Though I've had little interest in the character of late, there was a time when Nightwing was on my list of "must read" books, and when it was, the creative team was Chuck Dixon and Scott McDaniel. I was also a big fan of the Dixon/Beatty "Year One" miniseries for Batgirl and Robin. Still, I wasn't sure that even a creative team I liked could revive my interest in a character who had lost my attention. As it turns out, they can, because the first chapter of "Nightwing: Year One" is really good, with a nice mixture of characterization and action and some clever use of pre-Crisis elements as the creators redefine and clarify the character's modern origin. In all honesty, I would rather that the series had featured art by Javier Pulido or Marcos Martin to match stylistically with the other "Year One" projects, but McDaniel and Owens do a nice job here, and I find myself interested in Nightwing once again, at least so far as seeing his early years.
One of the problematic things about superhero continuity is the shifting timeline and continuity revision which can make the foundations the stories are based on a little shaky. Case in point, Nightwing's name and origin, which originally were based on adventures in the Bottle City of Kandor (I think), but which are now a little more vague. I want to say they've been redefined previously, but not in such a memorable and definitive way that I actually know what those revisions were. Part of this story's raison d'etre is to show the transition from Robin to Nightwing, how and why he changed codenames, costumes and methods of operation. Is it wholly necessary? No, but it's not completely irrelevant either, especially if you're a fan of the character interested in his backstory.
There are some fun references to pre-Crisis continuity to be found in the story, and judging from the "next issue" blurb, there will be more to come. The most notable reference in this issue is the introduction of the "adult Robin" costume, which comes from the only person it really could have come from, and which serves as a sort of visual breakpoint and "what might have been" for Dick Grayson. Speaking of costume tweaks, I also thought that Dixon and Beatty came up with a neat way to get Grayson into basically the new, cooler-looking Robin costume, and McDaniel and Owens do a nice rendition of it without completely turning it into Tim Drake's uniform.
While I could go on and on about the neat little details, though, like seeing Robin start to experiment with new weapons and become his own man, even that is a small part of the larger story, which is Dick Grayson outgrowing the sidekick role and Batman not being able to deal with it. The Batman-Robin relationship has always been a parental one (well, unless you're looking at the gay subtext), and this story is basically about what happens when the children start to become adults and leave the nest and the friction that results. Unlike the many modern writers who would couch this in literal terms, Dixon and Beatty use the genre's power for metaphor by having Dick show up late for a fight with a supervillain and having the characters fight about his effectiveness as a superhero, and whether he has let Batman down in that regard. The message is clear, that Batman feels he has an ungrateful child and Robin feels he isn't being taken seriously as an adult, and there are strong emotional undercurrents to the confrontation between the two, but the two characters' refusal to really express their underlying feelings seems more realistic and also quite telling about the way they relate to each other.
If I do have a complaint, it's that I'm tired of "asshole Batman," the guy who can't relate to anyone on a human level, and Dixon and Beatty play that up here. The result is that rather than Batman seeming to have a legitimate grievance or hurt feelings, he seems like a petty, vindictive jerk, and that's not a hero I have a lot of interest in reading about. Fortunately, Batman's role in this series should be relatively small, so that's really just a complaint about this first issue. 9/10
