Preview for Nightwing #7

[icon_uk]

Courtesy of Newsarama

As Dick finds out what happened to Raymond/Saiko years before





Odd that Dick doesn't seem to be using his escrima sticks, they'd be useful when fighting someone with hand blades, no?

But anyway....



The raw rat diet is looking pretty good by comparison.

The Court of Owls are indeed bastards of the first water! (I may have my little quirks, but that's too extreme for me thanks)

Comments

[icon_uk]

The circus didn't do it, the secret society of entitled rich assholes did.

With the assistance of the circus OWNER, so yes, I think you could say the circus did do it.

Again, the travelling circus works as long as you don't think about it.

The Court of Owls, which appears to be Gotham-centric, exerting control over a mobile group of travelling folk who tour internationally seems "off" to me.

Plus the circus community isn't that large, if there was a reputation of kids being involved in accidents there, Haly's would have had a very bad reputation and the Grayson's probably wouldn't have gone near it.

[sistermagpie]

Yeah, that's the thing for me. I like the circus being a circus. It's also that, as you said, it's supposed to be more meaningful because it's a "family" issue, but this isn't Dick's family. I mean, I get the temptation to mine the past for interesting people who can pop up again, and as a former circus kid Dick would know a lot of people in that small world.

But this story tries to introduce yet more circus kids claiming to have the Graysons as almost-parents, one of whom is also claiming some hold on Dick's affections, while in the same breath they're resenting him for leaving the circus and plotting against him in crazy ways, and also the circus is revealed to be preying on its own children etc. It's a lot of backstory I'm supposed to not only buy but care about, when I'm predisposed not to because I like the original, think it's more interesting and think it's got plenty of potential on its own.

When strangers show up claiming to be Graysons resenting Dick's current life and claiming he owes them something, I think of them more like that early fake-aunt and uncle from the golden age.

[coldfiredragon]

I think you are very wrong in claiming that the circus isn't Dick's family. He left the show in his late teens, when he was sixteen and the only reason he left was because his direct relatives were murdered. He's only 21 in current canon. Five years is NOT a long time when 'family' is involved, especially when Dick spent 16 or 21 years of his life growing up around these people- around Raya, and Raymond and even Zane. These were his childhood best friends in the DCnU continuity.

I would honestly say that he has stronger ties to them than he does to many of the old 'Titans'. I don't see him having really strong ties to Roy or Kory. He knows them definitely but they are not his best friends in this universe. The kids he grew up with would be. The people from the circus are the ones he owes his childhood and early teenage loyalties to.

[sistermagpie]

No, I wasn't saying that the circus wasn't Dick's family. It is his family and always has been. (Re: Dick's new history of barely knowing Bruce Wayne and his parents dying when he was 16 I'll just say that I'll ignore that until it's quietly retconned away since even the author hates it. It's bad enough they're trying to retcon away friendships of Dick's. I'm not giving up Dick and Bruce's relationship without a fight--a relationships which has been nicely highlighted in the successful Batman comic.)

So what I was saying wasn't that the people at the circus aren't his family, I was saying that *these people*, the girl and the guy, are new characters and I don't buy them as Dick's family. I certainly don't buy yet another random person showing up to claim the the Grayson's were "like parents" to them, thus making them like Graysons too. I understand that this is what the story is telling me, obviously. But I don't buy it at all. It's too much with too little build up, and both of them will probably be gone asap when this arc is over never to be thought of again because Dick's history with Bruce is obviously going to be more relevant and interesting in the comics than the story of the random girl he had a crush on in that scene and claimed she was totally part of his family in this story arc.

[coldfiredragon]

I guess I'm more willing than most to adopt the 'big changes come with a big universe shift' side of things. As long as Nightwing continues to sell well, and I haven't seen ANY signs that its not selling well, DC isn't going to change a whole lot.

You can 'not buy' Raymond and Raya all you like but the bottom line is that in this new continuity they were at one point 'like family' to him. We haven't gotten to see their childhood together but this is a new world and now that DC has said they exist then they existed. The old history got rewritten and we can either cling to it or accept the past as the past and move on with the future.

[sistermagpie]

I don't think Raya is going to be an important enough character for me to have to convince myself that at one point she and Raymond were like family to him. I don't expect to see Dick having a lot of memories of being in the circus ten minutes ago and flashbacks of their 16 years together. I think they'll be like the last kid who was retconned in as so close to the Graysons he was almost family: insisted upon in one story and then dropped with Dick's past going back to what it was, a vague circus environment where the only truly stable people were his parents.

I think the main point of the reboot was to establish things like Dick being younger, not the details about Dick's life before he was Robin, including the ones made up for tihs story. Especially since apparently most of the Bat-continuity from the past is supposed to be still in effect, with 4 Robins, Dick's tenure as Batman, lots of events, etc.

[coldfiredragon]

I, like you, think the focus on the circus background was done in part to make it clear that Dick was younger. II don't think that was the sole purpose however. Why focus the whole first seven issues of a story on a fleshing out a backstory that doesn't mean anything? I really wish DC would stop using the circus as a throwaway plot device but every few years it crops up.

As for these characters never being mentioned again I think the fallout from the Court of Owls storyline will play out for at least a couple of issues after the arc is done. The revelations in this issue of Nightwing aren't going to be something Dick just side-steps and forgets. The circus' connection to the Court of Owls is going to raise questions in his mind and make him look at Gotham differently. I think Higgins has said as much in interviews... that Dick will look at Gotham and wonder what good have he and Batman done if the Court was playing in the shadows the whole time.

Maybe I'm interpreting things I've read wrong but I can't see how this revelation won't have an impact on Dick that lasts more than a few issues.

[icon_uk]

Why focus the whole first seven issues of a story on a fleshing out a backstory that doesn't mean anything?

Except the only real changes have had an impact on an upcoming crossover event, so I think that answers your question right there.

I don't see Raya being any more important long term than, say, Liu, the "First love and first person Dick slept with" Marv Wolfman retconned in for an arc that basically was less about Nightwing and all about his upcoming Vigilante launch.

[coldfiredragon]

Ahh that dreaded word 'retcon'. See I think I just realized this. The reason I don't have as much problem with many of these changes like everyone else does is that I'm not looking at the post-Flashpoint changes as a retcon. A retcon for me is one author changing previous facts written by another author -- generally minus the reasoning of a world changing event like Flashpoint.

I don't look at the DCnU as a retcon and I don't think DC is either. I think DC's approach to Flashpoint is that everything that happened before Flashpoint still happened. They didn't do away with it. It still happened but Flashpoint and Barry Allen going back and forth in time created ripples in the time stream that altered everything.

Time travel is always such a sticky, messy plot to try and do in any medium and I think DC did it BETTER than most. Barry severely altered the world in his attempt to save his mother then in putting it right some of the damage was already done and it stuck.

I don't think the Court of Owls ever existed pre-Flashpoint but when the timestream rippled and shifted there was a catalyst that created them, that created a link between them and Haly's Circus.

LOL, all of this is just my long-winded way of saying that I don't look at the DCnU as a retcon. The characters and scenarios I grew up with still happened pre-Flashpoint but once that Barry Allen shaped stone got dropped in the calm pool everything changed. I don't mind a shorter timeline and altered character histories.

What will piss me off though is when DC starts retconning the post Flashpoint changes without another catalyst event like Flashpoint as the reasoning.

[icon_uk]

Don't get me started on the mess that was Flashpoint, for both our sakes. :) Presenting the shiny new universe as being a good thing because, simply put, Barry Allen fucked up the entire timeline, seems bizarre to me. FIXING the timeline should be the focus, not celebrating the half arsed job that St Barry did of it. That's like thanking Parallax for Zero Hour, or the Anti-Monitor for Crisis.

I think you're assuming I'm conflating the general and the specific. The fact the history overall has been changed, I have no real problem with, but altering fundamental concepts does annoy me. Certain truths hold to be self evident; Superman came from Krypton because it was blowing up, Batman became who he is because his parent's were shot in front of him, and Dick Grayson was a kid whose parents were killed by a mobster's protection racket and his idyllic exciting life in the circus replaced by a new life with Bruce Wayne as Robin.

Changing it so that he's a 16 year old is approaching the painful to start with and seems to highlight the sense of actual embarrassment some senior staff at DC have with their own history, making it so that his circus was actually run for the benefit of an evil hive of child torturing monsters is going way too far.

I'm not quite sure whether the Court of Owls existence before Flashpoint has any bearing on anything to be honest. This is the new "This is how it always was" status quo, and they are a part of it.

[sistermagpie]

I tend, like icon, to think that the revelations of this story will be important for the crossover where they fight the Court of Owls, but I just can't imagine writers years from now being bound to details like the Graysons murder being the thing that saved him from being recruited into the Owls, which brought tragedy to Very Important Raya and Raymond. I think even already DC has shown signs they just want to have it both ways--they want the iconic Robin stories that work, they just also want Bruce to be young.

So I think it'll be in continuity that the Owls exist and that Bruce beat them. They might even keep the idea that the Owls had their eye on Dick. Because those things have potential to the story and characters we care about. But I wouldn't be surprised if they did that without erasing Dick and Bruce's relationship since that's long proven to provide good stories in ways these details don't.

[icon_uk]

Thing is, that uncle and aunt in the Golden Age weren't fakes, they really were Dick's relatives.

[sistermagpie]

Ha! Totally forgot. But then, these people aren't supposed to be fakes either. But the aunt and uncle never became an important of his backstory either. I find it much easier to believe a couple of relatives would want to claim Dick because he was Bruce's ward than that Dick truly cares deeply about what's her name and Raymond.