“References of actual Robin fight scenes”

Matt Santori-Griffith’s interview with Grayson artist Mikel Janin at Comicosity in January was mostly the upbeat puffery we should expect from comics creators while they’re still marketing their current magazines. Nevertheless, it contains some insights about how that magazine has been put together.

Janin was expecting to take over Nightwing, costume and all, before plans and editors changed:

Former editor Mike Marts asked me to join Nightwing and, after more than two years in Justice League Dark, I was thrilled to be part of such an important and loved character.

But when things started to roll, I realized this was a totally new direction for Dick Grayson. There were a lot of changes, with editor Mark Doyle taking the project, and everything went full speed very quickly!

I sense the plan to launch Grayson came from the top of DC, so the change in editors was probably coincidental rather than causal.

Another sign of the writers’ fondness for the long history of the Dick Grayson character shows up in the fight scenes:

Tim Seeley gave me some references of actual Robin fight scenes in the Golden Age, and I tried to bring the energy and the happiness of this young boy we all know and love to Dick’s moves, less elaborated than Nightwing’s graceful moves, just direct action to the face. It was really fun to do!

And the different strengths of the two Grayson writers, Tim Seeley and Tom King:

Tim brings some crazy ideas and sense of wonder, going to places you only can go in comic-books. He has an incredible ability to bring rhythm and fun to the book. Tom digs deep to character’s heart, and has a sense of pace that makes you feel like you’re into a movie.

Grayson’s Future End

Modern comic-book writers often dread big crossover events, at least when they’re not in charge. Whatever storylines they might have mapped out over several issues have to be put on hold for one or two episodes tied into a larger conflict determined by the publisher’s top staff or star writers. But crossovers tend to sell more copies of all the titles involved, and often continue to sell in paperback form, so the industry keeps ordering them up.

Currently the big crossover event from DC is “Futures End,” not to be confused with the last crossover, “Forever Evil.” (The company seems to have a thing for those initials. I will refrain from making a scatological joke about what they really mean.) “Futures End” is set five years into one possible dismal future for the DC Universe.

As I explored back here, in the DC pantheon Dick Grayson has long represented hope for a better future, so to showcase how awful a future is the company often shows how badly Dick Grayson’s life has turned out. Grayson: Futures End, published last week, is squarely in that tradition.

That situation freed up Grayson writers Tom King and Tim Seeley (they plotted the issue together, King wrote the dialogue). Working within a timeline that’s supposed to be averted, they don’t have to leave the door open to further stories or other crossovers. They can start at Dick’s sad end and work backward—which they do.

Each page in the magazine takes place “Earlier” than the preceding page, hopping backwards in time from five years in the future (as in “Futures End”) to Dick’s childhood. Characters allude to events, promises, and in-jokes that we don’t see for another few page flips. As one commenter noted, the issue is like a sestina, with certain details—ropes, codes, last days—popping up rhythmically. It demands, and rewards, immediate rereading.

I hesitate to call this a self-contained story because it depends completely on readers’ knowledge of the legend established in Detective Comics, #38: when extortionists put acid on the ropes of the Flying Graysons’ trapeze apparatus, causing Dick’s parents to fall to their deaths. But it surely brings its own story to an end (as in “Futures End”).

As promised, King takes the opportunity to offer his “New 52 Universe” explanation for why Robin dresses in stoplight colors. That’s not because Dick as a circus performer and/or little kid likes bright colors, the explanations in some previous versions of the mythos. (The “New 52” Flying Graysons wear blue, and the “New 52” Dick becomes Robin in his mid-teens.) Rather, the colors are Bruce Wayne’s way of making night patrols harder for Dick so he has to be more careful. I’m not sure that will go over well with fans of either character.

Grayson: Futures End also shows Barbara Gordon as Batgirl suggesting that Dick’s ideal romantic partner is someone who treats him like Bruce. Fifteen years ago the company was adamantly against Barbara likening Bruce and Dick’s relationship to a romance. Now DC is embracing the metaphor. But perhaps only in this not-necessarily-so future.

Which brings me to the remaining mystery of this magazine—when its timeline is supposed to deviate from the “New 52” present that DC’s line will presumably return to at the end of the crossover. Does that deviation produce the events we see: Dick and his agency handler Helena Bertinelli becoming lovers, Dick becoming willing to kill? In other words, when exactly does Dick’s life start to turn out badly?

Weekly Robin Extra: Grayson Intelligence

On Saturday I attended a signing by Grayson co-writer Tom King at Friendly Neighborhood Comics, and enjoyed chatting with him about his new assignment. Here are some things I hadn’t read elsewhere.

As King understood the situation behind Nightwing, #30, DC decided not to print the original story it had commissioned from James Tynion IV and Meghan Hetrick because executives thought the firm was publishing a lot of elegies lately. They asked Seeley and King to produce a replacement that was less funereal than a story set at, well, a funeral.

Because that issue was already slated to be an extra-long 30 pages, Seeley and King divided their story into three distinct sections that were sent out to three different pencilers: Javier Garrón, Jorge Lucas, and Mikel Janin. That’s how tight deadlines are met in a collaborative art form.

Looking ahead, DC’s big crossovers continue to do mischief to storytellers’ schedules. King wrote one alternate-future issue that was to be tied into the “Future’s End” event but numbered like a regular Grayson issue. Then the company changed its collective mind, and that will be Grayson: Future’s End, #1. As headaches go, that’s a minor one, and there’s probably serious marketing thought behind DC’s decision. But it’s interesting how such tactics are still being worked out on the fly.

Finally, there’s been a lot of discussion among fans about the fact that Dick Grayson is carrying a gun in his job as a spy. King told me that Grayson, #3 (following that “Future’s End” issue) will have “the gun go off.” As in Anton Chekhov’s playwriting axiom that if we see a gun on stage in Act I, it has to go off by the end of the show. How will Dick’s gun go off? What will be the consequences? That, of course, is part of the story.

In addition, King promised his explanation of why this Dick Grayson chose as Teen Wonder to dress in stoplight colors.

Won Over by Grayson, #1

I was dubious about the premise of the Grayson comic book until I saw the preview pages.

When DC first announced that Dick Grayson would give up life as a costumed crime-fighter to become an undercover spy, an announcement accompanied by multiple images of Dick pointing a pistol at the viewer, I wasn’t convinced that move took his established character into account.

Rather, I thought DC’s editorial echelon had looked at what type of stories are popular with their main target demographic and not already covered by their line: the spy thrillers of Bond, Bourne, Chuck, Mission Impossible, and their heist counterparts. A few years back, I detected some Bourne influence in how Tim Drake was reworked into Red Robin, but espionage adventures represented an empty space in the company’s “New 52” lineup.

Yet that role seemed all wrong for Dick Grayson. A license to kill for a hero raised never to take a life, especially with guns? Anonymity for a character defined from the start in connection with other heroes, and established in the 1980s as the best and most popular team leader in the DC Universe? Undercover work for a natural entertainer raised in the spotlight? Those contradictions raised the specter of the company arbitrarily inserting a popular character into stories that would be all out of character.

The preview pages for Grayson, #1, showed that the magazine’s writing team, Tim Seeley and Tom King, understand those character traits. Their opening pages show Dick choosing not to fire his gun but to knock out an assailant by throwing it. (Of course we could ask why, if Dick had enough freedom of movement and leverage to throw that gun, he didn’t just conk the other guy on the head with it.) And we read Dick’s thoughts in caption lamenting: “The downside of a solo act. No one around to see you do the cool stuff.”

In other words, Seeley and King immediately reestablished the character as he’s been written for the last two decades. They recognize that precisely because being a gun-toting undercover agent isn’t the best fit for Dick Grayson, that role can create drama in his life as he tries to reconcile his old values with his new job. They couldn’t do much about Dick’s friendships with other heroes outside the “bat family” since those have been largely erased from the “New 52” Universe—but the issue’s final page indicates that Dick’s new role is still closely tied to all the remaining masked crime-fighters.

To be fair, DC’s editorial team might have been looking for that tension all along. But I still give Seeley and King credit for carrying it out.

TOMORROW: Grayson news from Tom King.