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InDC Comics , Batmanis know for having a unambiguously terrific rapscallion ' gallery , a fact that spills over intoDick Grayson ’s iteration of the character . Because fearfulness is one of the most basic elements of Bruce Wayne ’s Batman persona , it is rude for many of his villains to have qualities rooted in repulsion . With characters like Clayface , Scarecrow , the Court of Owls , Two - Face , the Mad Hatter , and the Joker , Batman ’s publication history is tick by several forays into the horror genre . And while Bruce Wayne ’s Batman has had his reasonable share of terrifying moments , Dick Grayson ’s Batmanhas faced scarier threats for one simple reason .
Dick Grayson was Batman ’s first Robin , lateradopting the personal identity of Nightwing , and eventually , after theFinal Crisisevent , becoming Batman . Born to circus performing artist parents , Dick had a loving , stable early life until his parents were gunned down by mob boss Tony Zucco . As tragical as this event was , it never drove him to the same depth of isolation as Bruce Wayne , evidentduring his clip on the Teen Titans . As such , Dick ’s easygoing personality and levity earned him the reputation as a more well - adjusted version of his mentor .
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It is for this reason that Dick Grayson ’s Batman villains are so much more worrying than Bruce Wayne ’s will ever be . When approaching villain as reflections of a hero ’s particularity , Dick Grayson ’s qualities call for villains to be his uttermost opposite word . Nightwing ’s likability and popularityremains one of the most uncontested multiversal constants in the DC Universe . That is , in about every translation of the DC Universe that exists , Dick remains a central figure of forgivingness and teamwork , no matter how strange the circumstances are . Because of this , it is gentle for fans to take for granted Dick ’s full nature : imagining him as evil is almost unthinkable . And yet , as depicted inDetective Comics#871 - 881 from Scott Snyder , Jock , and Francesco Francavilla , the glowering opposite word of Dick Grayson ’s Batman is utterly horrible .
Snyder , Jock , and Francavilla ’s arc inDetective Comics , also get laid asTheBlack Mirror , introduced the villain , James Gordon Jr. , Commissioner Gordon ’s son who is everything Dick Grayson is not . James Jr. is a psychopath who has enjoy torment beast and other people since he was a child . And while psychopathy as a condition can not be , and should not be , assign to environmental factors , the loving home that the Gordons supply for him makes this trait even more shocking to consider . With James Gordon Jr. as Dick Grayson ’s dark opposite , The Black Mirrorcalls into dubiousness everything about Dick ’s character that fans have find out quilt and safety in , pointing out just how bizarre it is that someone with such a troubled past miraculously exists as a pinnacle of goodness in the DC Universe . Rather than assay to ingest Dick into theexisting mould of Bruce Wayne Batman stories , The Black Mirroris The Dark Knight ’s most frightening tale exactly because it warps the decennium - onetime human relationship that rooter have with Dick Grayson .
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Readers seldom require a sense ofsafety from a Bruce Wayne Batman story , which is part of why his explorations into repulsion study so well . But with Dick Grayson ’s Batman , this approximation takes on a more horrifying effect , as fan have been conditioned to view Dick ’s quality as a safer , less isolated reading of Bruce Wayne . Bruce ’s devil have always been apparent to referee , but Dick ’s deft direction of his own has made it easygoing for fans to bury the substantial darkness that exist in his personal history . Likewise , because James Jr. has subsist for so long in comics beforeThe Black Mirror , fan do not expect the sister boy seen in Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli’sBatman : Year Oneto grow up to be a sequent killer . So when Dick ’s Batman is faced with the dependable , stomach - churn chaos of James Jr. ’s violence , it crosses a limit of expectation that enhance the smell of repulsion in the narration .
This makes James Jr. ’s resemblance to Dick all the more effective as a Batman villain . Continuing with the idea of villain as item-by-item reflections of heroes , James Jr. ’s word picture yell out Dick ’s flawless nature in equivalence to his wise man . Fans have never had to look closely to notice Bruce Wayne ’s shortcoming , but for Dick , whose ability to put people at ease and navigate life - threaten situations with a smiling on his facial expression has made him so popular , this paradigm skew into much dreary territory . Dick inspires other characters in the DC Universe , and by extension , comic book reader too , to be good version of themselves , and as James Jr. embarks on a plan to release other hoi polloi in Gotham City into psychopaths like himself by drug them , it inverts the cheery , aspirational impact that Dick Grayson has had on the world . As much as fans have clung to Dick ’s uplifting history as a graphic symbol , they must also look at that its world postulate its inverse .
For uncounted comics fans , Dick Grayson has been a source of stable comfortin a disorderly macrocosm , a character whose goodness is courageous in the face of his own injury . The Black Mirrorsucceeds in pointing out just how easily Dick could have fallen into the eccentric of dark that James Jr. exudes , demonstrate a type of evilness that is just as hard to explicate or understand as the goodness surrounding Dick Grayson . This shatters any sense of escape in the news report , turning it into a nightmarish enquiry of how goodness can ever stay under any circumstances .
While James Gordon Jr. is certainly not the only villain Dick Grayson ’s Batman has faced , he sets a powerful model of how a story ’s stake can change depending on who is under the cowl . That is , while Dick Grayson , or any other Batman , should be able-bodied to inherit some of Bruce ’s villain , digging into the particularity of the character itself gives writers the opportunity to terrify readers in completely new ways . The Black Mirrorrevealed the ugly potential that lector ' assumption can have , which makes thisDick Grayson Batmanstory the chilling in the Dark Knight ’s work .
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