Tim Drake Gives a Book Talk

Following on Dick Grayson Gives a Book Talk and The Bones Give a Book Talk, Oz and Ends presents a conversation about children’s books between Tim Drake, the Robin from 1989 through last year, and Dick Grayson, the Robin from 1940 to 1983.

They are, naturally, sitting on the roof of the Cloisters museum in Manhattan, looking at the George Washington Bridge and the lighthouse below it. Dick as Nightwing just had a fight with some winged zombie creatures that resulted in smashing the windows of that landmark. “Deathstroke” is one of the DC Universe’s leading killers for hire, and arguably Nightwing’s greatest nemesis within the mythology.
The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge, written by Hildegarde Swift and illustrated by Lynd Ward, was published in 1942. Dick Grayson’s dad was first shown dying in Detective Comics, #38, in early 1940, which produces a bit of an anachronism. But DC has reset its characters’ ages as needed, keeping Dick in his mid-twenties for the last two decades or so.

As for the “coma” reference, Jack Drake was comatose in the early 1990s, when Tim was supposed to be in his early teens. Symbolically, that detail shows how Tim has long been as mature as the father figures in his life, and looked after them as much as they looked after him.

The images above may look like another example of copying art from one panel to the next, but I had to cut one wide panel in two. The conversation appears in Nightwing: Freefall.