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Day 13,282 of Dick being the #1 Helena defender.

The more I proceed on my Nightwing-and-Huntress-are-The-Boys™️ crusade, the more I feel my sanity slip.

And yet I cannot give in.

Thus do I trudge, listless, friendless, alone, on a mission which only I can undertake and whose merit only my own unraveling psyche can acknowledge.

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Dick and Roy being each others’ wholesome hype men is my shit. They are The Boys.

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My dream is to post so consistently and so obnoxiously that one day a Nightwing writer accidentally stumbles upon one of my posts that’s just me spamming “WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK OH MY GOD AGHGHHHHHHH” with blurry ass pictures of comic panels.

I hope they quit out of horror of what they’ve created.

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Dan Watters Nightwing is the funniest shithead and I love him.

All the “holy _______” moments were iconic.

And bro is so mean to criminals 😭

Like, I would cry of embarrassment if someone said this to me.

He’s so unimpressed by you and your shit. It’s amazing. He’s still in his 20s and he’s already been at it too long. Brother needs to retire.

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I’ve said it a million times and I’ll die on this hill, but it wouldn’t be even a percent as bad if someone just acknowledged how frequently it happened and how off-putting it was.

I need one person in canon to say “ew guys can we chill with the comments?” or Dick to, for once, be able to say “hey man I’m uncomfortable with this”.

It’s not just that he’s constantly sexualized. That’s one thing, but in the right circumstances that can be a great avenue for serious character exploration or something. Or if it was done less, jokes like this would be able to hit without all the baggage of every other time Dick has had a similar experience . To be frank, I did find this fucking hilarious, but it also had this pervasive underlying gross factor because of just how many times it’s happened and just how normal it is to everyone. Kinda like all the sexual humor in the Grayson comics. In isolation this panel is great, and I still find a lot of humor in it, but it’s ruined a little by alllll the unaddressed similar circumstances of the past.

Even worse than being uncomfortable, it ruins the joke.

It’s the fact that we’re kind of expected to treat this as… a natural consequence of being Nightwing? And not, y’know, untoward behavior on other peoples’ end? Like he’s not allowed to vocalize discomfort over it in a serious manner? It almost frames it like it’s his fault.

Idk. Again, I’m being repetitive as shit, but it means a lot to me.

WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK

If I had a nickel for every time a writer sexualized Dick to this degree of discomfort… I’d have way too many nickels. Put the nickels down.

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No honestly. Bro can critique hallucinations like a wine connoisseur at a vineyard.

Bro has gone down this path too many times before. He already knows, and is neither impressed nor amused.

Like do you know how many hallucinations you have to have to feel confident in giving one a 1.5-star Yelp Review?

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Iirc it was all the “___ and The Demon” stuff, because at that point I didn’t realize he was the Demon, I thought it was just a naming convention to indicate a complete run, and Death and the Maidens, and like a dozen odd mini trades.

Picked the Chip Zdarsky run back up and rn the Zurr-powered Botman has Damian convinced that he’s actually Bruce because of like… one memory?

Bullshit. Bruce has his memories uploaded to so many random places that they’ll lowkey get leaked alongside all the World of Warcraft passwords in the next Blizzard hack or smth. Damian wouldn’t fall for that.

And oh my god can the Zurr-En-Arrh stuff just stop. Maybe I’m unlucky because I blindly chose my most recent run order to be the Morrison stuff, then Snyder, then Zdarsky, but I swear to god Zurr has been Batman longer than Bruce has for me at this point. I should’ve more evenly interspersed the 90s stuff.

But also if I can have this problem as a blind reader, it means editorial fucked up. I’m supposed to be their target. They shouldn’t expect me to look up spoilers before I read so I’m not overloaded with Zurr. Zurr isn’t even cool. I hate him. He was a neat gimmick that should have never been a significant recurring problem besides maybe an occasional callback for an issue or two.

Now he’s been one of the primary antagonists for 2 of the 3 most recent runs I’ve read.

Christ the mainline Batman comics are hit-and-miss these days.

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Yeah ik. I have both runs with me right now actually. I just started with those three for my modern deep dive because they were the first ones I saw. Guess I was unlucky with my choices, lol.

In my defense, you can pick up pretty much any comic from the 80s-2000s at any point and it flows pretty well. Even when you accidentally stumble on a rut of just one villain (I accidentally had a whole week where literally every antagonist was Ra’s al Ghul), the plots were different enough to make it okay. But Zdarsky felt like such a rehash at points 😭

Picked the Chip Zdarsky run back up and rn the Zurr-powered Botman has Damian convinced that he’s actually Bruce because of like… one memory?

Bullshit. Bruce has his memories uploaded to so many random places that they’ll lowkey get leaked alongside all the World of Warcraft passwords in the next Blizzard hack or smth. Damian wouldn’t fall for that.

And oh my god can the Zurr-En-Arrh stuff just stop. Maybe I’m unlucky because I blindly chose my most recent run order to be the Morrison stuff, then Snyder, then Zdarsky, but I swear to god Zurr has been Batman longer than Bruce has for me at this point. I should’ve more evenly interspersed the 90s stuff.

But also if I can have this problem as a blind reader, it means editorial fucked up. I’m supposed to be their target. They shouldn’t expect me to look up spoilers before I read so I’m not overloaded with Zurr. Zurr isn’t even cool. I hate him. He was a neat gimmick that should have never been a significant recurring problem besides maybe an occasional callback for an issue or two.

Now he’s been one of the primary antagonists for 2 of the 3 most recent runs I’ve read.

Christ the mainline Batman comics are hit-and-miss these days.

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Batman is such a massive franchise with so many media sources, I’m curious to see how the fandom engages with the OG comics. Keep in mind that this encompasses derivatives too, like Birds of Prey or Robin or any other the other batfam comics.

This is purely a curiosity thing; keep all comic-consumer supremacy out of here lol. Franchises deserve to be enjoyed in whatever form you find most joy from. It’s literally entertainment.

(Might do similar polls about other popular media formats if ppl are interested.)

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My punishment 😔😔😔

I get to eat this for a week.

(That brown rice is actually from a cabinet in my lab that we were cleaning up. It expired in 2023. I feel fine though lmao).

Alright. I bit the bullet.

Actually bought the four most recent issues like a good comic fan instead of taking everything from the library.

Blew this week’s grocery budget while doing so. I expect a personal letter from Dan Watters for this.

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Alright. I bit the bullet.

Actually bought the four most recent issues like a good comic fan instead of taking everything from the library.

Blew this week’s grocery budget while doing so. I expect a personal letter from Dan Watters for this.

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What gets me is how quickly he deduces it’s a hallucination.

Like, “ah, indeed, the rational answer is that I am having visual, audial, and tactical hallucinations that are realistic to a point nearly indiscernible from reality.”

It’s just expected at this point LMAO

- Dick, on at least a bi-monthly basis, 1996-2025

I legitimately cannot tell if this is a normal level of Dick hallucinating or if Watters is kind of reacting to fanon depictions of Dick regularly losing his shit a little.

Dick hallucinated quite a bit in NW 1996 and during the Spyral arc (though the latter could be blamed on Hypnos), and there are other individual instances peppered throughout other Nightwing and team up comics, but Watters is really going at it.

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I’m sorry — that’s just my corny ass name for the feral gremlin depiction of Nightwing that Chuck Dixon did during early his early Nightwing 1996 run.

Bro would literally scamper on all fours on rooftops and he had the biggest, evilest shit-faced grins. It was legendary.

I like to imagine it’s still inside of him somewhere in more modern iterations of Dick but he just has to actively resist being a gremlin.

WE GOT SOME BOY HOSTAGE HEREEEEEEE

First off. My man wakes up dangling by his feet and he’s just like. “Neat”. Brother does not care.

And then as soon as he wakes up, someone walks in, and his reaction is just…?

AND THE FUCKING JUICE BOX ISTGGGG

And like ofc a Batman comic from the 90s isn’t complete without a surfacing of the inner Dixon demon. Because our baby fresh-into-Blüdhaven boy Dick is holding against his homocidal tendencies by a fucking thread. He’s been off of Batman’s leash for exactly 9 minutes and he smells blood.

He likes this. He’s having fun here. This is a play date, and he’s this close to breaking every childs’ toy dinosaur in the room.

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- Dick, on at least a bi-monthly basis, 1996-2025

I legitimately cannot tell if this is a normal level of Dick hallucinating or if Watters is kind of reacting to fanon depictions of Dick regularly losing his shit a little.

Dick hallucinated quite a bit in NW 1996 and during the Spyral arc (though the latter could be blamed on Hypnos), and there are other individual instances peppered throughout other Nightwing and team up comics, but Watters is really going at it.

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have you read batman and robin year one (2024)?

Tragically, I’ve combed every library around me in a 2 hour radius and found none that carry it. I could buy the trades, but refer to my Bean Posts for an idea of how tight my budget is. I could also pirate it, but reading comics online feels so wrong to me.

There’s something so special about feeling the suspense of a dire moment and the anxiety you get when flipping to the next page. Scrolling doesn’t cut it, to the degree where I’ve tried to read comics online and stopped a few pages in because I couldn’t get into it. This is coming from the person who read through four trades across five hours yesterday. I couldn’t do it.

So, until I can convince a nearby library to buy it or I somehow stumble upon 100k, I’ve just been trying to keep myself spoiler-free. The former shouldn’t be too difficult actually, and it brings me relief to know that at least a few extra copies are being purchased by someone, which the publisher can use to see the comic is successful and not cancel it early. Pirating means nothing gets purchased, which in today’s landscape guarantees cancellation.

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Picked the Chip Zdarsky run back up and rn the Zurr-powered Botman has Damian convinced that he’s actually Bruce because of like… one memory?

Bullshit. Bruce has his memories uploaded to so many random places that they’ll lowkey get leaked alongside all the World of Warcraft passwords in the next Blizzard hack or smth. Damian wouldn’t fall for that.

And oh my god can the Zurr-En-Arrh stuff just stop. Maybe I’m unlucky because I blindly chose my most recent run order to be the Morrison stuff, then Snyder, then Zdarsky, but I swear to god Zurr has been Batman longer than Bruce has for me at this point. I should’ve more evenly interspersed the 90s stuff.

But also if I can have this problem as a blind reader, it means editorial fucked up. I’m supposed to be their target. They shouldn’t expect me to look up spoilers before I read so I’m not overloaded with Zurr. Zurr isn’t even cool. I hate him. He was a neat gimmick that should have never been a significant recurring problem besides maybe an occasional callback for an issue or two.

Now he’s been one of the primary antagonists for 2 of the 3 most recent runs I’ve read.

Christ the mainline Batman comics are hit-and-miss these days.

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This as an excuse would actually be so neat — that the consequence of regaining your memories during a reality-altering event is that the universe doesn’t know which memories to have you recall, so you remember all of them.

And, again, DC will never do this because they’re cowards, but exploring that as a plot concept would be wild. Having Dick remember things about people that never happened and reminiscing on events that never took place. Legitimately not knowing how old he is. Having simultaneous memories of both being raised in the 70s-80s (right before the New Teen Titans) and in the 2000s.

That kind of thing.

Of course, this all occurs during his post-Ric recovery because that’s what kickstarts the memory jumble to begin with, so his peers think his confusion is a consequence of being shot in the head and not going through some bungled up form of semi-timeline-ascension.

THE CHEMO BOMBING IS STILL CANON.

I REPEAT, THE CHEMO BOMBING IS STILL CANON.

I did not expect that. I figured since they brought back Blockbuster, most of Nightwing 1996 was now defunct.

What else is still canon???

Is everything still canon but Blockbuster somehow managed to escape? Or like, the events still played as normal except replace Blockbuster with some other generic villain who did all the same things?

Was Dick still a police officer in this canon? Did he work in that cop bar? Has he already met Amy? Did Tarantula happen?

Like I’m sure they’re just never gonna acknowledge it at this point, but now that I see we’re willing to bend some logic for the sake of preserving former canon, I now choose to presume all of NW 1996 as canon until explicitly stated otherwise. Bite me.