Warning: The following article contains spoilers for Batgirl #50 by Cecil Castellucci, Emanuela Lupacchino, Wade Von Grawbadger, Mick Gray, Scott Hanna and Jordie Bellaire, on sale now.
Ryan Wilder is about to swing into the CW's Arrowverse as the new Batwoman, and she just made her official DC Universe debut. Shortly following the conclusion of Season 1 of The CW's Batwoman, it was announced that star Ruby Rose would be exiting the series. The show, however, will keep going with a new original character, Ryan Wilder, who will be played by Javicia Leslie, taking up Batwoman's cape and cowl.
But before her live-action debut, Ryan Wilder is introduced to the DCU in this week's Batgirl #50, where it's revealed that she has a personal connection to Barbara Gordon, the current Batgirl.
When it was first revealed that Ryan Wilder would replace Kate Kane as Batwoman on The CW, the original character was described as someone who was street-savvy and highly skilled, but also raw and unpredictable: "With no one in her life to keep her on track, Ryan spent years as a drug-runner, dodging the GCPD and masking her pain with bad habits," the character description read.
All of that matches up precisely with Ryan's brief appearance in Batgirl #50, where she shows that she has an anti-establishment attitude and freely speaks her mind. In the aftermath of the Joker War, Barbara Gordon is walking the streets of Gotham, a city struggling to rebuild. She meets up with Jason on the street, but she finds that he is attempting to give a woman living out of her van information on where to get shelter. This woman is Ryan Wilder.
Ryan is living in her van, and she has no interest in listening to Jason. The real surprise however comes when Barbara and Ryan show that they know each other. Barbara tells Jason that she knows Ryan from the days when she was working at the Gotham City Library, a reference to Barbara's job in her 1967 introduction. "Ryan used to hole up in the library I worked at when she was younger," Barbara explains. "Read through everything. Took my coding class, too."
Although Wilder might not be well-off, it's clear that Ryan is incredibly smart and socially engaged. While she and Batgirl may know each other, they don't particularly care for another. In fact, Ryan greets Barbara by calling her names, and Babs passively reciprocates. Ryan is angry, and she doesn't care for how the current Gotham government handled people on the street. Still, she prefers living in her van to any other alternative.
For the time being, Ryan doesn't appear to have an alter ego of any sort. But she has a fire inside of her, a passion that may drive her to become something else. For the moment, it's not clear if Wilder will step up to become Batwoman or another Caped Crusader in the DC Universe, as she's set to on television. While this might be the first time Ryan Wilder has appeared in the DC Universe, it almost certainly won't be the last.
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