"If I could walk on water, if I could tell you what’s next; I’d make you believe, make you forget.."
…So, I gave in and read the last eight issues of Devin Grayson's run in one sitting.
Dick brings his girlfriend flowers, kisses, and his fine, fine ass.
I had high hopes for this run, if only because Devin’s work on Gotham Knights is still among the most amazingly detailed and sensitive deconstructions of the Bats as a family that I’ve ever seen, and I wouldn’t give up having had that as my introduction to DC for anything. Really, I loved it that much.
For better or worse, I found myself responding to each and every issue here (which sadly couldn’t always be said for Dixon), but in some ways I really think that it was exactly Devin's sensitivity and masterful attention to detail that actually brought her work on Nightwing down a bit. With only Dick to be the focal point of all that raw emotional energy the story very quickly lost its focus and became pretty universally self-defeating. When it really, really didn't have to be.
Get used to seeing Dick in this position.
The Not-So-Great
Now, I’m not gonna lie. The masochistic fangirl in me certainly took some guilty pleasure from the glorious proliferation of gratuitous mantears every other panel for forty issues. But as much as it was effective in providing that surface-level gratification, none of Dick’s losses were allowed any space to breathe in the context of anything else, and so none of them actually seemed to mean anything beyond the issue or two in which they actually happened. Which to me makes them just that; ultimately cheap and gratuitous.
I certainly understand the impulse to rip a hero down to nothing so we can have the fun of watching him rebuild from the inside out, which is why this sort of breaks my heart, because all the ideas fueling this implosion of angst were actually decent, in themselves. Blockbuster blowing up Dick’s apartment building with dozens of people he knows inside? Good idea. Dick and Barbara having actual relationship issues based on a genuine (rather than contrived) failure to communicate? Worthy of exploration, if carefully and sensitively handled. Vindictive supervillians torching Dick’s childhood circus while he happens to be visiting, thus stripping him of his last tangible tie to his parents, his family, his cultural heritage, and his former life as an acrobat? Oh god, my heart. All of the above in the space of five issues, followed by Dick having a nervous breakdown and all-but killing a man and then being raped on the roof? Yeah. It's too much.
Crying through the mask FTW.
And again, what makes it too much is the fact that we’re never once allowed to see the fallout of what’s happened to Dick outside of the immediate context of what we’re given on the page. By which I mean, we certainly see Dick consumed with plenty of shame and self-loathing after being emasculated, humiliated, and violated on a rooftop by someone he knew, but in the mess of everything else Devin takes the easy way out and quickly subverts the thrust of that angst onto Blockbuster’s death, rather than dealing with the reality of what happened in any kind of honest way.
Sure, it’s incredibly realistic for a male hero to accept his own violation as a well-deserved punishment or retcon it in his own head as consensual (if ill advised) sex, and then refuse to deal with it beyond that. But as a reader, having witnessed the rape for what it really was, I really do feel cheated. It should be your job, writer, to call Dick on that bullshit rather than reinforcing all those negative, damaging stereotypes. Make us see that rape can happen to anyone. Make it unquestionably clear that while it’s natural and expected for Dick to be unable to face the reality of what’s happened to him, at the time he said “no, don’t touch me,” and Tarantula kept touching him anyway while he was near-catatonic, and that absolutely, completely makes her a rapist.
It be hug tiemes yet BatDad?
While I adored her brave and ruthless almost platonic OTPing of Bruce and Dick, it was also all too convenient for her to ignore that connection completely when it would have actually would have made sense for it to be there.
I’m sorry, but “oh gee, Bruce was busy” isn’t a good enough excuse when Dick is sleeping on a fire escape under a pile of newspapers and Bruce is twenty miles away in a mansion with a hundred fucking rooms. Even if we’re supposed to buy that Bruce is dense enough to have missed even a tenth of what was going on with Dick, Barbara knew, and if she cares enough about Dick to let him spend an entire evening sobbing in her lap twelve hours after dumping him, she cares enough about him to call Bruce. Call the Titans. Call Tim. Call someone.
I can buy that calling Dick back for War Games was Bruce’s ass-backwards way of checking up on him, but again, we see a whole lot of Dick being desperate and needy with Bruce, some of Bruce being vaguely concerned but ultimately clueless, and very little necessary payoff between the two of them until issues and issues after the fact.
No really, I’m over it.
"Don’t worry about me, Batman. I’ll just lie down on this nice, comfy fire escape with an open bullet wound and gallons of blood gushing out. But you go finish whatever the fuck you were doing before I called. Really, I’m sure it’ll take me at least two or three minutes to go completely into shock."
The Good
…And then they had sex.
However, the payoff, when it did come, was sogood.
I’d almost venture to say that all the gratuitous misery and pain of the last forty issues were a worthy price for the moment where we finally, finally see Dick get exactly what he needs from the person he needs it from most. Yes. This.
Among other adored things, much as it broke my heart to see Dick’s police career stripped away in the end, while it lasted it brought in one hell of a supporting cast for the book, including the addition of Gannon, Dick’s awesome partner on the force.
Who just happens to be gay, by the way.
With almost any other character a scene like this might have come off a little heavy-handed at best and mildly offensive at worst. How many times, after all, do we really need to see yet another queer character’s victimization used to prop up the good-guy cred of yet another unquestionably heterosexual hero?
But with Dick, it really does work I think. Both given the fact that he himself can easily be read as one of the most sexually ambiguous characters in the DCU ( most particularly when written by Devin ), and the level of partner loyalty and solidarity drilled into him by Bruce, it feels less like PSA delivered with all the sensitivity of a 747 flying into the side of an oil rig and more like an organic and surprisingly effective plot device. It’s never brought up between them again after this moment, and Gannon is immediately allowed some space to grow and escapes being defined by either his homosexuality or Dick’s activism on his behalf. I would have loved to see him stick around longer, and I’m bummed that he left with the end of Dick’s career with the Bludhaven PD.
No, I have no idea what the hell he's thinking, either. Half-naked Babs, Dick. Just chilling in the kitchen, wanting to make you really late for work. Sheesh.
I really can’t even tell you how hard I ship these two. On that I mostly blame Dixon, but Grayson deserves some of the credit as well, for all that she dragged out the wangst of their annoyingly soap-esque breakup for far too long. Perish the thought, but I daresay we have something here perilously close to a heterosexual relationship that’s actually based on things like friendship and mutual compatibility. In a comic book, no less.
In any case, reuniting Dick with the heterosexual love of his life was the perfect culmination of his ultimate return to himself, as well. And in spite of everything that came after, I’m so glad this moment, at the very least, was theirs to have together.
AND THEN DICK AND BABS GOT MARRIED AND LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER THE END.
Or, you know. Not. >_<
On that note, I’ve jumped into Jones as of today, and that means I really need someone to please hold my hand and tell me it’ll be over soon. D:
Also, I accidentally destroyed my parents $1800 dining room table today. I kind of wish I was living somewhere else, right now.
Dick brings his girlfriend flowers, kisses, and his fine, fine ass.
I had high hopes for this run, if only because Devin’s work on Gotham Knights is still among the most amazingly detailed and sensitive deconstructions of the Bats as a family that I’ve ever seen, and I wouldn’t give up having had that as my introduction to DC for anything. Really, I loved it that much.
For better or worse, I found myself responding to each and every issue here (which sadly couldn’t always be said for Dixon), but in some ways I really think that it was exactly Devin's sensitivity and masterful attention to detail that actually brought her work on Nightwing down a bit. With only Dick to be the focal point of all that raw emotional energy the story very quickly lost its focus and became pretty universally self-defeating. When it really, really didn't have to be.
Get used to seeing Dick in this position.
The Not-So-Great
Now, I’m not gonna lie. The masochistic fangirl in me certainly took some guilty pleasure from the glorious proliferation of gratuitous mantears every other panel for forty issues. But as much as it was effective in providing that surface-level gratification, none of Dick’s losses were allowed any space to breathe in the context of anything else, and so none of them actually seemed to mean anything beyond the issue or two in which they actually happened. Which to me makes them just that; ultimately cheap and gratuitous.
I certainly understand the impulse to rip a hero down to nothing so we can have the fun of watching him rebuild from the inside out, which is why this sort of breaks my heart, because all the ideas fueling this implosion of angst were actually decent, in themselves. Blockbuster blowing up Dick’s apartment building with dozens of people he knows inside? Good idea. Dick and Barbara having actual relationship issues based on a genuine (rather than contrived) failure to communicate? Worthy of exploration, if carefully and sensitively handled. Vindictive supervillians torching Dick’s childhood circus while he happens to be visiting, thus stripping him of his last tangible tie to his parents, his family, his cultural heritage, and his former life as an acrobat? Oh god, my heart. All of the above in the space of five issues, followed by Dick having a nervous breakdown and all-but killing a man and then being raped on the roof? Yeah. It's too much.
Crying through the mask FTW.
And again, what makes it too much is the fact that we’re never once allowed to see the fallout of what’s happened to Dick outside of the immediate context of what we’re given on the page. By which I mean, we certainly see Dick consumed with plenty of shame and self-loathing after being emasculated, humiliated, and violated on a rooftop by someone he knew, but in the mess of everything else Devin takes the easy way out and quickly subverts the thrust of that angst onto Blockbuster’s death, rather than dealing with the reality of what happened in any kind of honest way.
Sure, it’s incredibly realistic for a male hero to accept his own violation as a well-deserved punishment or retcon it in his own head as consensual (if ill advised) sex, and then refuse to deal with it beyond that. But as a reader, having witnessed the rape for what it really was, I really do feel cheated. It should be your job, writer, to call Dick on that bullshit rather than reinforcing all those negative, damaging stereotypes. Make us see that rape can happen to anyone. Make it unquestionably clear that while it’s natural and expected for Dick to be unable to face the reality of what’s happened to him, at the time he said “no, don’t touch me,” and Tarantula kept touching him anyway while he was near-catatonic, and that absolutely, completely makes her a rapist.
It be hug tiemes yet BatDad?
While I adored her brave and ruthless almost platonic OTPing of Bruce and Dick, it was also all too convenient for her to ignore that connection completely when it would have actually would have made sense for it to be there.
I’m sorry, but “oh gee, Bruce was busy” isn’t a good enough excuse when Dick is sleeping on a fire escape under a pile of newspapers and Bruce is twenty miles away in a mansion with a hundred fucking rooms. Even if we’re supposed to buy that Bruce is dense enough to have missed even a tenth of what was going on with Dick, Barbara knew, and if she cares enough about Dick to let him spend an entire evening sobbing in her lap twelve hours after dumping him, she cares enough about him to call Bruce. Call the Titans. Call Tim. Call someone.
I can buy that calling Dick back for War Games was Bruce’s ass-backwards way of checking up on him, but again, we see a whole lot of Dick being desperate and needy with Bruce, some of Bruce being vaguely concerned but ultimately clueless, and very little necessary payoff between the two of them until issues and issues after the fact.
No really, I’m over it.
"Don’t worry about me, Batman. I’ll just lie down on this nice, comfy fire escape with an open bullet wound and gallons of blood gushing out. But you go finish whatever the fuck you were doing before I called. Really, I’m sure it’ll take me at least two or three minutes to go completely into shock."
The Good
…And then they had sex.
However, the payoff, when it did come, was sogood.
I’d almost venture to say that all the gratuitous misery and pain of the last forty issues were a worthy price for the moment where we finally, finally see Dick get exactly what he needs from the person he needs it from most. Yes. This.
Among other adored things, much as it broke my heart to see Dick’s police career stripped away in the end, while it lasted it brought in one hell of a supporting cast for the book, including the addition of Gannon, Dick’s awesome partner on the force.
Who just happens to be gay, by the way.
With almost any other character a scene like this might have come off a little heavy-handed at best and mildly offensive at worst. How many times, after all, do we really need to see yet another queer character’s victimization used to prop up the good-guy cred of yet another unquestionably heterosexual hero?
But with Dick, it really does work I think. Both given the fact that he himself can easily be read as one of the most sexually ambiguous characters in the DCU ( most particularly when written by Devin ), and the level of partner loyalty and solidarity drilled into him by Bruce, it feels less like PSA delivered with all the sensitivity of a 747 flying into the side of an oil rig and more like an organic and surprisingly effective plot device. It’s never brought up between them again after this moment, and Gannon is immediately allowed some space to grow and escapes being defined by either his homosexuality or Dick’s activism on his behalf. I would have loved to see him stick around longer, and I’m bummed that he left with the end of Dick’s career with the Bludhaven PD.
No, I have no idea what the hell he's thinking, either. Half-naked Babs, Dick. Just chilling in the kitchen, wanting to make you really late for work. Sheesh.
I really can’t even tell you how hard I ship these two. On that I mostly blame Dixon, but Grayson deserves some of the credit as well, for all that she dragged out the wangst of their annoyingly soap-esque breakup for far too long. Perish the thought, but I daresay we have something here perilously close to a heterosexual relationship that’s actually based on things like friendship and mutual compatibility. In a comic book, no less.
In any case, reuniting Dick with the heterosexual love of his life was the perfect culmination of his ultimate return to himself, as well. And in spite of everything that came after, I’m so glad this moment, at the very least, was theirs to have together.
AND THEN DICK AND BABS GOT MARRIED AND LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER THE END.
Or, you know. Not. >_<
On that note, I’ve jumped into Jones as of today, and that means I really need someone to please hold my hand and tell me it’ll be over soon. D:
Also, I accidentally destroyed my parents $1800 dining room table today. I kind of wish I was living somewhere else, right now.