To begin with in this issue, we’ve got an entire gang based around the concept that they’re really good at soccer. They’re called the Sports Spoilers Gang, and they use their frightening dribbling abilities to rob an armored truck. This makes me very suspicious of David Beckham, who I’m now certain is the head of some notorious gang of Brazilian cat burglars.

Batman and Robin aren’t on the scene, but Batgirl is. See, this issue is apparently devoted to the notion that Batgirl isn’t completely useless – something that would become a recurring theme as everyone in the world realized that Batgirl is in fact completely useless. Batgirl takes on the gang, but gets distracted when her mask gets a little mussed. While she’s busy with her wardrobe malfunction, the gang gets away – except for the one that is captured when Batman and Robin show up on the scene. Poor Batgirl is quite crestfallen, because she realizes that now they’re going to make her get back in the kitchen and make a pot pie for them.

Despite the fact that the gang has just had a run-in with Batman and Robin (and that dumb chick), they decide to keep their wave of crime going. When the bat and the bird inevitably show up (with Batgirl tagging along and trying not to screw up again), they beat a hasty retreat down the Gotham River. Batman and Robin, though, are revealed to be expert log-rollers, and run on logs down the river to catch them. Batman and Robin have things well in hand when Batgirl arrives and promptly gets mud splashed on her costume. She makes a big scene of getting the mud off, which provides a distraction and allows the gang to escape. In unrelated news, Bruce Wayne begins a furious billion-dollar campaign to revoke women’s suffrage.

The next day, the gang is back at it, and is once again met by Batman, Robin, and (ugh) Batgirl. If it wasn’t for that third person in the group, I’d say these guys are really down on their luck. Anyway, the fight follows the same formula as the first two: Batman and Robin are extremely competent, and Batgirl is…not. This time, she gets a run in her tights, and stops fighting to fix it. This time, though, it works out. The thugs are distracted by Batgirl showing some leg, and are promptly bested by Batman and Robin. Later on, Batgirl reveals that she deliberately created a run in her tights to distract the gang, thus “proving” that her femininity has its uses in crime-fighting. Never mind the fact that Batman and Robin probably would have had them days ago had it not been for Batgirl’s glaring incompetence. Never mind that the Sports Spoiler gang is not only the lamest gang to have entered Gotham (and that’s saying something), but that they proved themselves to be pretty incapable of actually pulling off a crime – unless you consider soccer to be a crime, which it should be. Batgirl feels good that she managed not to be too incompetent on her third try. Just give her a cookie and walk away.

The good news about this comic book is that it was a major blow for women’s rights at the time it was written. After all, it showed us that women are not totally useless outside of the kitchen – they also have sex appeal. Additionally, they can occasionally be used as distractions for the much more competent men to actually accomplish something. Remember, they’re not objects, they’re people – really useless people who would have starved to death long ago in any other society, but people nonetheless. Or at least that’s what I would have thought if I was walking away from this completely unenlightened tripe of a comic book.

Oh, the comic has one other major benefit, too. It serves as a reminder of how annoying Batgirl is, so we can all give a quiet cheer when the Joker puts a bullet in her spine years later. After all, then she became a useful superhero named Oracle. I guess that once she had to stop flashing her legs, she realized that she had brains in her head. Too bad she didn’t use them back in the 60s.