Zahri’s Lazy Ramblings

Since I’m once again thinking about it, Devin Grayson really had the worst luck in the world for her whump storyline.

Sure I’m certain it would never have ranked up there with people’s favourites, but I’d love to have seen what her original pitch for the resolution of the storyline was. Presumably the depression-almost-marriage, then Dick runs off and joins the mob, then we finally get a comfort arc where he realises he’s NOT that person and reconciles with the family.

Instead: 9 of the following 13 issues to Nightwing #93 were out of Devin’s control (War Games then Nightwing Year One), she gets her mob arc up only to be informed Dick will be getting sacrificed in Infinite Crisis, and she diverts over to the half done Slade story because nothing really matters at this point, hey? Editorial drops Chemo on Blüdhaven because Dick’s dying anyway, we can sacrifice his city for drama, only for the rebellion to save Dick AFTER PAGES ARE TURNED IN.

I know everyone dislikes #93 and why they feel that way, but it’s also basically the last point for the subsequent two years where Devin had any control over the course of the title, at the end of which she was removed. #94&95 are the start of Dick’s reaction. She gets to write #100 and ONE proper story arc in after this point: the mob arc #107-112. Everything else is scraped together transitions or preempted or someone else’s story.

If her story hadn’t been disrupted for an ENTIRE YEAR at its lowest point by intervening events, so that fans had given up on getting any sort of catharsis out of the whump and had turned on Devin, I can see a world where people enjoy Devin Grayson’s run as ‘the one where Dick gets to go off the rails’. It’d be his Red Robin - known to be Dick not acting normally, but with the fun that yeah, that was DESERVED, and Dick came out the other side solid.

But we don’t live in that world, and instead we live in the world where fans spent an entire year in a holding pattern at Dick’s lowest point, and just gave up caring. The narrative was set. This was The Worst Story (until the subsequent two Worst Stories came about)