#nightwing 2002

[thenixkat]

While I do like Ted's late 90s/early 2000s cameos in the Batfam books they definitely aren't perfect.

My major complaints being

That absolutely asinine decision to randomly change Ted's given name from Theodore to Edward

The occasional fat joke

The absolutely nauseatingly overly stylized and overly dynamic art from that Nightwing issue

the absolute fuckery that same issue did with Fleeter and the Madmen cause Ted's rogues are not free from getting the 'we didn't bother researching' treatment

The thing about Ted getting negged back into heroing after he retired for good fucking reason by someone who clearly wants to get back onto the field herself and follows that mindset of 'if you can superhero you should, even if it will kill you' that's also shared by Fire and Booster Gold in the JLA comics that is just an awful fucking mentality

And then Ted disappearing off the face of the Earth more or less after it gets revealed that he has a disability that actively impedes him from being on the field. (A disability that Countdown and the current ongoing Blue Beetle run are absolutely ignoring/pretending don't exist)

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[thenixkat]

Do gotta say that I'm not happy with the uses of Ted's rogues, the Madmen outside of his comics. Like writers refuse to let them just be normal dudes with a gimmick who's entire thing is that they're just a hired distraction.

They wear grease paint and bright clothes and do wacky annoying acrobatic shit to keep attention on them while the people who hired them can commit crimes in peace. They aren't comicbook land 'crazy' people or anything like the Joker or the Creeper.

They're literally just some guys doing shit for a paycheck. They don't have powers either, they don't need them because their thing is jumping people. They're literally just street-level thugs that jump people and are distracting on purpose.

And like in their normal stomping grounds, the only superheroes they really encounter are two largely solitary nonpowered guys. They don't need anything else.

Nightwing 2002 decided that Fleeter has mind control powers and that the Madmen follow him b/c he makes them. Which is just a shitty interpretation. B/c clearly no one would join a gang unless they were being forced to. And it totally doesn't make our heroes look like terrible people having them beat up people being blatantly mind controlled and begging for help.

And also I have to assume they gave Fleeter the mind control powers to 'justify' him being held at The Slab (a prison that is blatantly a crime against humanity that keeps people convicted of crimes in suspended animation for their whole sentence as far as I was able to gather) so he could be Jokerized. To have the story in the first place. B/c clearly there's no other reason to have some of Ted's villains show up elsewhere. It's not like anyone could have done something with folks mistaking The Madmen for Jokerized fuckers when they were literally just doing their normal thing.

And then we get the DCAU, Justice League cartoon tie-in comics where the Madmen show up renamed to the Madniks. Which I will say that the Madniks is a cuter name than the Madmen. But they've been turned into 'crazy' people wereclowns ala the DCAU version of the Creeper in practice instead of just being some dudes.

And even more disrespectfully, the comic insists that Ted, who'd been handling them for years, doesn't know how to track them down and can't handle them. Which is why Batman has to team up with the Creeper to stop the Madniks. Heavens forbid Ted be allowed to do shit in a team book and there's other heroes available.