Spy Wanted; Must Have Experience With Death Traps: DC To Make Grayson A Secret Agent Comic

So DC Comics’s current Forever Evil event is famous for a few things, and not just for being an irritating “ending” to prior crossover Trinity War, for putting almost the entire stable of major DC superheroes off the playing field for about five straight months (except in those characters’ home titles, where they are wisely generally pretending that Forever Evil isn’t a thing that is happening), and for making even Marvel’s Fear Itself seem like a fully-baked idea.

Beyond those things, it is known for being the storyline where The Crime Syndicate exposes Dick Grayson’s identity as Nightwing to the world at large. Which has, since that even occurred in the first issue, begged the question as to how that event would be handled once the event ended (assuming it does. Considering Forever Evil spun right out of Trinity War, there is a part of me that thinks there might be another event spinning out of Forever Evil. With another event spinning out of that one. Ad infinitum. Keeping the Trinity of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman on the sidelines, and making Justice League into an anthology title where Geoff Johns can reintroduce whichever Silver Age second stringers he has a fancy for. But I digress). Would Grayson go back to being Nightwing, with perhaps an crossover appearance by Mephisto to make a deal for everyone to forget his identity?  Obtain some kind of neural backup to restore an earlier personality? Or one of the myriad other trick Marvel has somehow successfully used to retcon their terrible continuity mistakes?

Nah. They’re going full James Bond and making him a super secret agent.

Starting on July 2, DC will be publishing Grayson, a new comic written by Tim Seeley of Image’s Revival and Tom King (a former CIA Operations officer), which reimagines Dick Grayson as a uniformed superspy working for a secret government agency. He’ll wear a dark unitard with a shoulder harness, and be one eyepatch away from looking really, really familiar to Jim Steranko.

Ol’ Dick will be working for Spyral, the international spy agency introduced in Grant Morrison’s Batman Incorporated, and doing the kind of dirty work that usually requires one eye. Says co-writer King:

He’s doing something that’s going to cause pain to his friends and family, but he believes in the cause. That tension between having to do something good but having the cost of it being pain to his family, it drives him a little crazy…

He has to save the world, but he’s dealing with an organization that may go beyond his comfort zone.

From one point of view, this move makes a hell of a lot of sense. I have questioned from the start of Forever Evil how DC Editorial would handle the outing of Grayson’s secret identity (because God knows that if no one would let Dan DiDio kill Nightwing in Infinite Crisis, they wouldn’t let anyone do it when Warner Bros. is trying to figure out a Justice League movie), and dropping the character off the radar to do black ops is a good way to keep him a viable character and yet away from the Batman Family, so their identities remain a secret… although even the shittiest and most corrupt investigative reporter in the DC Universe would still be asking Bruce Wayne how he thought his former ward became a costumed hero every time Bruce left Stately Wayne Manor, but that’s beside the point.

The point is that there are two problems with this move, the first being that this means the official and final cancellation of Nightwing, which has been a pretty solid title since the New 52 reboot under Kyle Higgins’s pen (although it won’t be ending under his watch). And the second being that cover. Which shows Dick Grayson. With a gun.

Having Dick, Batman’s protege, carrying and pointing a gun, feels really counterintuitive to me. And while that kind of move would lead to the kind of tension with the Batman Family that King intimates in his quotes, he and Seeley had better present one hell of a good mission for Dick to motivate him to pack heat in opposition to everything he has been taught by Batman since 1940. Like, direct missions against Earth 3 and their evil versions of DC’s heroes or something, or maybe he’s hunting for whoever greenlit the “ending” of Trinity War. And even then, it’s gonna take some masterful writing to make me believe that a public doxing and a simple deathtrap would overturn years of training to make him pick up a gun. This is a guy who has been captured and tortured by the fucking Joker, for Christ’s sake; it’s gonna take a lot for me to believe that a few days with Johnny Quick are enough to make him pick up a gun… although to be fair, only six issues with the prick were enough to make me consider the same.

(via USA Today)