DC Histories: Dick Grayson (Robin I / Nightwing II / Batman III)

Here at DC Histories, we try to make sense of the continuity that perplexes, befuddles, and intimidates. We discuss what worked and what didn’t. This week, we’re talking about the first teen sidekick and original Robin, Dick Grayson.

Less than one year after Batman debuted, the dark and mysterious Dark Knight Detective got a sidekick. Supposedly seen as a way to get young male readers to project themselves into the story, young acrobat Dick Grayson was introduced in the pages of Detective Comics #38.

Much like a young Bruce Wayne, Dick’s parents were murdered before his eyes. The circus Dick and his parents worked for under the name the Flying Graysons refused to pay a local gangster protection money. In retaliation, “an accident” was arranged to kill John and Mary Grayson, the circus’ prize performers. Seeing himself in the young man, Bruce Wayne took Dick in when the boy lost his parents. With Bruce, Dick was given the opportunity to train, which helped him focus his anger into a positive direction. Eventually, Bruce gave Dick a costume based on both the North American Robin and the classic outlaw Robin Hood. Robin, the Boy Wonder, began joining Batman on his many cases.

Things were wonderful between Bruce and Dick. While the young orphan wasn’t officially adopted by Bruce, he was made the billionaire’s ward. Bruce was Dick’s guardian but he wasn’t his father. It made their relationship fairly amorphous. They were partners, teammates, friends, but also mentor and apprentice.

The legalities behind their relationship was thrown into question when Dick’s Uncle George Grayson came back into the picture just a few years after Dick became Robin. Thinking Dick should live with a family member and not a bachelor playboy, George brought a court case against Bruce’s legal guardianship of his nephew.

Against both Bruce and Dick’s wishes, Dick was turned over to his uncle. However, it was quickly revealed the George simply wanted to extort money out of Bruce. If he was given that money, George would turn the young boy back over to Bruce. After Batman busted up George’s shady dealings, Dick’s uncle left Gotham, never to again trouble our heroes.

So popular was Dick during the Golden Age that he was eventually given his own solo series of adventures. He became the main feature in the Star Spangled Comics series. There he tracked down crooks without the aid of Batman and even had a few reoccurring villains to call his own including the dastardly Clock.

After his solo stories ended when Star Spangled Comics became Star Spangled War Stories, Robin continued on as Batman’s assistant through the rest of the Golden Age and into the Silver Age.

Eventually, the many teen heroes of the DCU started to spend time together. Aqualad, Kid Flash, and Robin worked their first case together in the pages of Brave and the Bold #54 in 1964. There they attempted to help a town’s teenagers get along with their elders. A new villain named Mr. Twister made matters even worse for the new trio.

This tale set the stage for the Teen Titans. The teen boys continued their adventures together and added Wonder Girl, Wonder Woman’s teen sidekick, to their roster. None of these tales set the comic book world on fire, but they were fun enough.

Ever so slowly, Dick’s status quo shifted. DC wanted to stay relevant to their aging readership so Dick began to grow up. In 1969, Dick left Wayne Manor to attend college at Hudson University, located in some part of New York State. He also proved his age by making an off-hand reference to the military draft, which was currently happening for the Vietnam War.

Shortly after Dick left home, Bruce mothballed Wayne Manor and moved his entire operation to downtown Gotham. In a special underground level of the Wayne Foundation building, he even set up a second Batcave which was just the right size for a solo operation.

After he left Wayne Manor for college life, Dick only sporadically appeared alongside Batman. Mostly, he had solo adventures in backup tales in the various Bat Family line of books. He and Batgirl had a few adventures together and Dick remained a part of the Teen Titans for much of the 1970s. Still, when Dick returned to spend time with Bruce during a break from college, the pair seemed to genuinely enjoy each other’s company. It was nice to see the father and son / brothers in arms having a good time together.

After spending most of the ’70s in college, things started to change for him again when the New Teen Titans formed in 1980. Written by Marv Wolfman with art by George Pérez, the group debuted as a special insert in the pages of DC Comics Presents #26. The group consisted of classic Titans characters Wonder Girl, Robin, and Kid Flash alongside the Doom Patrol’s Beast Boy, and a host of new characters like Cyborg, Raven, and Starfire.

When the New Teen Titans’ ongoing series launched the following month, it was a huge hit. The mixture of teen drama, interpersonal dynamics, and clean action brought readers to the title and held them fast. Somewhere along the way, Dick quietly stopped attending college.

By 1983, Dick was spending all of his free time with the Titans. He barely appeared alongside his former mentor. So, when a young orphaned circus performer named Jason Todd fell into Bruce’s life, it seemed a natural fit for the young man to become the second Robin and swing through the streets of Gotham City alongside Batman. Dick gave the young acrobat his full endorsement.

With a new, young Robin spending time in Gotham, Dick began to have an identity crisis back in New York, where the Teen Titans were based. A few months after Jason popped up, Dick decided to retire as Robin. In the middle of the epic Judas Contract storyline, Dick debuted his new identity of Nightwing, complete with an epic collar and plunging v-neck.

Nightwing was not a new name in the DCU. Decades earlier, Superman had used the name when he visited the bottle city of Kandor. Named after a bird native to Krypton, Nightwing was a non-powered Superman’s answer to Batman. Why Dick Grayson choose an old Superman pseudonym for his new identity wasn’t explained during this original tale. Chances are, Marv Wolfman just liked the name and since it hadn’t been in use for years, he slapped it on the former Robin. In any case, the name fit Dick well and he stuck with it.

The Crisis on Infinite Earths hit a few years later and the resulting continuity reset changed the dynamic of the Bat Family. Thanks to the influence of the dark, brooding Batman seen in the Dark Knight Returns miniseries, things were no longer quite so sunny between Batman and his supporting cast.

In this new continuity, the chummy Dynamic Duo began to split apart after Dick left for college. While Dick had enjoyed college in the ’70s, now it seemed like it had been a poor fit for the former Boy Wonder. His grades suffered because of his indifference to his studies and his constant nighttime activities in the bad parts of town.

He only lasted a single semester at Hudson University. When he dropped out, it strained the relationship between Batman and Robin.

It was also shown in this new continuity that Dick didn’t voluntarily drop the Robin name. After Dick was shot in the shoulder by the Joker, Bruce decreed that what he did was too dangerous for a young person and fired Dick while his protege recuperated in bed. It was cold-blooded.

Undercutting Bruce’s assertion that crime fighting wasn’t for kids was the fact that in the very next issue, Bruce tapped a post-Crisis Jason Todd to become the second Robin. This complete reversal in less than a month of real time made Batman seem like a jerk and, perhaps, psychopathic.

A year and a half after he’d been fired from the job of Robin, Dick returned to the Batcave to demand answers as to why Bruce had wasted so little time in proving himself to be a hypocrite.

Written by Jim Starlin, it was a tough conversation that the two of them had. Bruce’s callousness to Dick really shook me when I first read this tale as a kid. The walls he’d put up to surround his heart were heavy here. Only after an extended shouting match did Bruce finally admit that he’d asked Jason to join him as Robin because he was lonely. He missed Dick and was too proud to ask for help.

Several years later, an explanation was finally given as to why Dick had chosen the name Nightwing. In a tale that told of the time immediately after he dropped the name Robin, Dick was shown to have had an adventure in Metropolis. There, he ran into Superman, who told him the tale of an ancient Kryptonian mythological figure called Nightwing. Inspired by the tale, Dick grabbed the name for himself soon afterwards.

With his backstory now reset, Dick continued as a member of the New Teen Titans, who had by that point changed their name to the New Titans to more accurately showcase their 20-something status. However, when Batman needed his help, Dick was quick to come to Gotham.

Unfortunately, Bruce isn’t really the type to ask for help. When Bane broke Batman’s back in the mid-1990s, Bruce turned to a new ally of his named Jean-Paul Valley to take over the Batman role. When the job corrupted Jean-Paul, Bruce finally turned to Dick for help. Needing a bit more time to mentally prepare himself to retake his role as the Dark Knight Detective, Bruce asked Dick to pinch hit. The role wasn’t a comfortable one for the former Robin and he took the job reluctantly. It helped that he knew the gig was only temporary.

Sure enough, Bruce retook the mantel a few months after Dick wore it and Dick was more than happy to return to his role as Nightwing.

The following year, Dick was finally granted his own solo ongoing series. Though he’d had solo stories before in backup tales and Star Spangled Comics, this was his first series with only his name on the cover. In the pages of this series, Dick moved to a city named Blüdhaven, a town even more corrupt than the famous Gotham City.

At first, Dick was looking into several murders that had taken place in the city. Quickly, the scope of his investigation expanded and he began looking into who was the real power behind the city’s hoodlums. The gang leader of the city turned out to be Blockbuster, a former foe of Batman’s who had been a dumb brute in the past but who had gotten his mental prowess upgraded after he made a deal with Neron in the pages of the Underworld Unleashed event.

Though he was kept extremely busy with his roles in the Titans and with Batman, Dick did manage to have a few romantic relationships. He dated Starfire, another member of the Titans, off-and-on for years but nothing came of it. During his Robin career, he’d also had a thing for Batgirl, whose real name was Barbara Gordon, daughter of Police Commissioner Jim Gordon. Years after the Joker shot and paralyzed Barbara, Dick took the former masked vigilante up on a trapeze during a date. It was a very sweet moment.

Relations between Dick and Bruce slowly mended over the years. Though he still had problems addressing his true feelings towards Dick directly, Bruce did file the paperwork necessary to officially adopt him in 2001. That meant that in the eyes of the government, Dick was Bruce’s son. All laws and issues of inheritance were now decided. More importantly, this was Bruce’s way of showing Dick how important his former sidekick was to him.

The following year, Bruce once again proved how highly he thought of the former Boy Wonder when he set up a contingency plan in case of the Justice League’s death. In the event that the JLA was wiped out on a mission, a series of heroes would automatically be offered a slot in the next JLA. Of course, the worst appeared to happen and Batman’s plans were put into motion. Heroes like the Atom, Firestorm, Jason Blood, Hawkgirl, Green Arrow, Faith, and Major Disaster found themselves called to the new League. The only person Batman trusted to lead this ragtag bunch was Nightwing.

Though Dick’s time with the League was brief, he did lead other groups during this time period. He was still a member of a few of the various Titans groups. He was also the leader of the Outsiders, a group that Batman had originally created in the 1980s but who had several incarnations since then.

Everything changed dramatically for Dick when Bruce died during the events of Final Crisis. Finding Gotham City without a Batman, Dick realized that he was the best person to take up his adopted father’s role in the city. The other people gunning for the role didn’t really understand what Batman truly was. Only Dick understood. Reluctantly, he again donned the cape and cowl of the Dark Knight but not without a few reservations.

Dick’s time as Batman was wonderful. Damian, Bruce’s biological son, became the Robin to Dick’s Batman. The pair of them battled against all manner of foes in Gotham. Their brotherly comradery took a while to get going but the duo eventually clicked together in a great way.

The longer Dick stayed as Batman, the more comfortable he got in the role. He even rejoined the Justice League, this time in the Batman outfit. This new League was comprised of several past allies of Dick, including former Titans like Donna Troy and Starfire, along with veterans like Hal Jordan and Black Canary. It was wonderful to see Dick embrace this new life.

Eventually, Bruce was shown to still be alive. He returned to Gotham and became Batman once again. However, Dick also kept the costume and for about a year, there were two Batmen running around the DCU.

The New 52 did away with all that. In a move that felt a bit like a demotion considering how well Dick had taken to the Batman role, he was back in his Nightwing outfit when the new continuity kicked in. Exactly how much of Dick’s past remains in place is still a bit of a mystery, but there is one drastic change to Dick’s backstory. Now it seems that Dick was originally groomed to be a member of something called the Court of Owls.

A secret society based in Gotham, the Court has a group of seemingly immortal ninja killers working for them. Dick was supposed to be in their number. Only by Bruce spiriting the young boy away from the circus after the death of his parents did Dick remain a free man.

It seems more challenges are in store for Dick in the coming months. Nothing is easy these days for the former Boy Wonder. Considering how much he’s gone through in the past, it seems clear that not much is going to keep him down. Dick Grayson will endure no matter what gets thrown at him. And that keeps me coming back.

 

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Jeff Reid knows that drama comes from conflict, but he likes seeing Dick Grayson happy and full of quips. He misses that. Jeff tries to express his love of life via Twitter.