Quarter Bin #17 "Nightwing and other legacies"

Amidst the eternal partisan bickering between DC and Marvel fans is the debate about which company has amassed a greater legacy. Marvel fans are cocky about the fact that they’ve had the superior sales number for years now, and can point to a remarkably consistent continuity dating back to the dawn of the Marvel Age in the 1960s as proof. DC can still argue that it’s been around longer, and that Batman and Superman are still more iconic than Spider-Man and the X-Men.

Me, I still like to talk in derivatives. Deadpool, the wisecracking “Merc with a Mouth,” is in some respects the mutant version of Spidey (as if the mask isn’t, well, a dead giveaway), who is in many ways a knockoff of Robin, the Boy Wonder sidekick of Batman introduced decades earlier. Robin is also known as Dick Grayson, who in later years evolved into the character known as Nightwing (who has just completed a second and very successful run as a replacement Batman, thank you very much). The one thing, beyond smart aleck humor, that Spidey and Dickey have in common is that they were both originally intended to be reader surrogates, someone young fans could identify with. Both have gone a long way toward growing up, however, and much as the median age of fans has gone up, so too has the base age of Misters Parker and Grayson.

When Mark Waid envisioned the future of the DC Universe, he paired Grayson with his sometime Teen Titans love Starfire, and even gave them an offspring, who looked a lot like mommy and went by the name Nightstar in her own crime-fighting career. When he revisited the Kingdom in 1998, he made it a point to spend some time with young Nightstar. I’ll begin this column’s issue commentary with a few of these KINGDOM spotlight spinoffs, more comics I caught up with years later…

THE KINGDOM: SON OF THE BAT (DC)
From February 1999.

Waid had no idea that his seminal KINGDOM COME would not actually endure as a symbol of DC’s future. How could he? When Magog finally appeared in regular continuity and actually got his own ongoing series, fans responded with apathy. What’s more, Grant Morrison decided to capitalize on the obscure scion of Bruce Wayne and Talia al Ghul, daughter of the Demon, Ra’s al Ghul, reshaping him as Damian and the other star in BATMAN AND ROBIN (along with…Dick Grayson!). Waid had previously fashioned the youngster as Ibn al Xu’ffasch, which very cleverly translated as, well, “Son of the Bat,” but…didn’t necessarily roll off the tongue. Still, as Waid envisioned him, his future was bright indeed. He was indeed the heir apparent, but he couldn’t quite figure out, even as an adult, to which legacy, to his father, or perhaps to his grandfather. What’s more, he carries on a romance with Nightstar. Egad, could this dude’s life be any more complicated?

THE KINGDOM: NIGHTSTAR (DC)
From February 1999.

Hah! Ibn, you have it so easy! The daughter of Dick Grayson and Starfire is even more angst-ridden! She’s haunted by the legacy of death her family seems to dwell in, constantly fearful that she, too, will lose her parents. (Still, she’s got great genes!) Moreso than with Ibn or any other legacy of KINGDOM COME, Nightstar represents an organic continuation of DC continuity, at least as far as the New Teen Titans go (Dick has since been better linked to Babs Gordon, the once and future Batgirl, naturally), and as such, always stood as the most likely of any future comics prognostications to actually happen (I’m looking at you, Marvel 2099, though unlike virtually everyone else by the end of that extended experiment, I actually enjoyed it more than its more contemporary counterparts). Needless to say, I’d read an ongoing Nightstar series, even today. For anyone who isn’t strictly interested in THE KINGDOM and its obsolete Hypertime outcome, this is something you can still easily read and enjoy. (For anyone who actually is, you’ll find a whole alternate explanation to the origin of Magog, including just who Gog is, which conflicts with the one Geoff Johns later established in the pages of JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA. But, after all, this was originally Waid’s tale.)

THE KINGDOM: KID FLASH (DC)
From February 1999.

The Flash was surprisingly tangential to the overall story in KINGDOM COME, despite the fact that Mark Waid was at the time best known for writing the continuing legacy of the speedster (it was even unclear whether the Mercury-esque figure he and Alex Ross depicted in the 1996 mini-series was Wally West or Jay Garrick). He seemed to make up for that when he got around to THE KINGDOM, and specifically this one-shot, which now stands like a lost gem in the Mark Waid/Flash firmament. Kid Flash in this instance is Iris West, the daughter of Wally West, who has a brother named Barry who’s perpetually disgruntled over the lack of affection they’d gotten from their father, and has rejected the chance to inherit the mantle. Not that Wally has stopped running. In fact, that’s all he ever does, to the point that he’s completely overlooked his daughter’s eagerness to follow in his footsteps (hah!). This whole issue is about Iris trying to get through to him, like a microcosm of Waid’s efforts to establish Wally’s own credentials in the regular FLASH series. As comics fans of 2011 know, Waid did eventually write about Wally West and his two children, but sort of like the immediate follow-up to KINGDOM COME, he was met mostly with disinterest. Funny how things sometimes work out.

One of the themes I routinely return to in this blog is the great exodus I undertook from comics reading in 1999, and how that has regularly provided me with material to revisit for the first time. In some respects, the KINGDOM comics I just wrote about were part of the run-up to this event (Countdown to Schism!), since although I was certainly interested in what Mark Waid had to say about the further adventures of his seminal KINGDOM COME work, I didn’t have the money to read all of them on original release. As I’ve suggested this column, Nightwing/Dick Grayson has been a character I’ve followed throughout my comics experience. His attainment of an ongoing series in 1996 was one of the most important developments of that experience, and something I necessarily had to try and forget when I stopped reading. Nightwing was hot for a short period following the debut of that series, but he was never going to be someone, say in the pages of Wizard magazine, fans in general would breathlessly await the latest storylines concerning. He was always going to play second-fiddle to those he most closely resembled: Batman, Spider-Man, even Daredevil. Aside from the fact that he used to be Robin, Dick just wasn’t in himself an icon. That helped make it easy for Dan DiDio to at one point consider him possible cannon fodder during INFINITE CRISIS. (No, seriously!)

Still, Nightwing comics kept getting written. Chuck Dixon had launched NIGHTWING as writer, and was still at it three years later, and wouldn’t leave the book until 2002. His successor, Devin K. Grayson, was still at it by the time I came back in 2005, but had run afoul of the fans by apparently emasculating Dick in her Tarantula storyline. Anyway, here’re some comics from the limbo period I eventually tracked down:

NIGHTWING: OUR WORLDS AT WAR (DC)
From September 2001.

OUR WORLDS AT WAR was an otherwise forgotten crossover event that symbolized the kind of comics DC was attempting to make at the time, that broke all the rules the previous decade had established, thereby theoretically making it safe for new fans, made famous by the black background amended to Superman’s famous shield, and the incidental timing of the fallout issue released soon after 9/11. Nightwing got his own spotlight special, written by Dixon, in which Dick and Barbara Gordon become entangled in a mostly unrelated plot filled with mind-bending time-travel. See what I mean about Starfire?

NIGHTWING #65 (DC)
From March 2002.

Dixon’s still writing, sharing the Dick Grayson spotlight with the “Bruce Wayne: Murderer?” crossover event, one that’s been completely forgotten. Completely miring these efforts is artist Trevor McCarthy, whose cartoony style is a worthy successor to Scott McDaniel and precursor to Phil Hester, at least as far as the Nightwing sequences go, but is completely out of place otherwise. I’m reminded, however, that it was as much letterer John Costanza as Dixon and McDaniel who set the tone for the series, whose style Willie Schubert continues to evoke this issue.

NIGHTWING #69 (DC)
From July 2002.

Dixon has a different artist this issue (William Rosado, for the record), but is still hip-deep in crossover, this time “Bruce Wayne: Fugitive” (of course it’s related to the other one, silly). It’s actually Dixon’s penultimate issue on the book, before his “Nightwing: Year One” arc some thirty issues later.

NIGHTWING #71 (DC)
From September 2002.

Devin Grayson’s debut! Having previously written a Nightwing/Huntress mini-series, not to mention the BATMAN: GOTHAM KNIGHTS ongoing title, Devin wasn’t a completely unknown commodity, but judging from letters column comments, she wasn’t an entirely trusted one, either (must have made the backlash all that much easier). I will go on record as saying I probably prefer Devin Grayson’s Nightwing work to just about any other run, including Chuck Dixon’s, which had previously set the standard (and was probably Dixon’s best work).

NIGHTWING #96 (DC)
From October 2004.

Well into Devin’s run, the offending event has already taken place, Tarantula has killed Blockbuster, and everyone’s primed for the big NIGHTWING #100 (which I did get to read upon release!). Serialized comics storytelling just doesn’t get any better than Devin’s Dick Grayson, especially how she managed to so easily transition Dixon’s work into a crescendo that eventually saw Dick “mobbed up” (how these comics have never been collected is one of modern comics’ biggest crimes) and witness to the destruction of his adopted (if horribly named) hometown during INFINITE CRISIS.

NIGHTWING #150 (DC)
From January 2009.

From Grayson there was a succession of writers, including Bruce Jones (never got a chance to find his groove), Marv Wolfman (actually did some interesting things), and Peter Tomasi, who had the chance to illustrate the transition from Nightwing to Batman, as this issue helps explain. This is not, however, the last issue of the series. That bugger proved to be a hell of a challenge to find. At the time, I had just lost Heroes & Dragons as my regular comics supplier, and had not yet chosen Midtown-online as its replacement. I relied instead on a combination of trips to Escape Velocity (never a strictly regular occurrence) and my friend Daniel to stay on top of “Batman R.I.P.,” by far the most important event from that period. I remained obsessed with reading the final NIGHTWING for the next several years. I already had this one.

I have other Nightwing adventures to write about in later editions of Quarter Bin, including, yes, the holy grail I’d sought for so long...