"Nightwing: Year One (Batman)"

WORTH CONSUMING!

When you’re 13, living in a circus, performing an act as a trapeze artist and one day you witness your parent’s harness break and they fall to the ground in a giant splat, I think society wouldn’t be disappointed if you came out with a little baggage. Heck, Danny Bonaduce had it all and it looks like he’s going to kill himself any day now on his reality TV show.

So when the life I described actually happened to young Master Richard Grayson, he didn’t eat the lemons life handed him, he made lemonade. A HOLY SOUR PUNCH lemonade.

DC Comics’ Nightwing: Year One is currently available at the Chapel Hill library and it is so worth checking it out. Drawn in the style of the 90’s cartoon Batman: The Animate Series, Year One is refreshing, familiar, and awesome. The story compacts several years worth of stories told in Batman, Detective Comics and the Young Teen Titans to recap Dick Grayson’s change from Boy Wonder to Man Wonder.

The early eighties is a part of the Batman mystique that I never really read. It looked to dark, was done in multiple part episodes and I swear, Two Face was on every cover. Yet from reading Nightwing: Year One, I was able to learn just how interesting this forgotten period in the history of the bat it was. Year One is a tale of a fall from stardom as Batman fires Robin, it’s a trial as Grayson finds his place I this world, and it’s a redemption as Grayson becomes his own man without the help from his family and friends.

Year One also focuses on one of Comics History more ignored characters, Robin II, Jason Todd. Voted dead by Comic collectors in the late 80’s, Todd’s Robin never really had a chance to become his own man. True, he was a punk, rude, and very arrogant. Yet someone must have liked him, because when they made Batman Forever, the Robin they used, was Jason Todd’s alter-ego, plain and simple. Even though he was called Dick Grayson in the movie, I don’t think Robin I would ever take the Batmobile out to score with hookers.

Bust them, sure. But never score! Holy double breasted comfort, Batman.