DC to Feed Nostalgia for Six to Twelve Years Ago

DC Comics executive Dan DiDio told USA Today that the company’s “Convergence” crossover event for next spring will return to older versions of its primary characters. “We’re picking up at points of their lives where we left them and finding out what’s gone on with them since then,” he said.

Closer examination at Comic Book Resources confirms that these stories hearken back to the company’s continuity before the “New 52.” But each tale seems designed to return its hero to a happy high point popular with his or her following. Back in June, the gossipy site Bleeding Cool heard from a creator that the upcoming project would be “a love letter to DC Comics fans.”

Thus, Wally West is not only the Flash once more, but he’s married to Linda and both their kids appear to have superpowers. (After 2010, only their daughter had powers.) In another nod to the domesticity of about eight years ago, Superman and Lois Lane are expecting a child.

Stephanie Brown will be back at Batgirl, with Tim Drake in his first Red Robin costume and Cass Cain as the Black Bat. That also reflects their situation in about 2010 (though we didn’t see much of Cass back then). Damian Wayne, who appears to be coming back in some form in the regular continuity, might well show up in one of these miniseries without ever having died.

“Convergence” thus gives DC a chance to “correct,” at least temporarily, recent developments that many fans vocally disliked, such as the murder of the Atom Ryan Choi and Roy Harper’s loss of both his arm and his little daughter.

Indeed, in some way, these series “correct” the entire “New 52” as they show the heroes fending off attacks from “Flashpoint versions” of other heroes; Flashpoint was a 2011 crossover presenting dystopic versions of the world which led to the “New 52.” The characters or versions of characters that disappeared in that transition have, the summaries suggest, been living under a protective “dome.”

I have particular questions about the Nightwing/Oracle title, to be scripted by Gail Simone. The teaser for the first issue says:

Dick Grayson and Barbara Gordon reevaluate their relationship under the dome (wedding!), but Flashpoint Hawkman and Hawkwoman attack, and everything changes.

For many fans, Dick and Barbara are meant to be together. But the last time they were talking marriage in DC’s regular continuity was back in 2006. So are they reevaluating from that perspective, or after all the events that happened between then and Flashpoint? If the latter, that means Dick has become Batman, and no one has successfully penned his decision to go back to being Nightwing. At least not yet.

More on Nightwing, #93

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the controversy over Nightwing, #93 (published in 2004), and how Wikipedia’s one-sentence description of that comic book’s script was rewritten in 2010 to say the opposite of what it originally said.

Another source in assessing that situation was Birds of Prey scripter Gail Simone’s conversation with Nightwing scripter Devin Grayson in The Pulse website in June 2004, while the storyline was playing out. I found the text of the relevant exchange, copied before the interview disappeared from the web. Here it is for the record:

THE PULSE: Another reason this year has been hard for Nightwing is the breakup of his relationship with a very smart redhead whose book I happen to write [i.e., Barbara Gordon]. Dick’s obviously a physical character, especially lately, and I think you and other writers have clearly established that he’s not a loner. Without giving too much away, the ending of #93 had rather a shocking event in Dick’s love/sex life. Was this a one-time thing, a moment of weakness and disorientation, or is Tarantula something more to Dick?

GRAYSON: That particular moment was actually not consensual. Dick’s body sometimes has a mind and life of its own, and in this case, his heart was very clear (as were his words) about not wanting to be engaged that way at that time. But Catalina [a.k.a. Tarantula] overwhelms him to some extent, both physically and emotionally. He feels responsible now for, essentially, the destruction of her soul, and as of issue 93 (and this continues into 94), he’s not yet sure how to redeem her or himself, so she’s really got an odd kind of control over him while he tries to catch his breath and figure that out. She’s crystal clear about what she wants to be doing and how she wants him to factor into it – utterly undaunted by recent events – and Dick is, at this point, basically being dragged around behind her (this actually becomes literal in 94). Through a combination of shock and moral anguish, Dick has, to some extent, surrendered to her will. And in that particular situation, the sex itself was practically allegorical. I don’t mean it didn’t really happen, but rather that it was a final physical manifestation of an emotional violation that went much deeper.

Two months later Devin Grayson had the Q&A with fans in which she referred back to this conversation: “For the record, I’ve never used the word ‘rape,’ I just said it was nonconsensual (I know, aren’t writers frustrating? *smiles*).”

Curiously, in an exchange on the Legions of Gotham message board dated June 2004 (though at one point I recorded it as having occurred in January 2005), Devin Grayson was explicit:

from aneurysm: Theres been alot of online debate about what actually happened at the end of Nightwing #93. Was Dick raped? Was it consensual? Did they actually do anything other than a bit of dry humping? Everyone seems to be debating this and coming up with crazy explanations (the weirdest I've heard is that Tarantula drugged Dick!).

Devin Grayson: Okay, let’s see if I can clear this up while still retaining some necessary vagueness. The facts: if you’re over seventeen, that was way more than dry-humping. If you’re a younger reader, well, they were just being friendly. ;-) There were no drugs involved beyond the very potent chemical cocktails of pheromones with which we all come naturally equipped. The act was not consensual – Dick did not want to be touched, as he stated, and physical intimacy – especially with Catalina – was the last thing in his head or heart. He was, essentially, raped, though I think in an emotional and spiritual sense even more than in the physical sense. He almost certainly has the power to best Tarantula physically, but she definitely overwhelms him in other ways.

I think it’s significant that Devin Grayson said she had to maintain “some necessary vagueness” and attributed her frustrating coyness in the other Q&A to being a writer. Those phrases are why I read her combination of statements as signs of a storyteller trying to balance between giving readers the information they need to interpret her narrative and not spelling out that story before it concluded (several issues and one Batman crossover later).

The result was clumsy and, especially in combination with the delayed conclusion, frustrating and even infuriating for fans. Devin Grayson herself expressed regrets in a mid-2005 Q&A:

What made you come up with the idea to have Nightwing being raped in Nightwing #93?

What happened between him and Catalina on that rooftop was a physical manifestation of a much deeper marginalization of power. In hindsight, I regret it — not because it was controversial, but because readers have paid more attention to that moment than to the one that truly shattered Dick — the moment when he stood by passively in the face of someone’s murder. That was a far worse subjugation of everything he stands for than the subsequent physical violation.

At that point the story of Dick and Catalina’s relationship had ended—though Dick would continue working out his feelings about the murder in hard-to-follow ways over another year of issues.

The Economics of Oracle and Batgirl

Two weeks ago I wrote about how we can interpret certain heroes of the 1986-2011 DC Universe—Wally West, Cassandra Cain, and Stephanie Brown—as having successfully come of age.

In rebooting its universe, DC made most of its characters younger. If the company had returned those three to their original status as young heroes struggling under their elders’ shadows and other burdens, that would erase their hard-won achievements and disappoint their biggest fans.

But then I asked, “Why doesn’t the same logic apply to Dick Grayson, Tim Drake, and Barbara Gordon?” Comics readers have seen all of them grow up along their intersecting paths:

• Dick as Robin, Nightwing, Batman briefly, Nightwing again, and finally Batman, evidently to stay.
• Tim as Robin and then Red Robin.
• Barbara as Batgirl and then Oracle.

Yet with the 2011 reboot of the DC Universe, Dick is once again Nightwing and Barbara once again Batgirl. Both those heroes are apparently in their early twenties. All three characters are once again dealing with the shadow of Bruce Wayne as Batman.

The first factor in this restoration of the status quo ante is simply economics. Versions of all three characters were featured in the Batman television series, live and animated. Many more people saw those stories than were reading the last two decades of comic books.

That factor seems to be most influential in the case of Barbara Gordon. Originally created at the instigation of the Batman television producers, her initial conflict was trying to keep up with the Dynamic Duo while hiding her masked crime-fighting from her father, Police Commissioner Gordon. For a while she was a US Congresswoman (with Dick Grayson as a young aide and eager romantic interest). That suggested she had indeed come of age.

Not knowing where to take Barbara after that (and with Dick romancing Koriand’r in New Teen Titans), DC Comics benched her in the 1980s. Then the company approved Alan Moore’s proposal to have the Joker shoot and paralyze her in Batman: The Killing Joke (1988).

Subsequently Kim Yale and John Ostrander, an editor-writer team and couple, developed a new role for Barbara Gordon: as Oracle, mysterious computer mastermind, online investigator, and super-police dispatcher. In comics like Suicide Squad, Batman: Gotham Knights, Birds of Prey, Justice League, and two Batgirl series starring younger teen protégées, Oracle pulled strings throughout the DC Universe. Her physical disability coupled with online mobility both reflected her past and personality and produced an unresolvable foundational conflict that generated stories.

But Oracle’s networking was tied into the complexity of that DC Universe, and the company feared that complexity was scaring off new readers. And, as I wrote above, millions of TV viewers knew Barbara Gordon as Batgirl. So back she came.

For the new universe, DC didn’t erase Barbara’s past as Oracle, paraplegic computer jock. But it did shorten that period to about three years, delete the Birds of Prey team she created, and completely restore her athleticism. Those changes rendered her work as Oracle far less important. Writer Gail Simone is exploring the psychological trauma of the Joker’s attack, and that may become part of the character’s new foundational conflict. But for many readers Barbara had already overcome that trauma by remaking herself as Oracle.

As well reviewed as Simone’s stories are, the removal of the 1986-2011 continuity’s Oracle does seem like an unreplaced loss and a disappointment. There was still a lot of story potential in the character’s previous situation.

However, the most recent sales figures (for May 2012) show DC selling nearly 59,000 copies of Batgirl through the Diamond wholesaler while the sales of the last issue starring Stephanie Brown (from August 2011) were below 23,000. It would be hard to convince the publisher that it had made a mistake when sales are up over 250%.

COMING UP: And Tim and Dick? This is the weekly Robin, after all.