Way back when I wrote this essay on the 1966 Batgirl, I said that her identity as the wheelchair-bound "Oracle" deserved a separate write-up.
Oracle was created by John Ostrander and Kim Yale as an enigmatic information broker, though it didn't take long for her identity as the crippled Barbara Gordon to be revealed. Though writer Chuck Dixon deserves credit for initiating the concept of making Oracle the center of the all-female team Birds of Prey, later writer Gail Simone gets the lion's share of approbation for making the Oracle version of Barbara Gordon more interesting than she'd ever been as Batgirl.
Of course, eventually the character went back to being Batgirl, with interesting if mixed results, but that's another story.
Incidentally, it looks like "O" will be one of the first letters I run out of. Apparently names like Olive and Odetta just aren't popular as heroine-names.
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