Welcome to the five hundred and twenty-second in a series of examinations of comic book legends and whether they are true or false. Click here for an archive of the first five hundred (I actually haven't been able to update it in a while). This week, why did Nightwing and Oracle get engaged? What was the strange reason behind the Flash being called Flush Man in Argentina? Finally, did classic cartoonist Winsor McCay help inspire the United States to go to war with Germany with a famous animated film?

Let's begin!

NOTE: The column is on three pages, a page for each legend. There's a little "next" button on the top of the page and the bottom of the page to take you to the next page (and you can navigate between each page by just clicking on the little 1, 2 and 3 on the top and the bottom, as well).

COMIC LEGEND: Nightwing and Oracle got engaged only because DC planned on killing off Nightwing.

STATUS: I'm Going With False

In this week's batch of Convergence books, Nightwing and Oracle finally got their happy ending in Convergence: Nightwing and Oracle #2 by Gail Simone, Jan Duursema and Dan Parsons.



This, of course, is referencing the fact that Nightwing and Oracle got engaged at the end of Nightwing #117...





but then it was promptly dropped in the "year" that took place between Nightwing #117 and #118. The main reason why it was dropped is because Dick Grayson was not originally intended to MAKE it to Nightwing #118, as Bruce Jones was originally going to be writing Jason Todd as the new Nightwing when he took over as the writer on Nightwing with #118.



This was because, as noted in this old Comic Book Legends Revealed, Dick Grayson was originally meant to die in Infinite Crisis.



Cooler heads prevailed, however, and he was not killed off.

This, though, led to the pervasive (and quite rational, don't get me wrong) belief that DC just decided to have Dick and Barbara get engaged to add a little more pathos to Dick's death. After all, this is the same company that had Sue Dibny be murdered right before her husband learned that she was pregnant...



So it makes perfect sense, and honestly, it perhaps did play A role in the plot point getting APPROVED. However, the idea was actually Nightwing writer Devin Grayson's and it had nothing to do with Nightwing's then-impending death in Infinite Crisis. In fact, Grayson didn't even KNOW that Nightwing was close to dying at the time.

In a great interview with Donovan Grant at the Bat Universe, Grayson answered this exact question:

TBU: During your final issue of "Nightwing", Dick Grayson proposed to Barbara Gordon. Was that always the plan? Some fans have speculated that the proposal was there only because he was about to die in "Infinite Crisis". Did you know their engagement wouldn't survive?

Devin Grayson: It was always my plan, and it was my intention to have the engagement be meaningful and long-lived. But yes, by the time I wrote that scene, I knew it wouldn’t stick because I knew that upper management was opposed to any characters getting married and had no interest in the Dick and Barbara relationship. So was I allowed to do it because other people knew at that time that Dick was destined to die? I don’t know. I didn’t know about Dick’s ensuing death, but I did know that my run—and probably everything I had created in it—was over as of the very next issue. But the proposal was a genuine part of my story arc.

So yeah, it possibly played a role in the engagement getting approved by DC (sort of "Yeah, sure, let her do it. It won't matter") but it wasn't his death itself that drove the idea - it was something Grayson wanted to do anyways.

Thanks to Devin Grayson and Donovan Grant for the information!

Check out some recent entertainment and sports legends from Legends Revealed:

What is the tragic origin of the phrase "no animals were harmed in the making of this film" (hint - it involves a horse and a freakin' CLIFF)

Did the sports term "upset" come about due to an underdog horse named Upset defeating the heavily favored Man o' War in a race?

Did the CIA really help to get the author of Doctor Zhivago a Nobel Prize?

What was the strange Deja Vu effect with the ending of the famed NBA "Phantom Buzzer" game?

On the next page, how did we get a comic called Flush Man in Argentina?

COMIC LEGEND: Flash was called Flush Man in Argentina during the 1990s because of a tabloid magazine named Flash.

STATUS: True

Reader Nicolás suggested this one a while back.

In the early 1990s, Perfil began to distribute DC Comics in Argentina.

The problem was that there was a magazine in Argentina called Flash...



So when it came time to do Flash, they were worried about being sued over the name similarity. Their head translator suggested names like Relampago (lightning) and Flashman, but they instead decided to go with....Flushman...



Although inside the comic they tried to refer to him as Flash as much as they could.

Luckily, Flash the magazine is no longer published, so the Flash name is okay to use in Argentina for the fastest man alive!

Thanks for the suggestion, Nicolás!

Check out my latest Movie Legends Revealed at Spinoff Online: How did Walt Disney's Bambi lead to the creation of the forest fire-fighting Smokey Bear?

On the next page, did Winsor McCay's animated film "The Sinking of the Lusitania" help push America into World War I?

COMIC LEGEND: Winsor McCay's animated propaganda film, The Sinking of the Lusitania, helped inspire the United States to join World War I.

STATUS: False

Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the German Navy sinking the passenger ship the Lusitania, killing over 1,000 people (including over 100 Americans) an action that sparked a good deal of American interest in going to war with Germany in World War I.

Travis Pelkie wanted me to feature Winsor McCay's response to the sinking in CBLR, so, well, here we are!

Winsor McCay, of course, was the acclaimed cartoonist whose comic strip, Little Nemo (and his adventures in Slumber Land), that ran from 1905-1926, is one of the most celebrated and acclaimed comic strips in the history of comics.



McCay was far more than just a cartoonist, however, as he was a talented vaudeville performer (he would do performances involving him drawing sketches for the audience) and an innovator in the field of animation.

His main gig, though, was as a cartoonist for William Randolph Hearst's newspaper syndicate. Under this job, he was beholden to whatever views Hearst wanted him to express. When the Lusitania sank, Hearst's position was isolationism, so Hearst did not want to make such a big deal out of the event. McCay differed from him greatly, and so he put together an epic 9-minute cartoon about the event, intended to serve as propaganda to drive an isolationist United States into action.

The finished film was a masterpiece, using techniques that were so ahead of their time that no one could even follow it up, and we wouldn't see films made to this level for another decade or so.



However, history has somewhat lost track of the timeline when people talk about the film. Yes, it was a masterpiece of propaganda. However, it also debuted in the Spring of 1918...over a year AFTER the United States went to war with Germany.

You see, the project was SO ahead of its time that McCay worked on it for over two years.

So it really didn't end up being all that important as a piece of propaganda. People also often misrepresent it as being the first depiction of the sinking of the Lusitania. This is also not true, as again, the time it took to make it meant that by the time it was released, many short films had been released that depicted the event. One of them even starred a SURVIVOR of the actual attack, actress Rita Jolivet.

The film was still acclaimed for its time (although it did not do all that well at the box office)...



And surely it did its part as propaganda for the war effort in general, but its impact has often been misstated by people who have run afoul of the timeline. I guess people figured that the film was released closer to the actual sinking of the Lusitania, which was nearly two years before the United States actually joined the fray.

As it turned out, McCay's attention to detail actually ended up killing his animation career, as Hearst was irked that he was spending so much time on animation that he forced him to quit doing animated films (just like he made him quit doing much of his vaudeville work) as he felt it distracted from McCay's main job drawing for him. McCay was highly compensated at the time financially, of course, it's just a shame that he wasn't able to continue his groundbreaking work in the field of animation.

Thanks for the suggestion, Travis!

Okay, that's it for this week!

Thanks to the Grand Comic Book Database for this week's covers! And thanks to Brandon Hanvey for the Comic Book Legends Revealed logo!

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is cronb01@aol.com.

As you likely know by now, at the end of April, my book finally came out!

Here is the cover by artist Mickey Duzyj. I think he did a very nice job (click to enlarge)...



If you'd like to order it, you can use the following code if you'd like to send me a bit of a referral fee...

Was Superman a Spy?: And Other Comic Book Legends Revealed

See you next week!