Today, we head back 25 years to take a look at DC's "Faces of the DC Universe" event. In Nightwing's entry, he faced his history with Batman" event (well, not so much an event as much as a month-long companywide fun gimmick) and look specifically at an issue of Nightwing facing his past with Batman as the Dark Knight visits Nightwing in Bludhaven.
This is "Look Back," where every four weeks of a month, I will spotlight a single issue of a comic book that came out in the past and talk about that issue (often in terms of a larger scale, like the series overall, etc.). Each spotlight will be a look at a comic book from a different year that came out the same month X amount of years ago. The first spotlight of the month looks at a book that came out this month ten years ago. The second spotlight looks at a book that came out this month 25 years ago. The third spotlight looks at a book that came out this month 50 years ago. The fourth spotlight looks at a book that came out this month 75 years ago. The occasional fifth week (we look at weeks broadly, so if a month has either five Sundays or five Saturdays, it counts as having a fifth week) looks at books from 20/30/40/60/70/80 years ago.
This time around, we head to October 1997 for DC's "Face Front" event, and I chose Nightwing #15 (by Chuck Dixon, Scott McDaniel and Karl Story) to single out for a spotlight, as Batman visits Bludhaven to visit Nightwing's new home.
WHAT WAS DC'S "FACES OF THE DC UNIVERSE" EVENT?
I always thought that it was called "Face Front," but I guess it might have been called "Faces of the DC Universe." In any event, the concept of this "event" was that each of the DC Universe titles (plus the DC animated universe books, but no Vertigo books) would feature a drawing of the main character's face on the cover, taking up the whole cover, with the logo being shrunken down to just a small bit in the corner. Generally speaking, the regular artists on the respective books did the covers (or the regular cover artists on the books where they had a different artist do the covers, like how Jose Luis-Garcia Lopez had been doing Wonder Woman covers at the time), but there were some exceptions, like Brian Stelfreeze doing the cover for Detective Comics #716 or Tom Grummett doing Robin #48 despite having left that series years earlier.
The reason why I am using quotes for "event" is because it was really just a cover gimmick, the interior stories were the same as if this cover bit hadn't happened. When DC next did something like this, the company made sure that the issues would all be "done in one" stories that time around. Here are the covers for the Justice League's "Big Seven"...
This was during an odd time in the Superman titles, and with four books to get covers for, some odd choices were used, like the new (and short-lived before heading to comic book limbo ever since) character, Scorn, and a one-off villain...
There were some oddball choices for covers, as well, like Impulse making a goofy face, Superboy posing upside down, Lobo picking his nose and having his finger go through his ear and Sovereign Seven depicting a team member who died at the end of the issue.
Marvel had a cute response a month later that I'll feature in the future.
In any event, while JLA #13 was in the middle of "Rock of Ages," I think I might talk about JLA #14 next month, so that'd be silly to have back-to-back issues of JLA, so instead, I'll go with Nightwing #15...
HOW DID NIGHTWING DEAL WITH BATMAN VISITING HIM IN BLUDHAVEN?
As I have written about before, in 1994, the Batman office got Dick Grayson back from the New Titans office. He was once more a Bat-character. He even filled in as Batman for a while and then when Bruce Wayne returned, Dick just sort of...hung around for a year or so. He was barely used. He would just pop up on occasion to help out. Eventually, he was given a new costume and in the first issue of his ongoing series in 1996, Chuck Dixon and Scott McDaniel sent him to the city of Bludhaven, a city more corrupt than Gotham City, even, and Dick set up shop there as the new local superhero .
A year into the run, Dixon and McDaniel had Batman pay Nightwing a visit, and throughout the four part story, Nightwing constantly believed that Batman was here because he didn't like how DIck was handling things. It reminded Dick of when they were partners as Batman and Robin, where he was just an afterthought...
However, in the end, it turns out that Batman totally felt that Nightwing was doing a good job, he was just stopping by to pretty much tell him that he was proud of him...
Awww...
If you folks have any suggestions for November (or any other later months) 2012, 1997, 1972 and 1947 comic books for me to spotlight, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com! Here is the guide, though, for the cover dates of books so that you can make suggestions for books that actually came out in the correct month. Generally speaking, the traditional amount of time between the cover date and the release date of a comic book throughout most of comic history has been two months (it was three months at times, but not during the times we're discussing here). So the comic books will have a cover date that is two months ahead of the actual release date (so October for a book that came out in August). Obviously, it is easier to tell when a book from 10 years ago was released, since there was internet coverage of books back then.