If you only know Batman and Robin from the movies, get ready for what you’re about to read, because there’s a lot to explain to get to what just happened in the American comics. To understand something that happened in 2023, we’ll have to make several stops along the way. More specifically in 1940, 1984 and 2016. Fasten your seat belts, because you are about to see the moment when, 83 years later, the pupil surpassed the master.
Holy bat-travel!
April 1940. Batman was already a success in the pages of ‘Detective Comics’, but, in addition, he was about to receive a golden secondary, a child who would help him fight crime. His name, Dick Grayson, a circus acrobat whose parents are killed in a performance and who is saved by the Masked Crusader at the last moment. He takes him in as his ward, gives him a rather tacky costume even for the time and names him Robin, The Boy Wonder. They would get along wonderfully… for almost 43 years.
July 1984. Dick Grayson, a member of the Teen Titans, stops being Batman’s sidekick and adopts a name he heard on Krypton a few years earlier: Nightwing. For his part, Batman would adopt a new Robin, Jason Todd, whose fate would be placed in the hands of the readers five years later. They decided to let him die… But that’s another story that would go down in comic book infamy.
May 2016. During the events of ‘Darkseid’s War’, Batman gets the powers of the New God of Knowledge by sitting in Mobius’ chair, which gives omniscience to anyone who tastes its power. Although he claims he’s fine and can quit whenever he wants, the truth is that the power ends up eating away at him and he refuses to get up, stubborn, until Green Lantern puts a ring on him and he manages to have enough willpower to accept that he can stop being a god. If not even Batman could resist, then who could?
And we come to what just happened in issue 104 of ‘Nightwing’. The demon Neron gives the powers of a god to Dick Grayson to try to corrupt him and thus take the soul of Olivia Desmond, a girl that the former Robin has sworn to protect (and the daughter of his archenemy, but that’s another matter). If he has godlike powers he will be able to save more people, and in exchange for only the soul of a little girl: Batman, as we have seen, would have agreed in an instant. “Not gonna happen,” Nightwing replies with a smile, showing that even the greatest temptation can’t keep him from his duty… And the final example of him finally overcoming his master eight decades later. Holy emotional bat-moments!
