Tim Seeley On Putting Dick Grayson Back in Nightwing's Blue For

This week sees the release of Nightwing #2, the third installment of writer Tim Seeley's [...]

By Russ Burlingame

nightwing-2
(Photo: DC Entertainment)

This week sees the release of Nightwing #2, the third installment of writer Tim Seeley's reinvention of Dick Grayson in the post-Grayson, post-Rebirth status quo.

Dick is working undercover inside the Parliament of Owls, trying to pursue a relationship with Barbara Gordon, and training under a new "master," Raptor.

Seeley recently joined us to discuss the high concept of the series, what to expect from Dick's relationship with the Parliament of Owls, and more.

It seems like every time we talk, you're reinventing Dick again.

Seems to be what I do, reinvent the Dick Grayson. That's the ongoing thread.

While you're bringing Dick back to the costume and a lot of the traditional trappings of the character, it's still not 100% back to where it was before Forever Evil. What went into the decision to still have him be Grayson, Mark II, almost?

I definitely felt like a Gotham-based Dick Grayson as Nightwing...I had seen that sort of story enough times, and I felt like the reader, maybe, had to, and that there was more we could do with it.

If there's one thing I really learned from Grayson, it was the things that we added to the character that really worked. One of those was the idea that Dick grew up in a circus and he's not someone who is specifically tied to any city. He spent a lot of time in Gotham, obviously, and he has a lot of ties there, but he's not as Gotham-centric as Batman and never really was. Including in his new story that ability to run him around the world and have him have these globe hopping adventures was definitely something I wanted to carry over.

That doesn't mean that he won't settle into places or come back to Gotham, but it just seemed like it would be a waste not to use that aspect to continue to tell cool stories and scenarios with Dick.

I really liked what you guys did with Helena during the Grayson series. It was just one of those bits that, when I first saw the Rebirth stuff, and she was nowhere to be seen in promotional art, I was like, "man, I hope that character doesn't just fade back into oblivion because Grayson is over."

She is my favorite part that we put into Grayson, for sure. Having the ladies pick her up and use her in Birds of Prey and use that iteration of her, combined with the old school super hero idea is so cool. I think they're doing some awesome stuff with it.

It just seemed like it would be a waste not to use that relationship. It was interesting, there's a lot of tension to it. It was a different version of their relationship than what we had seen in the past years, and I thought, We'll definitely come back to that as one of Dick's allies slash frenemies slash love interest and mine that for more great story stuff.

As far as I know, I don't anybody who responded really badly to your take on that character. Is there a formula, do you think, that makes people more willing to accept change in some characters than others? Obviously, there have been some characters in the Post-Flashpoint DC Universe where, they were handled really well, but people just weren't having the change.

I think part of it is, before ... I don't know how other people approach this with stuff. It's such a weird job to be like ... I don't know what other industry one could possibly be like, Here, you're given this 50-75 year old character and you're to reinvent them, but you need make them likable to new fans and old fans. I don't know what other job has that parallel. One of the things I always do is, before I take on the job of reinventing a character, I sit down with bunch of the material and read through it. I really try to think about what is the most interesting and relevant parts of that character's history, and then what's the most interesting parts of their personality, and then put that through the filter of whatever new thing I'm going to hopefully add to it.

In her case, the coolest part about her was that she was this really ... She was one of the original bad-ass female characters. She was kind of dark, she was a vigilante and as hard edged as Batman, but a woman, in a time when that probably wasn't traditionally done. The original creators of that character did such a good job that I wanted to just slightly update that and put it into a new context. I think, if you do that, you keep the soul of the character there and really understand the context of the character in the larger world and in the DC Universe ... I think you do okay.

Obviously, the Court of Owls involvement I think leads to surrounding Dick with people who are more overtly evil, I guess, than ... During Grayson, there were these nefarious organizations, but not every person who was in the organization was bad. I feel like, with the Court of Owls it's much more traditionally ... It's like H.I.V.E. or Hydra or something like that. I almost feel like there's just nobody he's going to be surrounded with that you can trust and that you don't want to punch.

That's one thing we immediately play with in the story. I think issue 2 does a lot towards that. You're exactly right. Dick being in Spyral -- Spyral was basically a gray organization, and the story there was a guy who was traditionally very black and white and a very morally good guy placed in that situation. That was the whole story of Grayson.

The story of this new Nightwing run has to be different than that. This is a case of Dick having to take what he's learned from that experience and move it into a new scenario. Really, it's about his relationship with this new guy who, though he may not be the traditional that Dick has been taught by, a guy like Batman, that he may have something to teach.

That's, maybe, one of the possible symbolic meetings for the "Better than Batman" title, and that's one of the ways I think this story is different than Grayson. This is not about Dick navigating that organization and trying to fit in. We know Dick is not going to be cool with the Parliament of Owls, they're bad guys, so the story is not about that. We're going to see, obviously, that Dick wants to take them apart. It's how he does that or what he learns from that that becomes the story of this start of Nightwing.

Even as early as when you guys made the announcement for Nightwing, you were on that stage at the convention and just gleefully enjoying the inevitable cascade of boos from the title "Better than Batman." At what point in the development of this first story arc were you like, Yeah, that could be a fun thing to play with?

It was definitely early when we were trying to figure out a new ... Who would be this foil for Dick in our first arc. We wanted to make a bad guy for Dick Grayson that I hadn't seen done exactly before. The only other time I've seen this ... Obviously, he's been around for 75 years, so a lot of things have been done with the character. There was a relationship that he had with Deathstroke in some of the previous stories that I thought was interesting.

That's actually the parallel that I was going to draw next.

The idea that Deathstroke had something to offer him as a teacher, but that clearly Deathstroke was a bad guy was something I thought was really interesting. The idea was, how do we do that, but do a very different dynamic? Deathstroke came in as a Teen Titans character, and that he was...the level of morally gray that he was. He was this honorable assassin.

I wanted to do, with Raptor, is something different. It will hopefully pick up some of those beats and use what I thought was so interesting about that relationship but add a personal aspect to it and challenge the reader not to agree with some of the things that Raptor believes in. A lot of what he says, though it will totally fly in the face of the things that Batman teaches or believe in, will make a lot of sense.

Going off that last point, do you think that when you introduce a character like Raptor that it's really helpful to you to have it be an original character that you can develop fully? Obviously, when you bring in Helena, there's expectations there. With a character like Raptor, I feel like you can do stuff that you can't do with Deathstroke because there's baggage and expectations and all that kind of stuff that comes on the part of the audience.

Absolutely, that's part of the job, and maybe the toughest part of the job, is adding to the mythos with something valuable and with something that will last. You hope that that's something that you're able to do. The challenge of Raptor was, obviously, to figure out a lot of what's worked before, but to give the readers a satisfying story with something completely that we haven't seen before. I hope it worked.

I think what we came up with for his relationship to Dick and why he does what he does is pretty cool. I hope readers dig it as much as they liked his relationship with a character like Deathstroke in the past, or his relationship with Batman right now.

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