You Read These With Your Eyes (Jan 18th, 2023)

DC is entering a new season of storytelling, and they're using Dick Grayson as their engine. It's positively magic.

A quick feature about selling stories featuring the week’s newest reads.

Superhero comics have a lot in common with magic. When the audience is engaged, they’ll suspend their disbelief long enough to scape into the fantastic. A good magician will leave you mystified and entertained - whereas a four year old disappearing an object when your eyes are closed requires quite a bit more work to accept.

A lot of good magic comes down to context. If I’m paying good money to see something astounding that I can’t quite wrap my brain around, it better pull my brain away from reality. A couple of mirrors just isn’t going to cut it. Similarly, when the four year old disappearing an object is my niece, the trick becomes more about a collaboration - two conspirators accepting the trick as real, in order to laugh. Done by almost any other random five year old, collaboration just doesn’t work the same.

I believe comics themselves to be a form of magic - collaborators working together to create worlds. The results have a similar range to magic, as the disappearing eraser evolves into elaborate stage play with time and practice.

I landed on this idea after dealing with the aftermath of Marvel’s One More Day storyline in the pages of Amazing Spider-Man. As a retailer, I ended up being the sounding board for a lot of disgruntled long time Spider-Man fans. While I was more than excited for the Brand New Day storyline that featured a single Spider-Man for the first time in my lifetime, others were upset by the feeling that their Spider-Man was being taken away from them. They weren’t wrong about that.

In Monday’s feature where I talked about the first event I experienced as a retailer, I spoke about the big two’s need to have their “second act” run in perpetuity. Once the concept is started, it can’t end. And if and when it does end, it notes a failure. Neither company wants to have a failure. For something like Spider-Man at the time, it meant pulling the character back into an old style status quo with a fresh coat of paint. This reinvention allowed a treasure trove of new stories to be experienced by folks like me who had only read Peter’s swinging singles days out of cultural context. That version of the character was theirs. This one, was mine.

Anyway, to go back to the whole “magic” analogy, I believe the biggest problem with One More Day came down to the fact that the magic trick was performed poorly. Despite the best of intentions, the trick of refreshing the character came across like a four year old’s disappearing act. I can say this, because at the time, Daredevil had recently run a similar trick with Matt’s secret identity that was near flawless in execution. From the reveal of Matt as Daredevil from Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev, to the re-bottling by Ed Brubaker and Michael Lark, the trick was artful in its misdirection. At the end of the day, the character’s status quo was regained with many great stories told in between.

¹

Two magic tricks aiming at maintaining the illusion of change and evolution while being clear examples of second act maintenance. Which brings us to this week’s main feature.

art by Bruno Redondo

ONGOING & JUMPING ON POINT | Nightwing #100

By Tom Taylor, Bruno Redondo, Scott McDaniel, Rick Leonardi, Eddy Barrows, Javier Fernandez, Mikel Janín, Karl Story, Eber Ferreira, Caio Filipe, Joe Prado, Adriano Lucas & Web Abbott w/ editorial support by Jessica Berbey, Jessica Chen & Ben Abernathy.

I wanted to talk about my magic theory as a lead into this, because there is absolute, top level magic happening in this book. Some of this comes from meticulous preparation, and some of this comes from various creators and editors utilizing the power of the perpetual second act for good.

The preparation end starts back at Tom Taylor and Bruno Redondo’s start on the book - which saw Dick Grayson inherit billions from a sadly deceased Alfred. Identifying Dick as a truly different character than Bruce, one that is deeply empathetic and helpful more than he is driven by vengeance, Dick immediately set about using the money to try and pull Blüdhaven from its existence as “worse Gotham”. He started programs and built safety nets, all while dealing with the superpowered end of things as Nightwing. The rich of the city, who required the status quo to be maintained for their way of life to continue, pushed back against this heavily by targeting Dick Grayson for assassination.

The run speeds along from there, becoming a heightened version of the struggle we’re seeing out in the world today, with the rich being that kind of comic book evil, instead of just sociopath evil that we have in the real world. Nightwing became a book about kindness over comfort with a different kind of billionaire at the centre, one that couldn’t abide by his position without truly doing the most he could do to help even a struggling family he would pass on the street. 

Eventually, this run ran parallel to the Joshua Williamson and Daniel Sampere driven Dark Crisis (on Infinite Earths), a story born from the darkest spaces of DC continuity.

²

Mining DC’s rich history, a story emerged about letting darkness overtake your thoughts and action. Submitting to the grind of it all was the enemy, and it was infecting everyone. The darkness itself was revealed to be nothing but a force with no purpose - just something that could crawl into your brain and make you a force of internal and external destruction.

That particular story kicked off with “the death of the Justice League”, something that the perpetual second act of these comics would not be able to abide by for any length of time. Even though Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and the rest were “dead”, their books came out without falter, because of course. The nature of these comics means that “death” can never be the point, but a plot.

³

Through the rest of the story, these deaths were used as a somewhat literal engine to propel the plot line forward. Darkness was used to fuel darkness. It was a whole thing.

In the end (warning, very mild spoilers for the story in this paragraph), this darkness was defeated through an acceptance of hope and positivity. Dick Grayson was instrumental in this happening, acting almost as a counter-engine to the darkness that had built. All of this features the bombastic layover that an event book requires, but at it’s heart, it was a simple story about being a force for good in the world, not just for others, but for yourself.

Which brings us to here. Nightwing #100. This book is a celebration of not only the current Nightwing run to date, but the new engine behind DC’s newest era. Entitled Dawn of DC, the rolling slate of new stories coming in 2023 is being built from a place of hope, and they’re using Dick Grayson, and this milestone issue as a foundation. Billed inside as the culmination of an arc, it is truly the start of something else entirely. It is a mission statement in all ways. On the surface level, it has the characters lay out what the future of the big DC superheroes looks like in a broad sense. The old ways allowed the darkness to exist, and thrive. Dick and his contemporaries were the ones who rallied enough to drive things back. That had to mean something, and it does.

On a deeper level, this is a book about being aspirational. It’s a book that rejects “rebuilding” for the idea of building better. DC’s marketing has made it no secret that part of this involves removing the Justice League as an idea for the time being. We all know that something like this won’t last forever, and the characters themselves acknowledge it too. There will always be a return - but in this case, the delay calls for building. It calls for action. It calls for a different way of thinking - one that many of the folks in story tie to Dick Grayson’s character - a character that Dick provides ample evidence for over the course of the story.

Outside of that, this is a book that is deeply reverent to its history. If you take a look at the artists listed above, you’ll see a who’s who of creators that are deeply tied to Dick’s journey over the years. It embraces this never-ending history, and presents us with something aspirational to look forward to while things come back around again.

This, is something special. This, is a beautiful thing. This, is how you build, and execute an event. This, is how you perform magic.

The Pitch | A lot of folks will be interested in all the corners DC is using their Dawn of DC status quo as a means to tidy up. I’ll be putting this into the hands of any fan of superhero comics that yearns for escape. While it does acknowledge how imperfect things are, it helps show us a road map on how we can approach the dark bits that seem insurmountable. It shows us something to aspire to. It shows us what heroes really look like. Anyone looking for a hero should grab this book, and retailers should be putting it in their hands.

---

Variant Edition presents The New Releases Show

Every Tuesday night at 8:10pm MST, my partner Danica and I go over the new comics and graphic novels that are coming out. This week, we showed everyone a video of me as a 12 year old doing a figure skating routine to the Spider-Man theme song. We used it as a bribe to help out a customer do accomplish a silly thing. It’s the kind of thing we do.

Anyway, you can find it somewhere in this video, or you can wait for Friday’s post here where I’ll have a video of the dang thing on its own.

That’s going to be it for me today, Wednesday waits for no one. Tune in here in a couple of days for our first Previously post, where we dig into times past and talk about retailer reaction to some older events.

1. This trick was done once more with Mark Waid and Charles Soule, with similar skill.

2. Featuring a who’s who of big bass melded with “The Great Darkness” itself.

3. Something equally well explored in the Hickman and post-Hickman eras of the X-Men books.