DC Universe: Inheritance by Devin Grayson

(Book Review)
Not all, but most boys go through a comic book stage at some point. And most of us grow out of it eventually. In my case the last comic book I bought was when I was 17.

But once you get the comic bug, you never really kick it completely. It’s like a soap opera for men. You have to keep track of super-hero romances, who is still alive, who’s dead, and who’s come back from the dead.

(I’m being slightly sexist now, because the author of this book, Devin Grayson, is a woman and self-confessed comic addict. Not to mention my friend Elizabethian).

Even though I’ve been out of comics for 10 years, when I’m in a big bookstore I still find myself wandering over to the comic book section to see what my favorite heroes are up to now. (I wrote about this addiction in a previous entry). Recently keeping track of comic book heroes has gotten easier thanks to wikipedia (unfortunately for my productivity).

Now that DC comics has expanded their market into paperback novels, I thought this would be a great excuse to spend some time with my favorite super-heroes, while at the same time fulfilling my new commitment to read more books.

In this novel based on the DC Universe, an attempted assassination of a foreign dignitary brings together Batman, Green Arrow, Aquaman, Nightwing, Arsenal, and Tempest.

If you follow comics, you already know why this is a unique team up. It brings together 3 great heroes from comics, Batman, Green Arrow, and Aquaman, with their former teen age sidekicks.

Nightwing, aka Dick Grayson, is the former Robin.
Arsenal, aka Roy Harper, is the former Speedy.
And Tempest, aka Garth, is the former Aqualad.
(Although I'm guessing that if you didn't already know that, you probably don't care).

In the comic books of the 80s and 90s, all 3 of these former sidekicks established their own independent identities and began solo careers apart from their mentors. This book reunites them with their former mentors for one more adventure together.

Bork and I recently had a conversation about Batman and Robin. Bork contends that Batman is a really cool super-hero when solo, but the addition of Robin threatens to take the dark edge off of the series and bring it back to the campiness of the sixties.

This is a popular view among many comic book fans, but I guess there are two kinds of kids growing up. There’s the Bork view, “Man, Batman would be such a cool hero if it weren’t for that dorky Robin following him around.”
And then there are kids like me who think, “Hey, I’m a kid, and Robins a kid. I can identify with Robin. A point of entry into the series, if you will.”

In fact, of the 300 or so comic books I have left over from my teenage years, over half are of the “Teen Titans”, the supergroup formed by the teenage sidekicks Robin, Speedy, and Aqualad (plus Wondergirl and Kid Flash, but they’re a different story). So this book was right up my alley.

“Inheritance”, as the title suggests, is primarily about how these former teenage sidekicks deal with having grown up in the shadow of their mentors.

Ever since Dick Grayson shed his Robin mantle and became Nightwing in 1984, Dick’s angst about struggling to become independent from the Batman has been a theme DC comics has milked for over 20 years now. But then, the Superman-Lois Lane relationship has been going on for 70 years. I suppose, like the Superman romance, people never become tired of these themes because it resonates with them in some way, even through the fictional world of flying men and super-villains. We all push and pull against our parents in our adolescence in the struggle to create our own identity. Given the age of the target audience, it should be no surprise these themes have been popular in comic books for the last 22 years.

And speaking of comic book history....
One of the things I’ve always found fascinating about comic books is their rich history. This is one reason I was so attracted to comics when I was younger. When you step into them, you are stepping into a much longer story that has been going on for decades. Considering the average age of a comic book reader is probably around 15 (or younger), comic books require them to keep track of a lot of information that happened before they were even born. And yet the kids manage to do it.

“Inheritance” is a good example of this. In order to keep the story straight, you have to know about the death of Dick Grayson’s parents and his origins as Robin (from the 1940s), the origins of Speedy and Green Arrow (from the 1950s), the road trip across America that Green Arrow and Green Lantern took (in the 1960s), Speedy/ Roy Harper’s addiction to drugs (early 70s), Roy Harper’s romance with the supervillain Cheshire (mid 80s), Crisis on Infinite Earths and the Death of Aquagirl (1986) Titans Hunt and the death of Joseph Wilson (1990)....
I could go on but I think I’ve made my point and I don’t want to give everything away.

If you don’t know any or all of that, don’t worry because the novel retells most of it. If, like me, you pretty much knew all of that already (sigh, another wasted youth), then you’re in for a lot of review. And that’s my single biggest complaint about this book. No forward momentum. Any time you get sucked into the story and wonder what is going to happen next, the action breaks for another flashback.

Perhaps this is just a necessary evil of the comic world; the necessity of playing both to the hard core fans and the newcomers. And thematically Grayson uses all the flashbacks to tie together the story of the former Teen Titans with the adults they have become today. But I still found it a bit jarring. Over half the book is in the form of Flashback. In fact there’s not much of a forward story at all. The main story is essentially just a shell that acts as a way to bring the characters together and provide a framework for flashbacks.

Addendum: Further Thoughts
It looks like I'm not the only comic book fan who reviewed this book on their blog. If you search the blogs, you can find a lot more reviews of this book. If you're really interested you can do your own search, but I like the thoughts of Shelley's Comics (another woman comic book fan) who reviews this book as she reads it in 3 parts: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, with a bonus entry picking on some of the more egregious examples of bad writing here.

Shelley's literary eye is a bit sharper than mine. I didn't pick out these specific examples when reading, but I did have the sense of swimming upstream against clunky prose. I was so happy just for an excuse to spend time with superheroes in a novel format that I forgave everything, but I do have to agree with Shelley: Where were the editors? I'm sure Devin Grayson wasn't trying to write bad prose on purpose, but don't they have people at publishing houses whose job it is to try and catch this kind of redundant writing? What were they thinking? "Batman? Green Arrow? Sure the kids will buy it. Just crank it out. Don't worry about editing."

There's a lot written about the homosexual innuendos in the book. An interview with the author here says she was just joking with the reader, and that was the sense I got reading the book. Everyone knows about the jokes made about Batman and Robin, and Grayson has the characters themselves comment on the rumors, and occasionally uses phrases with potential double meanings. I thought it was harmless enough, but I guess I can see why it would anger some fans.

Useless Wikipedia Fact
"They couldn't hit an elephant at this distance." Last words of General John Sedgwick, before being hit by an enemy bullet.

Link of the Day
DeVos team: Race-baiters, Women-haters This article may be a bit inflammatory, but I did get an automated call telling me not to vote for Granholm because she opposed English as the official language (a tactic which I view as race-baiting). Although in this day and age of dirty trick politics, I guess there's no guarantee that call even came from Devos's team.

DC Universe: Inheritance by Devin Grayson: Book Review (Scripted)