Scott Beatty

Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

I had wanted to really like Robin: Year One from (mostly) the same creative team as this story, but found it a bit disappointing. Not terrible, but I didn't feel like it really gave very much insight into Robin. So it was with a little apprehension that I approached Batgirl: Year One-- but that needn't have been the case, as Batgirl: Year One is excellent. The story covers the first few months of Batgirl's career, filling show more in with the occasional flashbacks to Barbara Gordon's pre-crimefighting life. Barbara wants to enroll in the police academy, but is too short, and beside, her father is entirely against letting her be in the same line of work as him. Deciding to tweak him by turning up at a costume benefit gala in a homemade Batgirl costume, she ends up accidentally becoming a crimefighter when the Killer Moth turns up, and then decides to run with it.

Batgirl: Year One gives us a succession of adventures as she "proves" herself to Batman. (Robin is, of course, smitten from the beginning. I think Barbara is 16 and Robin 14 during this time?) Along the way, we also see the miserable career of the Killer Moth (who no one takes seriously), Barbara teams up with Black Canary for the first time (but certainly not the last!), and Batgirl and Robin take down the Condiment King (yes!). The book is just fun and vibrant: the main tension with Batman comes from the fact that Barbara doesn't have a "reason" to fight crime. Bruce and Dick both lost their parents to crime, but Barbara just wants to help as best she can, and this turns out to be enough.

Everything conspires to make this book work: the charming narration by Barbara, the banter between the characters (like in Snow, I can totally hear Kevin Conroy saying all of Batman's dialogue), Javier Rodriguez's vibrant colors, and most of all, the expressive artwork of Marcos Martin and Alvaro Lopez. Their art is energetic and dynamic, their storytelling is rock-solid, and they just bring the whole book to life. The book was a joy to read from start to finish. I'm not saying every superhero comic should be this way, but it wouldn't hurt if more of them were!

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I just have to start off with one thing. Boo on DC for retconning Barbara as something other than a librarian. C'mon now, y'all had to take that away from us Librarians too? Least you didn't turn her blonde or something in this TPB.

It's another restart (although this one came way before the current New 52 restart, and then the restart of the New 52 restart as well, the early 2000s I believe) of Batgirl as they seem to do every few years with all the characters (or at least that's how it show more feels to me).

Her journey towards becoming Batigirl (a name that she seems resigned to in this TPB) is less about hero worship of Batman and more about being Batgirl in spite of Batman. Much more feminist sorts of view points for sure. It was an okay TPB, but, as I said, I did miss some of the old canon too. show less

Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

Nightwing: Year One is the last of the Beatty/Dixon-written "Year One" collaborations, both in my reading order and in terms of publication. This one expands on events only briefly chronicled in Batman: Second Chances to show how Dick Grayson decided to become Nightwing. It opens with Dick coming to Batman's aid in a battle with Clayface, but later than Batman would like, owing to Dick's duties with the Teen Titans.

They show more argue, and Batman ends up firing Dick-- this doesn't replace the firing depicted in Second Chances, though, as Dick declares he's been fired before, and the timeline of Dick's life in the front of the book includes the Second Chances firing in its events. So apparently much of Nightwing: Year One takes place during the single issue in Second Chances where Dick is fired and Batman first meets Jason Todd; the book as a whole overlaps with Second Chances a lot, as we don't see how Batman meets Jason or selects him as the new Robin, but we do see some of his training. In the meantime, Dick goes back to his old circus and gets a job there and meets Deadman, but the call of crimefighting pulls him, and building on a conversation he had with Superman, he decides to go into action again as his own man: Nightwing.

This book isn't terrible by any means, but it didn't really work for me. There are three main reasons, I think. The first is that Bruce Wayne is just an absolute asshole here. In Second Chances, he "fired" Dick because he was worried for Dick's safety. Here, he does it because Dick can't live up to the impossible standards he imposes on him, refusing to allow Dick defeating criminals with the Teen Titans to excuse him from working with Batman. I feel like you could write these two men drifting apart as they both grow older without making one of them as an arbitrary jerk, but I suppose no one ever hired Chuck Dixon to write a comic book with subtlety in its characterization.

The second issue I have is the book's last few chapters, which do retcon some of Second Chances out of existence specifically, the "ONE YEAR AGO" issue where Dick first meets Jason. Here, Bruce manipulates Dick into participating in Jason's "Gauntlet," his final test to be a full-time Robin, where the two of them are meant to team up to save Alfred from Two-Face (although Two-Face is actually Alfred in disguise). Things go awry, but the two succeed in saving the day without the help of a sedated Batman. It's a fun adventure on its own merits, but it's a weirdly Batman-centric choice for the climax of a volume about Dick Grayson becoming his own man. I'd rather have seen him fighting his own villain(s), far away from the whole Batman clan.

Lastly, there's the art. I've never liked the team of Scott McDaniel and Andy Owens, not since they were Judd Winick's artists on Green Arrow, and I don't like them here. I think it's their way with faces, which just look weird and indistinct to me.

This is a likable book. Dixon is always good at writing action. The appearance of Deadman is fun (if a little pointless), and I liked Dick's talk with Superman. Alfred's final gift to Dick is pretty nice, and makes perfect sense. I wanted to like the flirting between Dick and Barbara more, but I don't think McDaniel and Owens made their body language work, and Barbara felt weirdly subordinate to Batman in his secret plans-- she's usually much more off on her own in my experience. Overall, Nightwing: Year One is fun, but kind of misjudged.

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Scott Beatty doesn't do the profession of librarianship any favors with this book, setting up Batgirl's day job as the very thing she wants so badly to escape she's willing to risk her life in daredevilry at night. But I came around, because Barbara Gordon is such a winningly progressive female character and because even she begrudgingly comes to see how her skills as a librarian help make her a vigilante-detective on a par with Batman himself. There are still times when she comes off as too show more "girlishly naive," as though Beatty is never quite sure how to maintain a strong female character, but I forgive it because the story is good all the way to the end, one of the rare (for me) satisfying conclusions to a hero graphic novel. show less