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Detective Comics #980: Brother Eye reveals Cassandra Cain and Stephanie Brown’s pre-Flashpoint histories to them…

Completing the current Detective Comics’ run of 1990s/2000s Bat Family nostalgia, the malevolent AI Brother Eye attempts to break Cass and Steph’s spirits by showing how they’ve done comparitively little compared to their preboot selves.

In Cass’ flashback, we get an homage to her first appearance way back in No Man’s Land, where Barbara Gordon was teaching her basic language skills, focusing on the word stop.

And in addition to the image of Cass and Babs sparring (who could really be in most issues of Cass’ series, really), we got get a shot of Cass reading, which is itself a direct reference to her time in in the latter half of her solo series when she was in Bludhaven. The fact that she chose Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities as entry level reading material amusingly shows her “go hard or go home“ attitude, if it was a deliberate choice.

Steph’s glimpse at her past incarnation is comparitively small in comparison…

The image of Steph as Robin appears to be an homage to a panel from her brief cameo as Robin in Cass’ series, albeit Batman wasn’t in the shot, Cass was.

Steph responding to someone telling her how much she sucks by coming back harder is VERY preboot Steph, by the by. Heh. Let’s see if future writers actually do something with Cass and Steph’s revelation here though (and no, “Cass died in the near future” stuff either, actual stories).