Monday, October 6, 2014

Grayson: Futures End #1 (DC)

writer: Tom King, Tim Seeley
artist: Stephen Mooney
via Comic Newbies
An instant classic.  Best single issue I'll read all year.  The Dick Grayson story I've been waiting to read for years.

Need I go on?

The idea of Futures End, whether considering the weekly series itself or the September one-shots, is to present a portrait of the DC landscape five years in the future.  In the weekly series, it's a catastrophe that needs to be undone.  In the one-shots it's a glimpse at where everyone ends up.

Since the New 52 launch four years ago, September has been the best time to be a fan of DC.  The first September was the launch of the initial wave of fifty-two new series, the second a look at everyone's origins, the third a month dedicated to villains.  Every time it's a chance to reconnect with the characters themselves, take a wide view of their activities.  In essence, September is the absolute best opportunity for me to catch my favorite kind of storytelling.

And this year, that happened within the pages of Grayson.  Since the final issue of Nightwing saw Tom King and Tim Seeley take their first stab at defining the career of Dick Grayson, I've been hopeful that these were the writers who would finally do justice to the character.  There have been others in the past who have done excellent work with the character, but few have been as interested in exploring the character in the same way countless creators have, say, Superman or Batman.  I know, Dick Grayson no matter what he's called can't be argued to be Superman or Batman.  I mean, only Superman and Batman are, right?  But Dick's been around for about as long as they have.  He also holds the distinction of making permanent leaps of development into new roles, something no other character has been able to do.  He went from Robin the Boy Wonder, Batman's sidekick, to leader of the Teen Titans, to Nightwing, to a solo career, and several stints as Batman.  And now he's Dick Grayson, undercover as an agent of SPYRAL, the premise behind Grayson itself.

So far I haven't read a regular issue of Grayson.  I've heard some good things about it, but every time I have a look it seems Dick is in the midst of a spy adventure, which is fine.  I'd probably like it just fine, considering it's the last vestige of Grant Morrison's Batman Incorporated.  But over the years, I've developed a real fear of writers wasting Dick on adventures that ultimately mean nothing to the character, a trend that began after some truly excellent material from Chuck Dixon and Devin K. Grayson.  After Dick was scheduled to die in the pages of Infinite Crisis, DC lost its nerve with the character.  Other than the last stint as Batman, Dick has been completely directionless.  And then he was singled out as the victim in Forever Evil, had his superhero identity stolen away, and ended up thrown off the deep end.

The Futures End one-shot changes everything.  It's the story that finally tells the story of Dick's life, all of it.  Even if the destination ends up being something that never actually happens, that's not really the point.  The particulars don't matter.  It's the story, and the effort to make a cohesive thru-line for everything Dick has done.  King and Seeley skewer heavily toward his later solo adventures, and naturally the context of Grayson itself, and this works incredibly well.  Helena Bertinelli, the erstwhile Huntress, has considerable history with Dick, so it's nice to see her so important to the story, at last, in this version of events, the permanent romantic foil he's been searching for his whole publication history (Dixon had a few ideas, and of course there was also Starfire in the Titans days and Batgirl, a notion that's been danced around for so long it's actually lost its appeal).  Helena was always the contrasting figure who challenged Dick best, and nowhere is that more evident than in this one-shot.  Their interactions force Dick to remember the signal moments of his career, incidental ones that represent the impermanence of his life, how he was living it even before becoming Robin, as a circus performer.

The brilliance of the story might be blunted in some eyes by the gimmick of unfolding it backwards, but I've always liked that idea, and it's done perfectly anyway, even with a nice cylindrical nature to it.  There's a command to the whole thing that's rare in storytelling anywhere, let alone comics featuring superheroes.  This is very deliberate stuff, not plodding but calculated, that rewards repeat reading (demands it, in some respects, depending how much you follow initially). 

If the series as a whole is as good as this, I'll probably be adding Grayson to the growing list of series to read in trade collection format, because it seems as if it's another experience that would greatly benefit from that style.  Hopefully King and Seeley stick around for a while, get as far along the Futures End narrative as they can, because they've proven a long-term and enduring benefit to Dick's current role, how it fits in with his whole history, enhances it.  I wouldn't mind their doing side projects exploring his past a little more, either.

But the beauty of it is that even if that doesn't happen, this one-shot still exists, and it already does all that, and it has a great deal of fun in the process, something that's been missing from the character for too long.  It's a perfect single issue, and thankfully King and Seeley were smart enough to realize that the Futures End month gave them such an opportunity.  I don't know if they already had ideas like this percolating for the series or if the prompt forced them to this creative peak.  It doesn't matter.  It happened, and it's the new high-water mark for Dick Grayson stories.

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