Reworked Robins

This month DC unveiled its plans for the character of Dick Grayson after Forever Evil and Nightwing end. He’ll become a secret spy, out of contact with everyone but Bruce Wayne (and presumably not much in contact with him, either).

Of course, Agent Grayson will wear his initial in an emblem on his chest. These are still superhero comics, after all.

DC made that announcement with art of Dick looking remarkably like Tom Cruise in the first Mission: Impossible movie. Mikel Janin’s image will appear on the first issue of the new Grayson magazine, arriving this fall.

Grumpy Old Fan Tom Bondurant wrote:

DC has already undercut Dick’s grounding by fiddling with its overall superhero timeline [in the “New 52” continuity]. By pruning his Robin career (and the corresponding emotional attachment) dramatically, and possibly throwing out all of his Titans adventures, DC has left Dick with a set of skills and not a lot more. No wonder he’s turning to espionage.

DC had some professional spies in its previous continuities, some even created back in the 1950s when superhero stories had stalled out. But that’s an unclaimed area now, so it makes some sense to fill that narrative space with a character who brings his own following.

Only some sense, though. As fans immediately noted, the sight of Dick Grayson pointing a gun at the viewer on the cover of Grayson, #1, contradicts Batman’s anti-gun lessons; the fatal side of black-ops would make more sense for Jason Todd. And the surveillance-and-secrecy side would be a better fit for Tim Drake. Nevertheless, the plans have been established.

And remade. In January writer James Tynion IV revealed that he was working on Nightwing, #30, the last issue of the current volume of that magazine and (presumably) the transition to what comes next. But now the creative team on that issue will be the same who are working on Grayson: Tim Seeley and Tom King. Before previews and internet discussions, no one outside the publisher would have known anything about this. Now, of course, it’s a mini-scandal.

Bondurant also wrote that DC now “arguably has too many Robins.” As powerful as the story of a dead Robin has been, the company may be bringing all ex-Robins back. Peter J. Tomasi’s miniseries Robin Rises: Omega will grow out of Batman’s search for Damian. Meanwhile, Steve Snyder and his team are introducing a new roster of young assistants for Batman in Batman Eternal, including Blue Bird and Spoiler. Plus, Grant Morrison is working on a story crossing alternative universes. How long can that situation last?

Batman and Robin, Together for the First Time Again

Batman and Robin Annual, #2, offers a story, by Peter J. Tomasi and Doug Mahnke, about the first big night on the job for the New 52 Universe’s Dick Grayson.

In its basic outline, this adventure’s a variation on a theme that DC Comics writers have been using since “Batman Plays a Lone Hand” in 1942: Batman snaps at Robin to stay home for his own safety, Robin disobeys, and after their narrow triumph the partners realize how much they need each other.

This time that tale is sandwiched by a framing story involving memories of Damian Wayne, who becomes more pleasant and beloved the longer he’s dead.

The new villain, Tusk, is well designed as a nemesis for Dick Grayson. He’s huge, muscular, and ugly as all get-out. In contrast, Dick as Robin is thin, lithe, and very pretty. The action in the story works nicely, even if requires some suspension of disbelief or gravity, and is beautifully drawn by Mahnke. Tomasi scripts fine interplay between Dick, Bruce, and Alfred, the three characters who really matter.

This story also underscores the biggest change that the New 52 has made in the Dynamic Duo mythos: Dick is already nearly grown. He’s in his late teens during his first official mission as Robin. That’s about the age when he left Wayne Manor for the Titans in the last two continuities.

This Robin is no longer clearly the littlest guy in the fight as the character was in 1940, or in more recent retellings like Dark Victory and Robin: Year One. He has much less maturing to do. Accordingly, Bruce and Alfred must have much less influence on this version of Dick.

Robin’s status as a young adult is underscored by a panel in which Tusk is gripping the top of his head, apparently holding him off the ground. Except that this Robin is so tall already that his feet don’t fit inside the panel. Obviously he was never a Boy Wonder, always a Teen Wonder.

Next week brings a Batman Black and White story not beholding to the current continuity which promises a littler Robin early in his career.

Robins of the Future, Glimpses of the Past

Detective Comics, #27, in DC’s new numbering is a collection of out-of-continuity Batman stories inspired by how that character debuted in the first volume of Detective Comics, #27.

I wasn’t thrilled. The most Robin-heavy story shows four of Batman’s companions from the 1986-2011 continuity returning to the bat-cave to celebrate Bruce Wayne’s birthday. Peter J. Tomasi’s tale aims too hard to please fans by avoiding all sign of loss. Damian is a trenchcoated crusader as in Batman, #666, but, unlike what that story told us about that future, Dick Grayson is still alive. Dick even has both eyes, unlike in the current Batman Beyond series, and blue fingerstripes. Tim Drake is still active too, also unlike the Batman Beyond continuity. Barbara Gordon is walking again. Even Alfred is alive, and Bruce can still kick butt. It’s a story nominally about aging with no actual change or physical deterioration.

Another story set in another future introduced a new Robin for a version of the 23rd century.

This is the only glimpse of the character. His name and history are blanks.

I’m not the only comics history fan who saw this image and found myself thinking of Dwayne McDuffie’s December 1989 memo to colleagues at Marvel about the lack of diversity in the publisher’s pantheon. McDuffie wrote:

In the past year, 25% of all African-American super-heroes appearing in the Marvel Universe possessed skateboard-based super powers. In an attempt to remain on the cutting edge of comics, I hereby propose a new series that will fully exploit this exciting new trend…

Teenage Mutant Negro
THRASHERS

When a group of teen-aged negroes from cosmic-powered skateboards, their lives are forever changed! A team of distinct characters join together, swearing an oath to use their powers for good.

ROCKET RACER: A black guy on a skateboard.

NIGHT THRASHER: A black guy on a skateboard.

DARK WHEELIE: A black guy on a skateboard.

And their leader, a mysterious black guy on a skateboard known only as “that mysterious black guy on a skateboard.”

Rocket Racer and Night Thrasher were in fact two new heroes in the Marvel Universe. I think Dark Wheelie was just a joke.

Less than four years later, McDuffie cofounded Milestone Media with three other African-American comics writers and artists—Denys Cowan, Michael Davis, and Derek T. Dingle. They aimed to fill a market and cultural gap with comics about an array of superheroes of color living in the Midwest city of Dakota.

Of the Milestone heroes, the most successful proved to be Static, created by McDuffie, Robert L. Washington III, and John Paul Leon. Static was a teenager. He had a superpower, controlling electricity. He was black. But he didn’t have a flying skateboard!

No, he had an electromagnetically levitating disk, at first a garbage can lid and later a manhole cover, that he stood on as it flew through the air. Very much like a, well, flying skateboard.

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<

Reading the Memo on Damian Wayne

One of the most interesting elements of Batman and Robin: Born to Kill, by Peter J. Tomasi and Patrick Gleason with Mick Gray, is the “story proposal” printed at the end of the book. Of its fourteen paragraphs, all but three are an analysis of the relationship between Bruce and Damian Wayne.

The other paragraphs introduce the story’s villain and his motivation, rooted in his history with Bruce Wayne, but not his powers or working methods. Also missing from the proposal is a storyline with plot points, emotional moments, rising action, and so on. It mentions only one corner of the plot, the climax at the end of what turned out to be issue #7.

Instead, Tomasi’s memo is all about Batman and Robin’s differing symbolism, motives, and approaches to attacking crime. All very important in the superhero genre, but I doubt such a memo would have been enough for DC Comics’s editorial team if it hadn’t come from Tomasi. He was a DC editor himself until a few years ago and a successful utility player since. As the company planned its “New 52” reboot, its honchos probably wanted to keep working with Tomasi. The question was how to make this Batman book different from half a dozen others. His proposal supplied an answer:

Our “A” story, the emotional and psychological backbone of the book[,] will be laser-focused on the relationship between Bruce and Damian.

Eventually the story reaches a common point in superhero comics: the hero appears to face dire consequences unless he compromises his values—in this case, Bruce Wayne’s commitment not to kill. Of course, Damian Wayne has a different approach to that dilemma.

Indeed, Damian is quite the troubled ten-year-old in this volume. He sits at a drawing board sketching gory pictures—a hobby that could lead only to the horror of being a comic-book artist. He crushes small animals. (The story proposal says he kills “a sick bat that’s fallen to the cave floor,” but that’s not how the scene plays out.)

I’ve seen some readers complain that this volume doesn’t show Damian having learned and grown from his training with Dick Grayson. In fact, some of the story’s noteworthy moments echo similar moments from earlier months: Damian insists on going out by himself, the R symbol gets ripped from his chest, another crime-fighter tempts him to change mentor, etc. And at the end, he can’t match his father’s commitment.

But if Damian changes greatly, there would be no story. The difference between the two Waynes isn’t simply the subject of this volume. It’s also the Unresolvable Foundational Conflict of this series. In issue #8 the villain is gone and there’s no trouble for the heroes after page 6—except the trouble they pose for each other. And that’s one of the most compelling chapters of the volume. The relationship really is the “A” story.

Tomasi expresses his theme as “nature versus nurture.” At least as Bruce sees it in issue #2, “I have to find a way to push him past the obscene indoctrination of his early years and hope nurture wins out over nature.” That seems like a misunderstanding of what “nature versus nurture” means, however. The conflict is between the two ways Damian has been nurtured by his two parents. We don’t know how he would have developed normally. We don’t know what his innate qualities are.

Another notable element of Tomasi’s proposal is how he linked his new villain with Grant Morrison’s Batman, Inc. narrative, about a worldwide crime-fighting enterprise led by Bruce Wayne and a worldwide criminal enterprise led by Damian’s mother. The villain had a personal reason to attack Batman, but Tomasi had him resent Batman, Inc. I think Tomasi is still loyal to the pitch he heard from Morrison as an editor years ago. The other main Batman comics seem to be working independently of Morrison’s storyline, but Tomasi is still trying to keep the continuity together.

Freefall into the Future

I think fans of the Batman comics might like to go back and review the collection Nightwing: Freefall, scripted by Peter J. Tomasi and illustrated by Rags Morales, Don Kramer, and Michael Bair.

Not just because it’s a good set of issues, offering acrobatic crimefighting and plenty of fun bat-family interaction (particularly brotherly bantering between Dick Grayson and Tim Drake).

As the months have rolled on, it’s become increasingly clear that Tomasi’s Nightwing arc set up developments in the larger DC universe, and may therefore contain information relevant to the future as well.

Tomasi was one of DC Comics’s top editors, working in the “Batman group,” when he chose to return to scripting with Nightwing. He knew what the company had in mind for its main characters/trademarks. Specifically, he’d been the first person at DC to hear writer Grant Morrison’s plan to have Bruce Wayne seemingly killed. Back in 2008, Morrison gave an interview to Newsarama about the upcoming “Batman RIP” storyline in which he said:

this is the first story I had planned when Peter Tomasi, the editor at the time, asked me to do Batman, which must have been two years ago now… longer. And the very first story title I noted down was “Batman RIP”.

The following year, Morrison was free to say more to Comic Book Resources about what followed:

We always knew that after “Batman R.I.P.,” we were going to do this run of stories where we didn’t have Bruce under the cowl. And again, that’s the fun of it. It’s like writing a whole brand new book. It’s like getting a new assignment because Batman and Robin are two completely different characters.

And I don’t want to give away who they are just yet with [writer-artist] Tony [Daniel] still doing “Battle for the Cowl.” But what we’ve got is a more light-hearted, more spontaneous Batman and a real bad-ass, violent Robin.

Morrison couldn’t completely confirm what everyone already assumed, that Dick Grayson would take over as Batman. But that had been the plan all along, and Tomasi had been in on it. How did that affect his Nightwing stories?

There are four plotlines in Nightwing: Freefall:

• Dick takes up skydiving as a new hobby. That activity isn’t really intertwined with the other plots, however, and it doesn’t add much to the character since Dick’s been doing incredibly acrobatic things since 1940. The hobby does provide the title for this collection and the next, The Great Leap.
• Dick becomes head of the Cloisters museum and starts dating a pretty librarian. I like the way this story revives Dick’s appreciation of history, also established in the 1940s, but it appears to have been an exercise in treading water. All those relationships are undone in The Great Leap as Dick returns to Gotham to become Batman.
• Nightwing works with other heroes on a case involving grave-robbers stealing the bodies of supervillains to revive and clone them. This ends with the Justice League reburying those bodies under their headquarters.
• Nightwing breaks up a related operation producing superhumans through a woman who gives birth over and over, accelerated growth, cloning, and other stuff. The man in charge of that operation is a new villain, but he’s working closely with Talia al-Ghul, a recurring character in the Batman books.

In addition, along the way we see Dick interacting with Superman, a Green Lantern, his old Titans buddies, and the Justice Society, reflecting how Tomasi shares the notion that Nightwing is “truly the lynchpin [sic] of the DCU.”

The third of the plotlines above turned out to have unexpected significance last fall when DC Comics launched a crossover event called “Blackest Night.” In that sprawling but well-received story, the world’s dead superheroes and villains come back to life and cause all sorts of trouble. Moving the villains’ bodies into the Hall of Justice proved very meaningful in Blackest Night, #3. In sum, Tomasi used his Nightwing issues to quietly set up a future plot.

Now let’s apply that lesson to Talia al-Ghul. What was she doing in Morrison’s Batman series shortly before Tomasi began writing Nightwing? She showed up at Wayne Manor with a bratty kid, the size of a ten-year-old, who she said was her child by Bruce Wayne. (These issues appear in the Batman and Son volume.) We now know that was part of Morrison’s move toward trying a new Dynamic Duo with “a real bad-ass, violent Robin.”

Since then we’ve had hints that the child, Damian Wayne, was raised at least partially in an incubator of sorts, his growth accelerated. (That helps fit him into the timeline of Bruce Wayne’s life.) The latest issue of Batman and Robin shows Damian undergoing some sort of super spinal therapy available only in comics.

There was no precursor for those details in Morrison’s issues, but Tomasi’s Nightwing run filled the holes. Freefall showed us Talia’s access to superbabies, accelerated growth technology, gene grafting, and so on. It not only justifies Damian’s existence, but it opens doors for future revelations. Damian may share Bruce Wayne’s DNA not because of sex under the desert moon ten years ago, but because of cloning. (Or he might not have Wayne DNA at all.)

As Grant Morrison moves ahead with Batman and Robin and The Return of Bruce Wayne, we can be sure that:

• He’s planned more twists than he’s revealed in interviews.
• Others at DC, probably including Peter Tomasi, are aware of those plans.
• They’re planting clues all along, while hiding big surprises.

After all, that’s how modern superhero publishing works.

Nightwing’s Great Leap to the End

Nightwing; The Great Leap and Robin: Search for a Hero, both published this month, are unusual among collections of superhero comics because they’re both the last of a series.

Normally an ongoing comic book, or any other type of serial fiction, is structured not merely to tell its story, but also to bring readers back for the next issue. The character’s fundamental situation is threatened, but always restored so as to maintain his appeal. The ongoing stories offer an “illusion of change,” a phrase apocryphally attributed to Stan Lee. A profitable magazine’s overall story can’t end even if a “story arc” does.

These collections couldn’t work that way. They take place during and after the events of Batman: RIP, which ends with Bruce Wayne dying, and Final Crisis, which ends with Bruce Wayne dying (don’t ask). That is a fundamental change, albeit a temporary one. DC Comics decided to end the Nightwing and Robin magazines and move their central characters into new identities: Dick Grayson as Batman, Tim Drake as Red Robin. In addition, this month made clear that the company planned to make Stephanie Brown, an important supporting character in Robin, into a new Batgirl.

Thus, scripters Fabian Nicieza (Robin) and Peter J. Tomasi (Nightwing) had to break the usual patterns of their vocation. They had to put their characters through true changes, prepare readers for those characters’ new roles, and provide satisfying wrap-ups to storylines that had rolled along month after month since the 1990s.

On top of all those challenges, it’s evident that DC’s plans were a bit squishy when it came to scheduling the series’ final issues. The scripters didn’t know at the start which issues would be the last. Nicieza talked about this in an interview at Big Shiny Robot:

The truth is the final issue was coming, but which issue would be was not yet set in stone. There were discussions that varied from ending it with #182 and the conclusion of [the arc] “Search for a Hero” or as high as #185 or #186.

I’ll address the results of his effort in Robin: Search for a Hero next week.

In the last Nightwing collection I felt Tomasi struggling to an end. The first four chapters/issues comprise an arc called “The Great Leap.” Dick Grayson confronts Two-Face, established as his particular bête noir among Batman villains back in Robin, #0 (1994), and the Robin: Year One miniseries. Plus, we get to see Nightwing fight half a dozen other iconic Batman villains, though they’re only hallucinations. And on the personal side, Barbara Gordon, Dick’s off-and-on crush since the late 1960s, shows up to boost his computer security and reestablish their friendship. So the story feels like a culmination of his Nightwing career.

That arc came to an end in issue #150 (which also came with a collectible variant cover!). On the last page our hero, having single-handedly saved New York from an attack by a line of acid-spraying blimps, looks up gratefully at the Statue of Liberty. And wouldn’t 150 be a fine number for the last of a series?

But DC needed another issue. So in Nightwing, #151, Tomasi provided an “Epilogue” to “The Great Leap,” with a happier ending for the story’s female lead and another extended conversation with Two-Face (adding little to what the characters already said while kicking each other in the face). Tomasi wraps up some loose ends from his previous arc, collected in Nightwing: Freefall: Dick and his new girlfriend break up, Nightwing confers with Superman and a Green Lantern, Dick goes for a skydiving record.

That issue #151 ends with a lovely three pages showing an evening at Wayne Manor. Working fluidly and wordlessly, Dick, Tim, and Alfred make strawberry shakes and watch The Magnificent Seven. The last page shows Bruce’s empty chair. The movie dialogue provides an ironic comment on crime-fighting. Dick clicks the remote, and the final panel is black. This chapter of his life is over; his life as Batman can begin.
But DC needed another issue. So Nightwing, #152, shows Dick in the batcave, recalling how he became Robin. Suddenly scores of ninjas attack him, demonstrating the Conservation of Ninjutsu. Nightwing must confront another fundamental Batman villain, Ra’s al Ghul. Symbolically, this short tale shows Dick sinking into his legacy as Batman’s heir, ready to step into his new life as Batman.

But DC needed another issue. So Nightwing, #153, shows Nightwing moving out of New York with the help of the Justice Society (it took them one page to move him in, two to move out). In Gotham, Robin and Alfred restore the giant penny to the batcave. Dick and Alfred talk inconclusively about Bruce’s death. A six-page coda shows Dick taking Barbara for a skydive, closely echoing a sequence that appears in Nightwing: Love and War. It’s all perfectly acceptable, but slow and anticlimactic.

And finally the Nightwing series comes to an end. As I said, there are lovely moments along the way, and Tomasi shows how well he understands the character’s roots, strengths, and appeal. But the second half of the Great Leap collection feels like the end of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, when the orchestra keeps working up to a dramatic conclusion, only to go back to pumping out chords.

Robin! Don’t Jump!

When Peter J. Tomasi took over writing the Nightwing comic books this year, he did what a lot of new scripters apparently do: change the tone, give the character a new base of operations, and de-emphasize or even get rid of the previous writers' supporting casts.

Tomasi also gave Dick Grayson an absorbing new hobby: skydiving. This provided the title and a few non-fight action scenes in the first collection of his issues, Nightwing: Freefall.

When I read about that change on scans_daily, I had trouble seeing what the excitement was about. After all, we've seen Dick parachute out of planes since the 1940s. And often he wasn't even wearing pants.

You can tell Batman's nervous by the way sweat beads burst right through his cowl! (This is an example of what I call "showing the invisible" in comics art; it's a visual symbol of action, emotion, or sound.)

Having taken the new identity of Nightwing in the mid-1980s, Dick started wearing pants. But in jumping out of planes he sometimes eschewed other things.
Those panels come from the Outsiders: Looking for Trouble volume.

And with that history, Tomasi's Dick Grayson is excited about ordinary skydiving?

Well, as I learned after reading the collection, he's trying to break the altitude record for a parachute jump, coming down from about 150,000 feet. So it's something he's never done before.

Still, skydiving. Kind of tame.

"And Here’s a Site for a Detail”

Last month Newsarama ran an interview with Peter J. Tomasi, the current writer of the Nightwing comic book. (And Nightwing is...? Anyone? The lady in the back? Yes! He's Dick Grayson, the original Robin, all grown up and fighting crime on his own. Which makes this another weekly Robin posting.)

Within that interview was a link for downloading part of Tomasi's script for Nightwing #140 in MS Word form, provided to the eager public to illustrate his method of writing action scenes.

I found that script interesting for a number of reasons. Like many others from experienced comics writers, it addresses the artist--in this case, Rags Morales--directly in a conversational tone. I haven't seen that in any other type of script or manuscript besides comics.

As with other comics scripts I've seen, the level of detail that Tomasi put into his action descriptions is striking. I'm used to the required minimalism of children's picture-book manuscripts, and the comics business's approach appeals to the control-freak in me.

But what really seemed new to me was Tomasi's use of weblinks to provide Morales with reference images and information.

PAGE 13

panel 1
Inside the Cloisters, FIVE THIEVES DRESSED COMPLETELY IN BLACK, decked out in hi-tech thief gear, infrared goggles hang from their neck or are atop their head, and cool-ass looking P90 submachine guns (website: http://www.fnherstal.com/html/Index.htm).

They are in a chapel where two tombs/effigys lie in the middle of the stone floor. Also, there's a hole in the stone floor where they entered and we can see a cylindrical hi-tech type of digger laying next to the hole (Rags, call me about this). There's a beautiful stained glass window that the moonlight streams through, and a large wooden chandelier with UNLIT candles. Here's a place for you to go to see a shot of the chapel: http://www.mrfs.net/trips/2001/New_York_City/Upper_Manhattan/gothic_chapel.jpg

And here's a site for a detail of the stained glass:
www.metmuseum.org/explore/Mirror/187.htm

Also Rags, Google the: Tomb of Jean D'Alluye and look at images, cause that's one of the tombs I'd like you to make sure we see since it's the reason they're there.

panel 2
Closer on our Thieves, as they take great care and struggle to try and open the tomb of Jean D'Alluye. Two of the thieves are using a small, handheld laser to cut around the sealed stone lid as the others stand guard with weapons ready.

panel 3
Overhead shot as our thieves are successful, we see them opening the tomb lid to reveal the skeletal remains of Jean D'Alluye, laid out just like the tomb cover bas relief carving, with his crusader shield and sword.

panel 4
Another angle now, moments have passed and they have already removed the skeleton and are now in the process of carefully zipping up the sturdy black body bag that it's now in. They are unaware that in the background, TWO SMALL BALL-LIKE DEVICES with Nightwing's symbol on it, have been tossed up from the hole and are at the moment in mid-air ready to go...

Decades ago, Batman co-creator Bill Finger was famous for clipping articles and photos to his typewritten scripts for artists to rely on. With web addresses and the dominance of Microsoft software, such sources can now be embedded in the scripts themselves.

Back at the start of Oz and Ends's first COMICS AND NON-COMICS WEEK, comics artist David Lee Ingersoll commented:

I'd say that the best script is the one that gives the artist everything he/she needs to do the job well. Sometimes that means providing reference material for the artist if the artist has been asked to draw something obscure. (The internet has made this a lot less necessary. Yay internet!)

I'm not sure whether David was thinking of URL-rich scripts like this one or being able to use the internet when he had to do his own research. Tomasi might be unusually sensitive to artists' needs since he was editor of Nightwing and other magazines for over a decade before returning to writing; he therefore probably heard every artist's complaint about scripts, and every excuse there is for the art (or script) not to be delivered on time.