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[ GO-GO-GRAYSON ] |
TO QUOTE Steve Rogers: “Hail Hydra”.
THE REVIEW:
Now this is going to be a pretty spoilerish
review of Grayson. It’s the big
finale after all, so you should have read it by now!
You’ve been warned, so gird your loins.
I'm sure you know the whole thing about Chekhov’s
gun, right? There are variations on the
exact quote (not only due to the translation, but also to him presumably having
proclaimed the concept multiple times yet never documenting it himself,
resulting in multiple writers reminiscing on his point in print), but the guts
of it is, “If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the
wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not
going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.” If you've read Robin War -- or
even just my last
few reviews of Grayson -- then you know all too well that a fairly
large metaphorical rifle was hung on the literary wall of the character of Dick
Grayson.
So to me, that’s the problem with applying
the principal of Chekhov’s gun to comics. A writer might have control over their
immediate story, but they’re not the only cook in the kitchen. Series are passed from one writer (or team)
to another, characters appear in stories
by other writers which need to fit in to the overall continuity somewhere, and sometimes,
the executives come up with a brilliant idea for a huge crossover that forces
all titles to wrap up what they’re working on and go off in a new
direction. So even the most carefully
placed guns sometimes don’t get fired, Pop!
Lanzing and Kelly didn’t stage this gun,
though. Tom King did. Then King got the presumable dream gig of
writing post-Rebirth Batman, so the job of wrapping up Grayson was handed off to Lanzing and Kelly
(while Tim Seeley moved to post-Rebirth Nightwing and took
the responsibility for fixing (yeah, I said fixing) the New Suicide Squad.) So kudos to them for finally firing it! But in the same issue, they went ahead and
fired that other rifle that King and Seeley set up in this very series just a
bit earlier.
And that’s the problem with this
issue. One gun is the payoff. The ticking time bomb we've been waiting for,
for five months. And the other gun is
the deus ex machina that cleans up the mess just six pages later. Our time bomb was contained. We don’t get any stories to explore and
develop the destruction.
When Somnus was first introduced, it seemed
pretty obvious that it was King and Seeley’s mechanism for undoing the big reveal of Dick
Grayson’s identity to the world when the time came for him to stop playing
spy. But it was also established that it
would require both Helena and Dick to activate it (Though, since Daedalus was apparently hiding in the Spyral computers
all along, I suppose we can allow that he had his own backdoor to activate and
operate Somnus via long, maniacal villain monologues. That’s sort of his thing.) Grayson never really dealt with the
fallout of Dick’s identity breach, but it’s always been in the background as
sort of an unspoken reason why he couldn’t go back to his prior life and say, “lol, just kidding, I’m not dead” -- even after he learned that the reason his
reports to Batman weren’t being acknowledged was because Bruce was amnesiac
after a brief case of being dead.
The impact of the Robin War reveal,
however, never seemed to affect ANYTHING other than having one more costume for
Dick to wear in his psychic five-Dicks-vs-one-Dick battle. (Don’t Google that phrase. Well, Google it if you want to. But maybe not at work? Just in case, you know?) So I feel a bit cheated to have it resolved
in one issue. But such is the nature of
comics. I’ll try to find time to express
my nerd-rage in between issues of all the great new Rebirth titles.
Other than that (yes, aaaaaall that), this
was a great issue. I realize I’ve been
pretty much raging about all the things that they didn’t do in this issue, but
that’s really the fault of the fact that it’s a comic book featuring a
publisher-owned character in a shared universe, not Lanzing and Kelly. There are things I think they could have
handled a little better, but overall, it was one of my favorite pre-Rebirth
finales so far. They created a
magnificent testament to what makes Dick Grayson so intriguing and unique as a
character -- his faith, his love, his positive outlook, his mental agility to
match his acrobatic ability, and his willingness to put himself at risk to save
the day. Oh, and I suppose I’d be a horrible
Grayson fan if I didn’t mention his butt.
The art was fantastic too, with Antonio
channeling a bit of a Jae Lee
vibe when we enter the internal struggle between Dick and Daedalus. This issue was far more … trippy than most of
this run has been, and appropriately so.
It’s the perfect art style for the end of a series that has shifted from
superhero espionage to spy vs spy games to full on comic book science
supervillain-tier mind control. Until it
isn’t. And Antonio transferred his style
very gracefully to “Istanbul . One week later.” Much of the grace of the transition was
certainly due to the color work of Jeromy Cox, shifting from the black and red
pallet of the inner Spyral sanctum to an earth tone pallet of the desert, then
to the bright blue skies of St. Hadrians.
But we can’t really complement Cox’s color
work without pointing out what color that last frame is, right?
THE MUSIC:
We’ll simply accompany this final issue
(save for the Annual, of course) of Grayson with one last spy theme; Who
Can You Trust by Ivy Levan. Yes, I’m
using the opening credits of Spy as the closing credits for Grayson. But it’s all good. Enjoy.
(The movie is great, too. Get on
that if you still haven’t watched it.)
This issue clearly needs to be compared to 土蜘蛛 (tsuchigumo), the giant supernatural dirt spider of Japanese
folklore that is either the origin of a derogatory term for clans that did not
follow the empire or named for said clans, depending on which historian you
believe. The renegade warriors would
hide in underground caves and mounds to surprise their enemy. The giant spider demons, on the other hand,
would actually lay their own silk tubes to hide in to lay in wait. So either version works just dandy for the
analogy. Even if one’s enemy is in one’s
mind and the caves or tubes are metaphysical constructs to protect your psyche
from mental attacks because you were trained by the Batman. So you lay your silk mind tubes long before
the enemy is even known, luring them in, thinking they have the advantage, and
then … all sorts of fancy shmancy craziness happens.
THE CONCLUSION:
I’m trying not to dwell on how the results
of the Somnus satellite and Helena ’s very specific exception list almost directly contradict the
events of Titans
Hunt, or at least significantly complicate the memory-recovery-centric
plot, and should probably throw a monkeywrench in all the developments that it
sounds like Rebirth will be bringing us.
See the aforementioned “the problem with the medium” manifesto. Plus we’re mixing comic book science with
comic book magic, and that pretty much always makes a mess... or summons Klarion.
I’m trying to enjoy the great ride we got
in this series. We got spies. We got love.
We got death. We got
double-triple-quadruple-crosses. We got
Nazis. We got Midnighter! We got globe-trotting shenanigans! We got a handful of brand new characters with
great potential for future stories! Yes,
it was probably concluded sooner than King and Seeley envisioned, but Lanzing
and Kelly provided as strong an endgame as we could expect from the sudden
redirect. We also get Nightwing back out
of the deal, so nothing to complain
about here!
Except that we’ll probably never find out
who Amelia Spellman is.
In the end, for better or for worse, all
the toys are put back on the shelf for the next writer. Spyral still stands, with a new Patron (and
still ambiguous Headmistress?), ties to Checkmate severed. St Hadrian’s continues. Dick and Helena return to their tights. The status quo is restored. All is right with the world. Save for all those horrible and mysterious
things going on that the heroes need to figure out, of course.
GRAYSON #20
Reviewed by David Andrews
on
June 22, 2016
Rating:

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