karanguni: (BATMAN and NIGHTWING)
K ([personal profile] karanguni) wrote2008-08-11 11:38 pm

So, about Batman and Nightwing.

Hello, flist. I am here to pimp out Batman - the Batfamily, more specificaly, from comicsverse. Do not worry. There is no required reading. The prerequisites? An enjoyment for good character dynamics. The ability to feel your heart break at the sheer amount of loyalty - and obsession - that can come with creating (and keeping) a family together that isn't bound by blood. An appreciation for those who are willing to die for what they believe in - and, more than that, those who are willing to live for what they believe in. A thought for the ones who push people they love away because they care. And a moment for those who take the time to remember the important things in life, and the challenges that come with those things.

Batman, alone in his cave, once took the time to sit down and talk about himself in third person, asking the question, what motivates the Bat?

Of Dick Grayson - the first Robin, the Robin who was fired (or quit), the Robin who went away demanding independence and came back independent as the vigilante Nightwing, the ward who became a son who became an almost-equal; of Dick Grayson, the man that Bruce Wayne has arguably hurt more than any of his other partners; of Dick Grayson, who took the hurt and ran with it, and who would die for Bruce as much as Bruce would live for him, Batman writes:

"As well as I profess to know the Batman, even I can't be sure what he was thinking when he agreed to assume legal custody for the orphaned boy who would be the first Robin.

I can tell you this about the boy: he was fearless. He was effusive. And he was full of grace."


The rest of the things are better said in images:



Click for big! And big is good!

Background: some evil dude gets too close to discovering the Secret Identity of the Batman. Naturally, Bruce throws him off by a) having Batman get exploded in a huge car accident while Dick and Tim (Robin) watched and b) having Bruce Wayne come back with no apparent memory of the Batman at all. Dick and Tim and Alfred spend some quality Batfamily time freaking out before they discover that Bruce intentionally hypontised himself to make himself forget that he was Batman for as long as the evil dude was around. Niiiiice.

While panicking, they find some files in the Cave:



Afterwards, when Bruce Gets Better (TM):





Also, prerequisite Dick Is The Best Older Robin Brother Ever moment:



Oh, and you know. Bruce kind of adopts Dick (aged, what, 24). And Dick, naturally, says things like:




So... anyone want scans? *GRINS*

[identity profile] guingel.livejournal.com 2008-08-12 06:22 pm (UTC)(link)
Last scan isn't working for me. :(

I actually don't read the Batman titles themselves - before 52 and Infinite Crisis and Geoff Johns taking over everything, I read basically everything else Batfamily - Birds of Prey, Robin, Nightwing, Batgirl, Catwoman (btw, the first few TPBs of both of those titles are highly, highly, highly recommended. Especially Catwoman because Darwyn Cooke worked on it and I want to have his comic book babies).

Anyway, yes. Almost never read the Batman titles. But I do love when Tim and Dick get to work with each other, or when either of them gets to work with Clark. :D

It's actually really funny to see someone pimping the batfamily relationships. It's like ". . . of course!" One of the things I love about comics is the complication and depth that the relationships get - even if the histories become contradictory. XD

[identity profile] karanguni.livejournal.com 2008-08-12 10:42 pm (UTC)(link)
*laughs* And I've read most of the stuff post-Crisis, now! Crisis itself still confuses the hell outta me - but I've more or less burned through Nightwing #100 through to the current issue - which is really, really kinda adorable. Tim and Dick, fighting crime like brothers whenever Dick visits! Bruce and Dick, actually sort-of-kind-of talking to each other! Clark, randomly appearing for No Good Reason!

[identity profile] guingel.livejournal.com 2008-08-13 03:37 am (UTC)(link)
Crisis itself makes me sad, but I'm glad they did it. Even though I still totally don't follow what actually happened and what's changed. It would seem that every 20-30 years, they need to sort of revive their canon, you know? DC started in around 1930, and by the 50s, Julius Schwartz came along and invented the Silver Age versions of all the heroes. Then, by 1985, they did the first Crisis and cleaned everything up. And now, 30 years later, we've got another. So I'm glad that it'll leave a new place to start. I'm just not glad that, last I heard, the person in charge of recreating the DCU was Geoff Johns, whose work I uniformly dislike. (Although I heard Mark Waid was also part of it - you won't have come across him probably because he writes Flash family comics - and in the case of the Flash they are actually family, some of them - and is one of my all-time favorite comic book authors.)

Who's writing and drawing Nightwing these days? Maybe I'll try to pick it up. :D Nightwing isn't playing personal sabotage anymore? . . . Is Babs around??

[identity profile] karanguni.livejournal.com 2008-08-13 06:18 am (UTC)(link)
Reinventing canon is lots of fun, but I guess it leaves writers and readers traumatised for a little bit after that. 8D For now, I really like what's happening before Batman RIP (which I don't think I'm going to read, um, for a long, long, looooong while.)

Whole bunch of awesome people - I think Peter J Tomasi is doing the current run! But I love love love Dixon's work to death, and Devin Grayson.

[identity profile] guingel.livejournal.com 2008-08-13 03:37 am (UTC)(link)
PS Last scan still not working!! :( Is it just me?

[identity profile] karanguni.livejournal.com 2008-08-13 06:16 am (UTC)(link)
I have no idea, it works okay with me! *goes to create a zip file of that entire cbr, which is awesome and deserves to be shared, anyway*

[identity profile] karanguni.livejournal.com 2008-08-13 05:08 pm (UTC)(link)
Nightwing 142 (http://andmoreslow.net/kicons/nightwing142.cbr) and Nightwing 143 (http://andmoreslow.net/kicons/nightwing142.cbr), in .cbr format so that you can open it easily with any comic displayer reader thing (go get CDisplay off the interwebs if you don't have it already! Makes reading comics gorgeous!) -- alternatively, if you don't want to, you can just rename them to .rar or .zip and they should work as usual. :D

Seriously Batfamily is so damned adorable in these ahhhhhhh. Tim! And Dick! Bestest brothers ever!

This icon now undergoing severe abuse.

[identity profile] karanguni.livejournal.com 2008-08-13 05:11 pm (UTC)(link)
Oh snap; I realise, after looking at the entry code, that it's the last scan and not the 4th scan that you couldn't see - I typed in the image name wrongly! All fixed now - and it doesn't come from 142/143, but, um, those are shiny anyway? 8D For hyper!Tim who is not-totally-depressed-after-his-life-went-to-hell?