In Defense of Devin Grayson: On Nightwing and Recovery
The most important comic for understanding Devin Grayson’s run on Nightwing was not published by DC Comics.
Trigger Warning: Breakfast was published online by The Nib in 2014. It details the writer’s experience with rape and how the breakfast she made the next day became a trigger for her. It’s a short read — maybe two to five minutes. You can go read it right now. I’ll wait.
Devin Grayson’s run on Nightwing began in 2002 with the 71st issue. During her four year run she built on the foundation laid by Chuck Dixon in writing Nightwing as a serialized story, finishing plotlines begun by Dixon and working them into her own. Most famous is Nightwing #93, published halfway through her run, the culmination of a story building since Devin Grayson took over the book. During a climactic fight, the villain Blockbuster taunts Nightwing (Dick Grayson), saying that he will continue destroying Nightwing’s life, killing anybody and everybody Nightwing holds dear — everybody under his protection, from his grandfather to the stranger standing next to him on the street. The vigilante Tarantula (Catalina Flores) appears, aiming her pistol. Nightwing steps aside, allowing Tarantula to kill Blockbuster. In his shock, Tarantula rapes Nightwing. On the last page the words of Blockbuster’s monologue echo through the narration, overlapping with Tarantula’s attempts at comfort.
Nightwing #93 has been controversial since its publication, and that controversy has made it the most famous issue of the series. It appears on “never read” lists of books for new Batman fans to avoid. Despite its relatively young age in the comic world, it sells for more than $90 on sites like Ebay. It has been accused of being regrettable and disrespectful, and of using sexual assault for shock value. It has never been reprinted.
But the conversation about Nightwing’s rape is centered around Nightwing #93 — one issue in a much longer serialized story. The primary discussion around the story would have you believe that the rape went unacknowledged and unexamined. Reading the next arcs of Nightwing, I can’t help but wonder if such fans read the same comic I did, or if they can only acknowledge trauma when dealt with by tired narratives of the good victim or vengeful survivor.
In Nightwing #94, Nightwing vomits in a stairwell as Tarantula gets dressed. In the same issue he monologues on auditory processing. “If I’d said “Stop,” we would have heard it. Heard and processed it along with the gunshot, simultaneously. “Bang”… “Don’t do it Tarantula, stop!”… Bang… Stop!… Bang…” When these scenes are acknowledged by fans at all, they are treated as traumatic responses not to rape, but to Blockbuster’s death. But reality is not so clear cut. Brains often wrap trauma up with peripheral details, things around the trauma rather than the violation itself. For the author of Trigger Warning: Breakfast, it was fried eggs. For me it was the pet names my ex used for me.
Nightwing has seen and condoned death before. In Joker: Last Laugh #6, Nightwing is only stopped from killing the Joker by the interference of Batman tending to the Joker’s injuries. In 1983’s New Teen Titans Annual #2 Dick Grayson, then Robin, declines to turn in Vigilante for killing the mobster Anthony Scarapelli in a story that parallels Blockbuster’s death. In all three of these stories, death is a last resort, used only against villains with enough power to avoid criminal indictment or a particular skill for escaping containment. But only in Nightwing does the death become a trauma trigger.
Pulling back to look at the larger arc of Nightwing reveals a much stronger reaction. After his rape, Nightwing goes on what can best be described as a downward spiral. Nightwing issues #96–99 are devoted to the Batman crossover event “War Games” before Nightwing turns Tarantula and himself in for murder in Nightwing #100. After his police contact refuses to allow him to go to prison, Dick Grayson gives up the mantle of Nightwing in favor of working first as a mob enforcer and then with his long-time villain Deathstroke as a mercenary. His deal with Deathstroke is simple: Dick Grayson will train Deathstroke’s daughter Ravager and refrain from turning her against Deathstroke. In exchange, Deathstroke will protect Blüdhaven, keeping the Society of Super-Villains from attacking the city.
Due to editorial mandate, the deal fails. In the DC-wide event “Infinite Crisis” Deathstroke and the Society of Super-Villains destroy Blüdhaven. Devin Grayson’s final issue sees Nightwing returning and reuniting with Batman, who says that Nightwing has been passively suicidal since Blockbuster died. After roughly 20 issues of Dick endlessly throwing himself into bullets and a failed attempt at leaving his city to another cape, I have to ask — was Dick Grayson planning on killing himself?
Though the text only directly focuses on Dick’s guilt surrounding Blockbuster’s death, the events of the entire arc remain an unspoken, ever present shadow hanging over him. In Nightwing #108, Dick haltingly attempts to describe his recent past, including “this other thing with this other girl”. In the end he falters, concluding “It was not a good month.”
This faltering acknowledgment that dances around the actual trauma is an extremely common experience among men. Among the general population, estimates on the numbers of men who have experienced sexual assault or intimate partner violence hover around 1 in 4 to 1 in 6, with similar numbers for domestic abuse. These rates rise based on factors like ableism and queerphobia — one study found that 51% of trans men have experienced sexual assault. But the shame of emasculation is heavy. A 2015 study among members of the US military found that only 13% of male victims reported their sexual assault compared to 39% of women. In 2021, these numbers had grown worse, with only 10% of male and 29% of female victims reporting their assaults. Though superheroes don’t exist, we can extrapolate that their data may be similar to that of the military. A superhero, much like a soldier, is the ultimate picture of American masculinity — strong, selfless, and independent. The kind of man who doesn’t ask for help. The kind of man who isn’t weak. The kind of man for whom being a victim would be an enormous badge of shame.
In order to admit to himself and others that he has been sexually assaulted, a man must overcome an entire lifetime’s worth of societal messaging about his gender. When assaulted by a woman, as in Nightwing’s case, these problems of shame and recognition are compounded. Victims of female perpetrators are often seen as “lucky”, and their trauma is brushed aside due to the prevailing belief that women cannot be perpetrators. This perception is so ingrained in our societal ideas of gender that many men have difficulty even realizing that what they have experienced was sexual assault.
Comic books are not absolved from this messaging. The 1995–1996 publishing year for Superboy alone saw its 16-year-old titular character groped, stripped, or kissed by adult women no less than five times. Dick Grayson’s 2014 solo series Grayson has been criticized for its casual handling of female-on-male sexual harassment. But for every comic that is criticized, another receives a pass. While Devin Grayson remains controversial for her handling of a single instance of rape in her work, Marv Wolfman’s work with Nightwing and the Teen Titans remains largely unexamined — despite his work showing a troubling pattern of sexual assault as a plot device. In the Titans storyline “Total Chaos” and its lead up, the character Mirage (Miriam Delgado) disguises herself as Nightwing’s long-term lover, Starfire, and rapes him by deception. This was the latest in a long string of questionable choices made in Marv Wolfman’s work with the Titans beginning with a scene in New Teen Titans #2 where Starfire kisses Robin despite “protest” and including Starfire’s own history as a sex slave and the hero Raven casting a love spell on Kid Flash shortly after her debut. Most famously, Marv Wolfman penned “The Judas Contract”, a victim blaming storyline involving the statutory rape of the character Terra — a character whose predator Deathstroke has since gone on to lead 5 ongoing comics of his own.
16 years after “Total Chaos” Marv Wolfman wrote Nightwing being sexually assaulted again, this time in the Nightwing solo series. In Nightwing #133, Wolfman introduced Liu, an adult con artist who groomed and coercively raped a teenaged Dick Grayson in order to steal from Wayne Enterprises. After Marv Wolfman’s departure from the book four issues later and her death in Vigilante, Liu is never mentioned again in Nightwing.
In addition to the long term consequences, the two stories are framed differently. Marv Wolfman and the artists, Jamal Igle and Jon Bosco as pencillers, Keith Champagne as inker, and Edgar Delgado as colorist, use flashbacks to romantic moments between Dick and Liu, done in soft colors and threaded through the rest of the story. The internal narration frequently reminds the reader of Dick’s relationships with Starfire and Oracle and implies that the reason those relationships failed is because he is still in love with Liu. Nowhere is it suggested that this relationship may have been problematic beyond the normal problems that arise from hero/villain entanglements.
Grayson’s portrayal of Tarantula and Nightwing’s relationship, drawn by Patrick Zircher and Mike Lilly, inked by Andy Owens, and colored by Gregory Wright, takes a starkly different approach. The pages are heavily shaded, colored almost exclusively in harsh oranges and cold blues. The rape itself is drawn only in silhouette. Elsewhere Nightwing and Tarantula are mostly framed singularly, rarely kissing or interacting with any real softness. When they do, their opposing color schemes draw attention to them as opposites, not as any kind of unit working together. The actual portrayal of their relationship — the rape, and Tarantula’s manipulation of Nightwing afterwards — is clustered together, separated from the aftermath, emphasized in the moment but not directly shown when it’s done. Where Liu’s relationship with Dick is softened and romanticized, her wrongdoings held at arm’s length, Tarantula’s are not. Devin Grayson and her artists are unflinching in their portrayal of rape and abuse, and place equal emphasis on the trauma that comes with it.
It is also worth discussing the treatment that Liu and Tarantula — both women of color — receive as overall characters. Catalina is introduced 22 issues prior to her rape of Nightwing. While her use of Spanish pet names and slang is objectionable (if sadly common in comics at the time), she is specified as a Mexican-American woman born and raised in Blüdhaven. She is given goals, family, and more roles than Dick’s abuser, existing as both a foil and briefly a partner as well as an adversary. Catalina’s background and social class are used not to exotify her, but to give her a place as a representation of the average citizen of Blüdhaven, and portray a potential image of a local Blüdhaven hero.
From the moment Liu appears on the page she exists as an old flame who broke Dick Grayson’s heart. She is given only one name, a Chinese surname, and met Eddie Hwang, her con artist partner with a Korean surname, in Tibet. The question of which of these cultures is most relevant to her is never answered; instead, Marv Wolfman spends several pages reminding us that Liu smells like jasmine. The exotic imagery of her jasmine scent and her association with multiple Asian countries without specification push Liu into the realm of a pan-Asian Dragon Lady — the scheming, manipulative, and sexually domineering Asian woman on the page for white male consumption.
These differences grow more pronounced when considering Devin Grayson’s and Marv Wolfman’s portrayals of Dick Grayson. In Nightwing Annual #1, Devin Grayson specified Dick Grayson’s ethnicity as Kalderash Romani, a diasporic group out of India. This fact has largely been ignored by other writers, with the exception of Tim Seeley in the 2010s. But during Devin Grayson’s run, Nightwing’s heritage was often at the forefront of his struggles and identity. Gregory Wright, the colorist for her run, colored Dick Grayson’s skin with a brown extremely similar to the brown used for Catalina’s. In this way, the racial dynamic of a woman of color preying upon a white man disappears — in this, if nothing else, Catalina and Dick are equals. Marv Wolfman wrote Dick Grayson as white during his work in New Titans prior to Devin Grayson writing the character, and this carries over in his work on Nightwing. The Brazilian Mirage was drawn with darker skin than Nightwing, and Liu’s name and artwork distinctly exotify her in comparison to Dick Grayson, drawn, colored, and written as a white man.
Tarantula, Mirage, and Liu have all been used differently in comics since they raped Dick Grayson. Mirage joined the Titans and became a semi-permanent fixture in New Titans until its run ended 5 years later. Liu vanished, having existed only as a plot device. Tarantula remained a neutral-to-evil vigilante, appearing sporadically in Batman related books and once in Secret Six. In 2015, Green Arrow attempted to revive her as a good-aligned ally and love interest for its titular character, but she only appeared in one arc. In this past summer’s Harley Quinn animated series, a reference to Tarantula was cut from the audio track, though left in the subtitles. “I thought I could cape crusade on my own,” a traumatized Nightwing says during a panic attack, “but I let Tarantula kill Blockbuster”. In the audio, Tarantula has been replaced with Vigilante — the male anti-hero who killed Scarapelli in New Teen Titans. Though the line was likely changed as the implicit reference rape was considered tasteless in what’s meant to be a humorous moment, the scene still treats male trauma and emotional expression as a whole as a joke.
Almost immediately, Screenrant published an article discussing the change, referring to the arc as “Nightwing’s worst comic story”, and claiming that Harley Quinn “treats the subject of Dick Grayson’s trauma with far more respect and delicacy than the original comics.”
When a friend sent the article to me for fact-checking, I saw red. Though Nightwing lacks a full recovery arc, the crash portrayed in it is real and raw. Indeed, Grayson has since stated that she intended to return to Dick’s sexual assault and complete his recovery. It was her sudden departure from Nightwing and DC Comics as a whole that prevented this. Though Bruce Jones’ brief run on Nightwing made attempts at grasping the trauma of being a superhero, for the most part Nightwing after “Infinite Crisis” shared the failings of Harley Quinn: The blatant erasure of trauma and male victims of sexual assault. This erasure is far more regrettable than any story about the recklessness and depression that follows it could ever be. The use of sexual assault as a plot device by writers like Marv Wolfman is far more disrespectful than the tying of abuse to another trauma.
Rarely if ever are Mirage and Liu discussed. When Mirage is discussed, it is almost always in conjunction with Tarantula. It has been 16 years since Devin Grayson left Nightwing, but the controversy has not died, despite Devin Grayson apologizing for the arc multiple times. In an interview for the 2015 book Dick Grayson, Boy Wonder she said, “I didn’t understand at the time that you can’t use rape metaphorically; the reality of rape and sexual assault has too much immediate meaning for too many people. And ironically, I think it was my own experience with sexual abuse that numbed me to that.”
I return again to Trigger Warning: Breakfast. “I am a bad victim,” the author wrote. “I am a bad story. But non fiction doesn’t care for neat narrative structure.”
This is the truth about trauma: it is not neat. It is not clean. It is messy and nonlinear. Nothing in life is a straight line from one end to the next. There are stories beyond the tearful victim of Law and Order and the vengeful survivor of Kill Bill.
This is the truth about trauma: when I was 17 years old, I was groomed into a relationship with a woman in her mid 20s. When we finally broke up after two years I set aside my trauma to look after my family. Now, almost four years later, I have still barely even begun to unpack my experiences. My family still doesn’t know. It took me a year and a half to admit it to anyone, sobbing drunk in my best friend’s arms on my 21st birthday. Nightwing by Devin Grayson was a revelation.
I am not a superhero, but I see myself in Nightwing and his traumas. Like Nightwing, I set aside my pain for my responsibility, and nobody saw it. When you strip away the spandex, the super-strength, and the world-class acrobatics, Devin Grayson’s Nightwing is the story of a man who falls into despair because of his selfless loyalty to responsibility and his inability to ask for help. In a world telling me to be selfless, to be responsible, to be unemotional, to never ask for help, Nightwing took me by the hand and said, it’s okay to fall. It’s okay if getting back up takes time.
There is no triumphant victory for Nightwing, no bloody revenge or grand return. A year and a half after he is raped he puts on his suit and goes to work doing what he needs to. As real recovery is, his recovery is a quiet whisper and a slow, agonizing climb.
I put my pen to paper, and start the climb.
