Nightwing Just Took on Comic Book Censorship (With a Twist)

Nightwing’s action is only ramping up with every issue. He’s battling a brand new set of enemies, including the otherworldly Zanni and his underling Oliva Pearce, who plan to recruit the Boy Wonder for their Cirque du Sin. While the protector of Bludhaven is busy dealing with an out of control Nite-Mite, Olivia’s tragic and villainous history is revealed, and not only is her origin painful to see, but it has ties to a real life organization that plagued comic books for decades. Nightwing’s newest comic takes shots at the Comics Code Authority, and shows the dangers and hypocrisy of that very type of censorship.

What Is the Comics Code Authority?

For those unaware, the CCA was an organization established to create guidelines to determine what subject matter was deemed too inappropriate to include in comic books aimed at a young audience. It was formed at the height of a moral panic in the United States after the release of Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent, a hack psychiatrist book that claimed that comic books were the cause of juvenile delinquency. Most infamously, this book claimed that Batman and Robin promoted supposedly illicit gay relationships, which terrified the masses into demanding censorship of comic books and even inspired several Senate hearings. The CCA was created as a private body instead of a government agency, and technically it was never illegal to ignore their guidelines, but most publishers refused to touch books that weren’t approved.

The Comics Code was a strict set of rules that focused mostly on preventing comics from depicting criminals or crime as sympathetic, sex or promiscuity in any form, drugs and their use, excessive violence or gore, and basically everything else that was deemed corrupting in the 1950s. These codes controlled comic books for years, with DC not officially throwing away the seal on their comics until 2011, although by that point their authority had long since withered to nothing.

The CCA Made Nightwing’s Newest Villain

In the 2025 Nightwing Annual, Bludhaven police commissioner Maggie Sawyer looked into the history of Spheric Solutions’ Olivia Pearce, finding that her entire history was fabricated. She looked into Olivia’s real past, discovering that her father was a lawyer that fought for the in-universe version of the CCA, specifically using the Gray Ghost and Wonder Boy comic, which was fashioned after Batman and Robin. Olivia was a massive fan of the comics and read them to escape the horrors of her abusive dad, but he considered them corrupting filth, and would punish her even more harshly for reading them. One night he caught her with an issue and tried to lock her in the basement, but she pushed him and accidentally killed her father. She ran, seeking refuge in the comic shop, only for the Zanni to appear to her and offer her a position in his Cirque du Sin.

The young Colombina kidnapped her favorite comic writer and forced him to join the Cirque, saying that they needed him to design the perfect death trap to kill Batman so they could recruit Robin. To her and the Zanni, superheroes are the natural evolution of the circus, pockets of insanity and impossibility that inspire and entertain, except that the overabundance of them has made them boring and ruined the circus. Superheroes became mainstream and stagnant, the exact opposite of the circus, which is supposed to embody change and breaking the status quo. 

Colombina clearly completely misunderstands her own love for superheroes, saying that it’s because of the perverse nature of watching them almost die and secretly hoping the next death trap will get them. This can obviously be attributed to the repression of her own upbringing, where the excitement and hope heroes are supposed to generate was labeled as evil and wrong, which influenced how she sees her love of them. This feeds into the inherent meta-narrative of this Nightwing run, calling out the hypocrisy of demanding purity while letting anger rule how you treat others. It’s a great callout, and is a very interesting motivation for Colombina, which only makes me more excited for when Nightwing inevitably comes into direct conflict with her and the Zanni. It’s the circus boy versus the god of the circus, and I am hyped.

Nightwing Annual 2025 is on sale now!

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