“That history will always be in the background”?

In an interview with Comic Book Resources, Grayson co-scripter Tom King spoke of his particular fondness for the character of Dick Grayson:

You’ve said a few places that Dick was always your favorite DC character thanks to his accessibility. With that in mind, what were the big stories that first brought you into his world? Are any of them the kind of thing you’ll look to fold into the background of this book?

I came into DC comics with Tim being Robin and Dick being the ex-Robin, the man who had gone through that uniquely frightening experience and emerged as someone uniquely brave. I remember buying my first trade, A Lonely Place of Dying, and obsessing over the Tim/Dick/Batman interaction. There was this essential question there about how do you leave childhood without losing who you were as a child. I read that thing to pulp. The first time I got to write my own complete script for the series, I titled it “Only a Place for Dying,” as a tribute to that experience.

Some of my other favorite Grayson stories are:

Birds of Prey #8 (the Barbara/Dick date issue), which is where Agent 8 from Grayson #3 gets her name; Batman #156 (“Robin Dies at Dawn”), which will play a role in an upcoming issue; and, probably my favorite Dick Grayson story of all time, Secret Origins Annual #3, which I haven’t yet figured out how to squeeze story out of — but I will! Dick Grayson has a 74-year history, and though Grayson is a book solidly set in the New 52 featuring a very modern take on the hero, that history will always be in the background and will always haunt and elevate our hero.

That’s almost sad. Secret Origins Annual, #3, was a story scripted by George Pérez in 1989 which synthesized the whole history of the Titans up to that point, both pre- and post-Crisis on Infinite Earths. It sought to build coherence and depth from the illogical late-1960s storylines of Bob Haney, revealing a series of villains to be one foe in different guises trying to undermine Dick Grayson.

That story also restored a version of Betty Kane, the first Bat-Girl, who had been abandoned with the “New Look” back in 1964. It reestablished the basics of Titans history as written in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s within DC’s new continuity. And in doing all that, it reflected the importance of Nightwing and his team to the company at that time.

In contrast, the “New 52” reboot of the DC Universe that King and his co-writer Tim Seeley are working within wrote off Dick Grayson’s version of the Titans, and most of the characters and relationships that Pérez’s story stitched together. Grayson has left the character even more alone within the DC Universe. The scripts might contain slight allusions to beloved older stories for long-time fans, but I don’t see how this Dick Grayson can be haunted by a history that he never had.

The Death of Damian Wayne

The big Boy Wonder news of the week is, of course, the death of Damian Wayne in Batman, Incorporated, #8. Comics fans lamented his loss, even if they couldn’t all spell his name right. Just a fortnight ago the “Death of a Family” crossover climaxed with no actual deaths, leaving some fans disappointed. One hopes it’s not the same fans.

Of course, Damian Wayne’s death has no more correlation to death in the real world than his short life has to real lives. He was created in a milieu of artificial insemination, incubators, and genetic hybrids (which should give pause to those trying to calculate the timing of the DC Universe based on assumptions that he was conceived and raised naturally). Similarly, Damian died in a storyline that includes clones, resurrection pools, and time travel. The “Robin RIP” issue came at the beginning of a four-issue arc, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see hints of the character’s return in some form by the end.

What interests me most about this development is what it says about collaborative storytelling. Grant Morrison pitched the idea of Bruce Wayne and Talia al-Ghul having a son back in 2005, thinking he'd kill off the child right away if he proved interesting only as a plot point. But Damian’s extreme personality proved fun to write, not just for Morrison but for other Batman scripters.

Morrison told the adventures of a new Dynamic Duo—Batman the Boy Wonder and the goddamn Robin. Among DC’s other writers, Bryan Q. Miller might have been most successful with Damian in Batgirl because his personality made such a contrast with Stephanie Brown’s, but there were also fine stories from Paul Dini in Streets of Gotham and J. T. Krul in Teen Titans.

The result is a six-year storyline played out over multiple crossovers and two continuities. At heart, Morrison was expanding “Punish Not My Evil Son!” from The Brave and the Bold, #83, written by Bob Haney (and reprinted in the first volume of Neal Adams’s Batman work). As in that single-issue story, Bruce Wayne is surprised to become the father of a nasty brat, causing trouble for his household and everyone else. But eventually the moral example of Dick Grayson turns the kid around, and he dies heroically in the Robin costume.

Of course, the story of Damian Wayne is more complex, layered, and successful. It became intertwined with Batman seeming to die and with Dick Grayson, Tim Drake, and Stephanie Brown taking on new coming-of-age identities. Damian was a prize in a worldwide war between his parents. The one glitch: I don’t think anyone could have engineered a satisfying story about Dick Grayson’s return to being Nightwing. Instead, DC rebooted its whole universe.

Morrison’s fellow writers were privy to his ultimate plan for Damian Wayne, at least to the extent of being warned off storylines that might ruin that virgin territory. Scott Snyder, present writer of Batman and current primary plotter for the rest of the line, has tweeted that he learned about Morrison’s plan when he got the assignment to write about the Caped Crusader.

Even more interesting is the work of Peter J. Tomasi, who was the editor who first heard Morrison’s pitch. In 2008 he left the editorial desk to become a scripter, taking over Nightwing even though he knew that magazine would soon end. In 2011 he took over Batman and Robin while knowing that eventually that partnership would be ripped apart. Tomasi just gave interviews to Comic Book Resources and Newsarama about how he’d laced the latter magazine with intimations of Damian’s death. The immediate plan is to continue it with a focus on ex-Robins, but, like Batman, Incorporated, it might be in for more profound changes or retirement.

Damian’s death resets the life of Bruce Wayne in more ways than one. Not only does he no longer have a young boy to keep out of trouble, but he has a dead partner to mourn. From 1989 to 2004 the late Jason Todd filled that role. But it’s awfully hard to mourn a Robin who’s alive and well. (“The Joker killed me! And, um, I got better.”) Now Damian can haunt the family as Jason did. There’s even a trophy case waiting.

Robin has always been the littlest guy in the fight—that’s part of the character’s identity and appeal. In some previous DC Universes Dick Grayson took up the role at the age of eight, and artists have enjoyed depicting the contrast between the spindly little kid and the tall, muscular Dark Knight. In the rebooted universe, however, Dick didn’t meet Bruce Wayne until his teens, making Damian the youngest boy ever to have become Robin—thus the littlest guy of all. And yet, the only foe to take that Robin down turned out to be his own genetic twin, grown to fearsome size, assisted by other members of the League of Assassins.

What’s next among Robins? The odds favor a young woman whom Snyder has introduced in Batman named Harper Row. While it would be good to see a female Robin again (the first in the current continuity), I’m old enough to remember the obvious inspiration for that name: the venerable American publisher Harper & Row, now subsumed into the HarperCollins division of Newscorp. I keep wondering if the new Robin will carry a torch, as on the old Harper & Row colophon, and peddle Maurice Sendak books. >tt<

“Now to Tickle the Cerebellum”

After the first two stories in The Strange Deaths of Batman, discussed yesterday, the volume’s Robin content falls off precipitously. There’s a tale by Gerry Conway from World’s Finest, #269, which shows his fondness for suspension bridges but not his usual ability to build logical plots. Dick Grayson is injured by a mad bomber because Superman apparently forgets which one of them is superfast and invulnerable.

Near the end of the book is an image of Tim Drake consumed with glee because Batman is marrying Catwoman. This turns out to be Catwoman’s dream—it surely isn’t Tim’s.

In between comes a legendary example of comic-book storytelling, originally published in The Brave and the Bold, #115. After the Caped Crusader is fatally wounded, the Atom shrinks to cellular size, enters Batman’s brain, and steers his body by kicking the appropriate neurons. Only Bob Haney could have come up with this approach to crime-fighting.

The heart of the collection is titled “Where Were You on the Night Batman Was Killed?”—a four-issue series from 1977 written by David V. Reed and illustrated by John Calnan and Tex Blaisdell. The premise of this tale is that the Gotham underworld is buzzing with rumors that Batman is dead. A coterie of villains gathers to conduct an inquest and determine who can claim the honor of killing him.

In successive issues Catwoman, the Riddler, Lex Luthor, and the Joker each explains how she or he killed Batman. Former prosecutor Harvey Dent as Two-Face dissects their stories through a combination of Encyclopedia Brown-style trivia (wood from the Brazilian pepper tree doesn’t float!) and outlandish plot revelations (that was actually Superman pretending to be Batman!).

I don’t think it will spoil anything if I reveal that at the end of these four installments it turns out Batman isn’t dead after all.

I found Calnan’s art distracting. His drawings show extreme foreshortening, especially hands and faces thrust out at the readers, and the pointy ears on Batman’s cowl are unusually thick. (Rather like bats’ ears, to be fair.) Calnan was primarily a commercial artist, and he also worked on the Catholic comic book Treasure Chest. According to a Comic Book Artist interview with letterer John Workman, DC’s editors worried that Calnan “just didn’t have that spark” for superhero stories, and he left the genre.

“Where Were You on the Night Batman Was Killed?” kept readers uncertain if Batman was really dead for a whole four issues. Stories in earlier decades had to wrap up everything within a couple of dozen pages. Nowadays, the pace of superhero comic-book storytelling is quite different:

• Four issues is a short time for a comic-book company to explore a major change to its universe. Major arcs seem to be taking six to twelve issues.
• Within each of those issues a lot less happens because of “decompressed storytelling.”
• Nonetheless, the stories have the same rhythm of early defeats, reversals, and mysteries solved only at the last minute, just at a slower tempo. This means that the frustrations and stumbles that the Dynamic Duo suffered in pages 3-10 of their early stories are now stretched out over two or three issues in the middle of an arc, leaving some readers frustrated as well.
• At the same time, marketing and the internet mean that fans can see the covers of upcoming stories months in advance, taking back some of that suspense.

In fact, it looks like DC went only about four months between the apparent death of Bruce Wayne in Batman and Final Crisis and the announcement of the upcoming miniseries The Return of Bruce Wayne.

Dig This Now

I had drafted a weekly Robin posting continuing my thoughts on the 1980s symbolic distancing of Batman and Robin, but then I read the lead story in World’s Finest Comics, #195, and it was all I could think about.

As you see, this magazine shows Superman and Batman forcing Robin and Jimmy Olson to dig their own graves. Furthermore, Batman is threatening to shoot the young men with a machine gun. This image is so incongruous that Dr. Wagner has written:

The best thing about the covers to WF was they were all lies. They would show you Superman running down Batman in steamroller and then in the story NOTHING like that would happen. . . . I don't even know what really happens in this comic, but I bet that this particular scene never takes place!

And yet it does. This is actually one of the more accurate comic-book covers of its period. The only non-verbal detail missing from the scene inside is the machine gun; there Batman carries a pistol with a silencer.

Indeed, I wonder if DC Comics came up with this arresting image first, then assigned Bob Haney to write a story around it. Because the story sure doesn’t make sense on its own.

The narrative begins in the previous issue of World’s Finest. Superman has infiltrated a mafia gang by posing as a bald man named Scarns. The boss, with the unstereotypical name of Lukaz, requires Scarns to prove his loyalty by killing one of the underworld’s enemies—lazy playboy millionaire Bruce Wayne! Actually, in 1970, when this magazine appeared, DC had made Bruce Wayne a socially conscious, activist millionaire, so that murder might have made a little sense. The two crimefighters concoct a way to make Scarns appear to kill Wayne in a horse-riding accident, which in no way now brings on thoughts of Christopher Reeve’s paralyzing injury.

Lukaz then shows Scarns that he’s keeping evidence of that murder to ensure his new underling’s loyalty. Superman sets out to retrieve that evidence in order to…protect a fake identity from being accused of a fake murder. Even with X-ray vision, he can’t find the hidden material, so he and Batman capture the mafia boss and—

• Take Lukaz to jail for attempting to instigate the murder of Bruce Wayne?
• Scare Lukaz until he divulges his secrets?
• Stash Lukaz in Superman’s Fortress of Solitude while Batman disguises himself as the boss and infiltrates the gang that Superman’s already infiltrated?

Naturally, Haney’s plot follows the third path.

But that riding accident has given Bruce Wayne a very unusual brain injury. He starts to believe that he actually is the mafia boss he’s disguised as. Yet he also remembers that Scarns is Superman. Lukaz-Batman exposes Scarns-Superman to green kryptonite, rendering him so weak that the only way Superman can save himself is to—

• yank Batman’s disguise off, thus endangering them both but shocking the rest of the gang?
• call his superdog Krypto to his rescue?
• use ventriloquism to make it sound as if Krypto is hovering outside the window, causing the whole gang to rush out, even though the kryptonite would work just as well against the dog?

Once again, we go through door number three.

Superman then acts as if the kryptonite has produced a very unusual brain injury: he pretends to have lost his memory. The mafia boss, who’s still the amnesiac Batman, tells Superman that he’s Scarns and has been fortunate enough to develop superpowers. (Don’t you love when that happens to you?)

Superman fakes being able to crush a crystal of kryptonite, which should tell any mob boss—let alone one who’s actually the world’s finest detective—that something fishy is happening. But instead Boss-Batman remains convinced that Superman now actually believes he’s a mob underling with superpowers.

To recap: Superman thinks that Batman thinks that Superman thinks that Superman’s an underling in the mob that Batman thinks he’s leading. Boss-Batman secretly knows that his underling is actually Superman while Scarns-Superman secretly knows that his boss is actually Batman—but Batman doesn’t know that.

Batman then has Superman (pretending to be Scarns pretending to be Superman) summon Robin and Jimmy to Metropolis and orders them to dig their own graves. This seems fair since World’s Finest, #141, a mere six years before, showed Robin and Jimmy faking their own deaths to fool their adult pals. That tale (written by Edmond Hamilton) involved intelligent, mind-controlling gemstones that simply wanted to return to their home planet and used the young men to raise funds for them. But I digress.

Having completed his grave, Robin tells the man he thinks is Lukaz:

Let Batman know…I died thinking of him! He taught me to live bravely…and to face death the same way! I love him as I loved my own father!

This expression of filial love snaps Batman out of his amnesia. He pulls off his Lukaz mask and puts back on his Batman mask.

But it’s too late! The real Lukaz suddenly appears with real underlings holding real machine guns. He explains that up in the Fortress of Solitude, one of Superman’s robot servants became loyal to him after falling and suffering a very unusual processing injury.

Lukaz then—

• realizes that having a superpowered, completely loyal robotic servant means he doesn’t need human underlings?
• recognizes that shooting Batman, Robin, and Jimmy Olson would mean there would be nothing left to stop Superman from grabbing the whole gang?
• accepts Superman’s offer to kill Jimmy and Robin with his heat vision?

I don’t want to spoil the entire story for you, so I’ll let you figure out that last one on your own. I’ll just say the dénouement involves wax dummies, picking a lock with superbreath, and a lucite box containing charred organs labeled:

Hearts of Robin and Jimmy Olson Killed by Alonzo Scarns

Because that’s the only way Superman can think to make Lukaz think that Superman still thinks he’s Scarns.