Not-So-Secret Origin

Before DC published Secret Origins, #1, with the origin stories of Dick Grayson as Robin as well as Superman and Supergirl, scripter Kyle Higgins said in an interview that his final issue of Nightwing actually “says everything I have to say about the character.”

Unfortunately, he was right. The twelve-page story in Secret Origins goes over old ground. The art, penciled by Doug Mahnke, is pretty, just as in the recent Batman and Robin Annual. The story confirms some things already established in DC’s “New 52” continuity, such as Dick already being in his mid-teens when he meets Bruce Wayne. The title “The Long Year” provides another temporal fact for readers who care deeply about such things.

But the problem is that the first Robin’s origin just isn’t secret anymore. In fact, it’s so well known among superhero fans that storytellers can evoke it with just partial images, such as a Flying Graysons poster or the broken trapeze rope swinging into the frame in the TV cartoon episode “Robin’s Reckoning.”

While the stories of how Jason Todd and Tim Drake became Robin have been significantly reworked, Dick Grayson’s has remained basically the same since 1940. The only changes have been at the margins: whether the authorities sent Dick to an orphanage instead of apparently straight to Wayne Manor, whether Tony Zucco or his family are still around.

The radical changes have been Frank Miller’s story of Bruce kidnapping Dick over several long issues of alternative-continuity All-Star Batman and Robin and Scott Snyder’s decision to make the Haly Circus a training ground for athletic assassins—which plays no role in Higgins’s new story.

So Higgins’s origin story has almost no place original to go. We see the robin bracelet he already established in Robin, #0. We see Tony Zucco threatening the circus. We see the death of Dick’s parents as Bruce Wayne watches, and an orphanage. Dick tries hunting his parents’ killer and has to be rescued by Batman, but we’ve seen that before, too.

Higgins said the one idea he had left to explore was the origin of the Robin name, mostly because DC’s new editors had nixed the idea of inspiration from Robin Hood movies. (Apparently Kevin Costner’s and Russell Crowe’s versions don’t have the cultural resonance of Errol Flynn’s.) So we have a page of Dick thinking about what his crime-fighting identity should be and seeing a robin fly by—the same scene we saw with Bruce Wayne and a bat back in 1939.

The last panel on that page drives home the symbolism with Bruce speaking of the robin as a symbol of “growing up,” which is what Robin/Dick Grayson has meant in the DC mythos since the following year. But we already knew that.

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?

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<

The Handsome Young Man on the Flying Trapeze

Nightwing: Traps and Trapezes is the first collected volume of Nightwing comics since the launch of DC Comics’s “New 52” universe. Written by Kyle Higgins and penciled mainly by Eddy Barrows, these installments of the ongoing series reestablished Dick Grayson’s character by showing his return to the Haly Circus—evidently his first significant visit since his parents’ deaths.

That, of course, wipes out the visits we’ve seen in previous universes. Indeed, returning to the circus where he grew up is a staple of stories since Dick Grayson became a man. It was while on the flying trapeze that he expressed his independence in Detective Comics in the early 1980s. Dick was buying the circus when he befriended Tim Drake in New Teen Titans. In the first season of the Young Justice TV universe, teen-aged Dick returned to the Haly Circus as a masked teenager, fooling no one.

All those stories portray the Haly Circus as a welcoming home. The elephants remembered Dick well, of course, and so did the regular performers. While the traveling tent show was often in dire economic straits and/or threatened by mysterious crime that only an acrobatic young detective could solve, it was a refuge for Dick from troubles at Wayne Manor, Titans Tower, or elsewhere. At the end of those tales he always realizes he can’t stay; he has responsibilities elsewhere. But Dick can feel happy that the circus will always be there.

(The one exception is Dick’s visit in Batman and Robin Adventures, #15, spun off the animated cartoons of the 1990s. There the circus owner is named Haley, perhaps writer Ty Templeton’s tip-off that this is a different reality but more likely just normal inconsistency.)

Traps and Trapezes rewrites Dick Grayson’s origin, and not just by saying he was with the circus until he was about sixteen, or five years before the present. As part of the “Court of Owls” storyline that Scott Snyder was directing from the Batman magazine, it reveals the Haly Circus to be a breeding-ground for young assassins.

We might ask why gangster Tony Zucco would try to shake down an enterprise connected to the Court of Owls. Nonetheless, he did, and he killed two-thirds of the Flying Graysons (as in every iteration of the Batman universe since 1940), causing Dick to leave the show and start living in Wayne Manor. That’s the only thing, it turns out, which preserved Dick from becoming just another assassin. Everything was already set up, including the dental plan.

The two magazines’ combined storyline thus plays on fans’ visceral dismay at any violation of Reason for Robin, #10: “Robin isn’t evil.” In addition to the overarching narrative, the first issue of the new Batman ends with Alfred finding Dick’s DNA under the fingernails of a murder victim. This Traps and Trapezes volume ends with one of our hero’s escrima sticks showing up at another crime scene. But in all cases the dénouements assure us, after the requisite worry in the middle acts, that Nightwing isn’t evil.

The other thing that this volume reassures us hasn’t changed in the new universe is that Dick Grayson is the pretty one. We see that even in the flashbacks that show him with other circus kids. The boy named Zane has a big, unexplained scar down one side of his face. Another boy, Raymond, starts out basically indistinguishable from young Dick, except perhaps not smiling as much, but he returns with terrible scarring around his eyes. (A detail apparently not yet settled when the first issue showed him taking off his sunglasses.)

And Dick? Despite spending five years in a business that involves being kicked in the face, he remains unblemished and oh-so-handsome. Barrows supplies many pinnable pictures of Nightwing swinging through the urban skies, muscles flexed and hair flowing. The new Nightwing uniform, while not as sleek and distinctive as the blue “fingerstripes” package, is skintight and shiny. Barrows also designs a lot of those panels that show a series of Nightwings bouncing across the rooftops.

Will the surviving traits be enough to keep Dick Grayson as a distinctive character with his own following? The new universe has replaced his long history as Robin with a couple of years at most. It’s wiped out his ascendancy with the Titans. There’s no hint of his years in Blüdhaven or his team-ups with many other heroes. But he does look pretty.

Why Dick Grayson as Batman Reached a Dead End

If we can interpret the sagas of, say, Wally West and Stephanie Brown in the 1986-2011 DC Comics universe as successful and complete coming-of-age stories, can we do the same for their contemporaries Dick Grayson and Tim Drake? And what does that mean for the new manifestations of those characters in the company’s new continuity?

Although DC’s editors have promised fans that little had changed in the Batman saga, there were significant changes to both Dick and Tim in the transition. Ironically, Tim underwent more outward changes than Dick, but his overall character storyline has remained much the same while Dick’s shifted significantly.

The last issues of the old Red Robin and Teen Titans magazines left Tim as Red Robin, a step away from his first crime-fighting identity as Robin but not yet fully his own man. He was back living in Wayne Manor; indeed, he was more involved with Bruce Wayne’s business than any other adopted son.

As usual, Tim was smart, serious, and fretful about living up to the challenge at hand. Since his first appearance in 1989, he’s been unusually mature for his age, preserving his father figures from their faults. But he remained an adolescent.

Indeed, when Bruce Wayne appeared to be dead, Tim alone rejected that idea. He turned out to be right, of course, but that also showed how he wasn’t ready to go on without his father-figure, that in his saga he didn’t come of age yet. To the premature end, Tim was still working through the issues of being an adolescent hero. His unresolvable foundational conflict was still trying to grow up without becoming too dark.

The new continuity’s Tim Drake has a new costume, a new Titans team, and, it now appears, a new past. Teaser copy for Teen Titans, #0, describes him as a “would be Olympic star and computer genius.” The Tim Drake introduced in 1989 was more interested in Olympus camera lenses than the Olympic Games; his athletic history was limited to some karate lessons. (Will this change affect his appeal to comics readers?)

Despite those changes, Tim’s overall story is still about coming of age. He’s still worried about maintaining the best parts of the bat-tradition without becoming cruel. As founder of this universe’s first Teen Titans, he’s at the center of its symbolic generational struggle.

In contrast, in the 1986-2011 DC Universe, Dick Grayson did come of age. He became Batman, not just temporarily but permanently (at least as he and most characters believed). The “man” in that crime-fighting name signaled his fully mature status.

Unfortunately, that transition left Dick without an unresolvable foundational conflict. Once he confirmed his ability to be Batman without losing himself, that conflict was resolved. And that left no clear way for the character to develop.

Some of the stories told in the last couple of years of that universe, such as Scott Snyder’s Black Mirror, are quite good. But they didn’t grow from Dick’s individual history and qualities. Nor did the company make major changes to that character’s life, such as marriage or another relationship, injury, revelation of secret identity, loss of fortune, move to another city, and so on, which could produce a new overarching challenge. While successful in both fictive life and sales, the character of Dick Grayson had reached a dead end. On top of that, the return of Bruce Wayne from the past meant the company had two Batmen at once, and that was confusing for everyone.

The last time that Dick stepped back after being Batman, in the 1994 issues collected in Prodigal, he told Bruce that he felt he’d failed as a hero and was ready to give up costumes and retire.

This attitude seems uncharacteristic, and of course it didn’t last. But from a creative standpoint that moment reveals the difficulty of shifting Dick back to the role he adopted as an older adolescent without acknowledging that it looks like a step backward.

So this time DC simply skipped that transition. The new universe’s Dick Grayson was introduced younger than before and back in a Nightwing costume. Though he’s stood in for Batman at least once, that history seems to a minor part of his past. The stories once again focus on Dick figuring out his role in life, just as they have since the 1980s. Once more, he’s coming of age.

Thus, we can read the Dick Grayson saga from 1986 to 2010 as a successful coming-of-age, but one that left a lot more unanswered questions that Wally West’s growth to a family man or Stephanie Brown’s achievement of respect. And the new Dick Grayson saga dialed back to odometer and started that story again, with the same foundational conflict as before. Does that feel like a loss to the characters’ fans? Probably so, but it’s also a restoration of the character that attracted us in the first place. Because, although we root for Dick Grayson to grow up successfully, he’s not as interesting if he does.