Just a reminder that DC DOESN’T know how to handle Dick Grayson, and I don’t just mean this. When they started aging their characters in the 80s and 90s, they forgot that the previous generation, your Superman and Batman and the like, technically have to age, too. However, with age comes all the downsides of aging, particularly for a character like Batman. And let’s face it - Batman is DC’s biggest cash cow and they can’t REALLY make him age that much. Batman Beyond is an outlier and kept its actual future year ambiguous.
And since companies like DC want to keep things forever in a bubble of time, with the characters starting “only about 5-10 years ago,” you have this situation with Dick Grayson’s generation, which has aged into adulthood 20-30 years old. DC doesn’t want them around to remind people that their characters are older than they should be, but they’re also extremely popular characters in their own right. That’s one of the reasons we have big retcon events to try to reset the universe, but ultimately infighting and creative changes make that impossible. If Flashpoint had actually done what it was SUPPOSED to do, reset the universe for a potential new audience, Dick Grayson would have been a kid again. There would be no Tim Drake and no Jason Todd, no Cassandra Cain and no Stephanie Brown. It would be Batman and Robin, Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson, period.
But DC is terrified of pissing off their long-time customers, too. The ones who have invested DECADES into this industry and the ongoing storylines. If their gambit to get new readers failed, they would have needed the long-time readers even more… except they would have already pissed off the long-term readers by resetting everything and lost all the character development that had come before.
And so DC reset a lot… but not enough. Suddenly characters who have known each other for years are meeting for the first time. Suddenly we’re seeing characterizations change and go in different directions, changing little details here and there but not fixing the overall picture, so instead the relationships feel OFF, inconsistencies abound, and they’re struggling even MORE now to figure out what to DO with certain characters. And the stuff with Dick Grayson isn’t a recent phenomenon, either. In 2004, Dan Didio wanted to kill off Dick Grayson - not because he was unpopular or because it would be a big shock moment… but because he felt they didn’t know what to DO with him and other characters of his generation of heroes. Wiser heads prevailed in talking him out of this, but the problem remained for them, especially when SPECIFIC high-profile, popular creators end up dictating how things will progress for the ENTIRE LINE. Geoff Johns was that creator for a long time (might still be for all I know), with Grant Morrison a close second who still ended up dictating quite a bit for the Batman line with the Batman, Inc. stuff and Bruce Wayne’s son. I fear Scott Snyder will end up being the same. And that’s not because any of these people are untalented - far from it, they didn’t become popular for no good reason, but because they each have their own singular vision for how some of these characters work but probably are best kept away from other characters, THEIR direction dictates how things work FOR THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE, creating additional problems on top of the ones we already have.
And so you have super-secret-agent Dick Grayson wielding massive gun who is supposed to be pretending to be dead but not really to work for a super-secret-spy organization no one’s heard of until now because of reasons that may or may not be evil (I don’t know, I don’t read Grayson so what’s going on with SPYRAL or whatever it’s called is unknown to me). And that’s why you have an event comic like Convergence - because the creative people have figured out that they’ve screwed up, but don’t know how to fix the entire line without a complete and total reset (which in their minds would be giving up), so the declaration of, “The multiverse is back, we’ll tell whatever stories we want, damn the continuity” is their attempt at just trying to tell good stories in spite of everything, because there’s nothing else they feel they CAN do.
Add on top of that brand issues with Warner Bros., who don’t give a damn about the comic books except as Intellectual Property machines for their movies and TV shows and merchandising thereof - where the REAL money comes from and not the funny books - and you’ve got a company that’s directionless, having creative tumult, and consistent problems with tone and storytelling.
And sadly, the way to fix this is the way they never will because of that aforementioned branding issue with Warner Bros.: kill Bruce Wayne. Superman is an alien and can live forever. Wonder Woman is a magical immortal woman. But Bruce is a mortal man and his story has been told before enough times. And it’s not like they’ll stop making Batman stories with him as Bruce either in comics or TV shows - to the general public, he IS Batman unless you make a new show where that changes, hence Batman Beyond. But really, the trick to this, as I see it, is Doctor Who. The Doctor is technically the same guy for 50 years, but he’s been played by over a dozen people. Branding on him is still the Doctor regardless of who plays him. The same goes for James Bond. Tell people Dick Grayson is Batman (which they did, not only when Grant Morrison killed Batman briefly, and it actually was a really good story) and be determined to stick with it. Death of Superman was never meant to stick - it was about telling the story of a world without Superman - he was always going to come back, but actually STICK TO THE IDEA for ten years or more. How do I know this will work for DC? Because Kyle Rayner and Wally West. Regardless of how you feel about the way Hal Hordan and Barry Allen met their ends in the comics, one of DC’s biggest strengths (and one of the things they seemed determined to get rid of in the Flashpoint reboot), is their legacy characters. Symbology, mythology, iconography - in JLA, Huntress once said she trusted Steel because he wore the Superman “S.” Bruce Wayne is not Batman - Batman is Batman and Bruce Wayne is a disguise he puts on. The bat is bigger than Bruce Wayne, more important than him individually.
DC’s strength has always been in how big these symbols are - the mask is more important than the person behind it, because when they wear that mask, they become that person and live up to the ideals put forth by it.
The end point of this being: if you’re not going to have the balls to just reset the continuity like other franchises and give things a proper fresh start… then you need to have the balls to move forward and keep moving forward, because otherwise you’ve got Secret Agent Dick Grayson wielding a huge, impractical gun instead of swinging around as his own superhero like his character SHOULD be.
