Now this announcement has The Blot all kinds of excited. According to a Variety report, “the CW is prepping a series based on Batman sidekick Robin’s pre-Caped Crusader days” entitled
The Graysons. (
link) In the same vein as The CW’s
Smallville,
The Graysons will be a live action television show based loosely on the DC Comics.
According to reports, “just as
Smallville focused on Clark Kent in the years before he became Superman,
The Graysons will follow the world of Dick "DJ" Grayson before he takes on the iconic Robin identity and aligns himself with Batman.” (
link) While I’ve never been too interested in watching
Smallville (except for the Justice League episodes), Robin (Richard “Dick” Grayson) has always been one of my favorite super heroes, even after he left Batman’s side to grow up and become Nightwing. It also makes me happy to see Warner Bros. finally create a project featuring one of DC Comics’ super heroes that isn’t named Superman or Batman.
Evidently
The Graysons will be a one-hour show, “which will be set in modern times, young DJ will face challenges involving first loves, young rivals and his family as he grows up.” (
link) I can’t even explain what great news this is. Even if the show totally screws with Dick’s official back story, at least Warner Bros. is making an attempt to utilize the huge stable of characters at their disposal, something Marvel Comics has been doing exceptionally well these past few years.
Expect more details to come as they become available!
This week has turned out to be a pretty cool news week in the world of comic books. The Portland Monthly Magazine is reporting that Portland State University’s Branford P. Millar Library will house the country’s very first comic book archive. Dark Horse Comics, home to Star Wars, Hellboy and Sin City, has “so far donated over 3,000 volumes to the library’s shelves (that’s three copies of every title the company has ever produced), making PSU the first university in the country to keep such an archive.” (link) I think this is wonderful news and it is about time that the comic book industry is given the respect it deserves as both works of literature and art.
For those of you wondering how such a collection ended up at Portland State University, it turns out that Dark Horse, the third largest U.S. publisher of comic books after Marvel and DC, was founded in 1986 by two PSU alumni, Mike Richardson and Neil Hankerson. In the article, librarian Helen H. Spalding is quoted as saying the Dark Horse Comics archive “is an important international research collection, it holds an interest for those studying American pop culture, gender studies, violence in literature—almost anything. We wanted to make the university a hub of comic-book studies.” (link)
If you’re in the Portland area then I highly recommend stopping by the PSU Millar Library and checking out the new Dark Horse section! I’d love to hear what it’s like and will one day hopefully get to see for myself. You can expect to see comics such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Concrete, Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot, Barb Wire, The Goon, Grendel, Groo, The Mask, Usagi Yojimbo, and Aliens in the newly created comic book archive.
