As speculated earlier in a comparison of the last few years’ plot developments in DC’s Batman and Marvel’s Captain America, both are on a similar trajectory, not for any sinister reasons particularly, but just because you’re dealing with a set of archetypes who’ve found themselves locked into similar situations.
Both books look to be returning their best known characters to the title role, because with movies, cartoons, action figures, Heroclix, movies, and especially movies, there’s simply too much at stake to not have Bruce Wayne be Batman and Steve Rogers be Captain America.
What this means for current Captain America, James ‘Bucky’ Barnes, is a spell in a Russian gulag, but the fate awaiting Dick ‘Robin’ Grayson, currently sharing the pointy ears with the returned Bruce, was less certain, other than assuming he’d be following suit judging from the increasing levels of disrespect he’s facing in the Bat-books currently – suddenly shown to be relentlessly screwing up to the point where even third Robin, and current Red Robin is able to score self-worth points off him.
Still confirmed in the solicits as Batman right up until August, the current Flash metaplot which is providing a fair bit of status-quo shaking via by the time-travelling, timeline disrupting anti-Flash that is Professor Zoom (this year’s Superboy punching walls in reality plot device) looks as though it’s sliding the Bat-editors a convenient excuse to bump Grayson right back to his previous incarnation as Nightwing.
The evidence for this? Aside from a hunch, the cover of Flashpoint: Deadman And The Flying Graysons suggests that Zoom will be monkeying around with the shared history of the two deathly and death-defying aerialists, no doubt resulting in a bold new world where everything is exactly as it was six years ago and Dick Grayson is cheated out of any real progression, and his brief run of brilliance in Grant Morrison’s Batman & Robin counts for nothing.
Still, Cliff Chiang’s art is gorgeous at least.
