#hes still a dick tho

[c0ff1nn]

acrylic marker bullshittery

[technicolorxsn]

thinking abt leshy inscryption again

[mocking-the-bird]

I returned to drawing Tiny Tim because I am a weak human being controlled by dopamine release

I think I'll make part two with Jason and Bruce, and I hope you want that too :p

[megaawkwardhuman]

[welcometogrouchland]

Disgustingly messy and crusty sketch dump but I couldn't get my own terrible theory out of my head and ended up making a bunch of sketches about it. Also at the end a bonus dickbats and Damian doodle bc I was reading an issue of their Batman and Robin run (IDs in Alt)

[ballisters-lawyer]

You can’t tell me that Ballister didn’t think that he had just been with Ambrosius in this scene omggg

^ so here we se Ballister waking up and still being tired or sore or something, which would normally be because he’s just been running around and fighting off guards with a Rhinoceros, BUT, he doesn’t know that because he has just woken up after being knocked out. So it’s only right to assume that he is currently wondering why he’s sore

^ he looks over and sees a FRESH and HOT cup of coffee or tea or wtvr, and freshly lit candles. Like the last set of images where there would’ve been something that tells him that there would have reminded him he wasn’t with Ambrosius (the last one being his prosthetic that was under the blanket), this one is the axe handle, but he doesn’t notice, instead looking at the candles and mug. The candles and mug themself are very caring and sweet things to have, and we know that movie Ambrosius is very caring and attentive, so this is definitely something he would do, and Ballister knows that

^ you can see how Ballister relaxes and smiles comfortably, contempt with having assumedly spending the night with Ambrosius

^ then this is where Ballister kinda wakes up to himself and knows that he’s not with Ambrosius (this is more implied when he’s slowly sitting up and looking at Nimona, knowing Ambrosius wasn’t there and now just confused with what had happened)

This is so silly and I am going FERAL over Bal and Ambrosius, so expect to see more of them, including a fic that’s currently being written trehee

[mikakuna]

are we ready to face the truth that is bruce did not love jason as much as jason loved bruce?

[levinbolts]

[bunnieswithknives]

I hope peri doesn't hold it against the kid. Throwing something on hand at the scary thing is just instinct. That said, Dev should give peri someone to eat or something, since I don't think the kid is good with saying sorry. Giving a gift tho...well, love languages and all.

Dev did it on purpose ❤️

He's still under the impression that Peri is the one who caused all this, and that all his denial and talk about how "Dale's fineeee" are Peri just bold faced lying to him. He saw Dale and went, '"'You caused this you deal with it BYE!'"'

That being said, Peri isn't going to be holding it against him. He's got the same logic as you, and he is supposed to be keeping Dev safe anyway. He will not be getting an apology tho lol.

[heroesriseandfall]

Introduction to Batman: A Lonely Place of Dying, April 1990

Introduction by Dennis O'Neil for Batman: A Lonely Place of Dying (1990 collected edition)

Transcription below the cut/readmore.

INTRODUCTION by DENNIS O'NEIL

Robin was gone. We needed a new Boy Wonder. There had been two previous Robins. The original first appeared less than a year after a new costumed hero called Batman made his debut in DETECTIVE COMICS #27, to instant success. Some time within the next eleven months, his creators, artist Bob Kane and his writer-collaborator Bill Finger, decided to give their dark, obsessed hero a kind of surrogate son, Robin, who was hailed on the cover of DETECTIVE #36 as “the sensational character-find of 1940—Robin, The Boy Wonder.” Over the next 40 years, Batman’s fortunes varied: always, however, Robin was at Batman’s side.

He served a couple of functions. If Batman were real (and it may shock some of our more avid readers to learn he isn’t), and if he were the grim, obsessed loner he is often portrayed as, Robin, with some help from Batman's faithful butler Alfred, would keep him sane; a man whose every waking hour is focused on the grimmest aspects of society, who is unable to release the effects of seeing his parents murdered, whose life is an amalgam of sudden violence and lonely vigilance, would soon skew into a nasty insanity if he did not have someone to care for, someone to maintain a link with common humanity. But Batman is, of course, not real. (My apologies to avid readers.) He isn’t exactly a fictional character—more on that shortly—but he does not and could not exist as a living, breathing human being. That doesn’t make Robin any less useful: he serves the same functions in the Batman stories as Watson served in the Sherlock Holmes canon and the gravedigger serves in Hamlet: like Holmes’s faithful doctor, Robin is a sounding board, a person with whom the hero can have dialogues and thus let the reader know how brilliantly he’s handling matters and like the gravedigger, he occasionally provides a bright note in an otherwise relentlessly morose narrative.

Which is why I was a trifle uneasy when we—the editorial staff of DC Comics—decided to let our audience decide whether he would live or die. It came to be known in our offices as the “telephone stunt.” We had a character, Robin, the readers didn’t seem terribly fond of. This wasn’t the original Robin, the “character-find of 1940”; that Robin was Dick Grayson and he had graduated from sidekick to bona fide hero who fronted a group of evil-fighting adolescents, The Teen Titans. In 1983, it was decreed that Robin should grow up and assume a crime-fighting identity of his own—become his own man, as befitted the leader of the mighty Titans. He left Batman’s world to assume the name, costume, and persona of Nightwing. Gerry Conway and Don Newton replaced him with a second Robin, Jason Todd, whose biography was virtually identical to that of Dick Grayson. Why not? Gerry and Don were not trying to innovate, they were simply filling a void. The assignment they were given was simple: Provide another Robin. Quickly and with as little fuss as possible.

In 1986, Max Allan Collins inherited the Batman writing assignment and told his editor he had an idea for an improved Jason Todd. Make him a street kid, Collins said. Make his parents criminals. Have him and Batman on opposite sides at first. Sounded fine to the editor and, since DC was in the middle of a vast, company-wide overhaul of storylines anyway, Collins was told to go ahead. I was the editor; I did the telling. And I’d do it again, today. Collins’s Robin was dramatic, did have story potential. But readers didn’t take to him. I don't know now, and will probably never know why. Jason was accepted as long as he was a Dick Grayson clone, but when he acquired a distinct and, Collins and I still believe, more interesting backstory, their affection cooled. Maybe we—me and the writers who followed Collins—should have worked harder at making Jason likeable. Or maybe, I guessed, on some subconscious level our most loyal readers felt Jason was a usurper. For whatever reason, Jason was not the favorite Dick had been. He wasn’t hated, exactly, but he wasn’t loved, either. Should we write him out of the continuity? It didn’t seem like a bad idea, and when we thought of the experiment that became the telephone stunt, Jason seemed the perfect subject for it. The mechanics were pretty simple: we put Jason in an explosion and gave the readers two telephone numbers they could call, the first to vote that Jason would survive the blast, the second to vote that he wouldn't.

It was successful—oh my, yes. We expected to generate some interest, but not the amount or intensity we got. As soon as the final vote was tallied—5271 for Jasons survival, a deciding 5343 against—the calls began. For most of three days, I talked to journalists, disc jockeys, television reporters. We got a lot of compliments. They ranged from a critic’s liking our stunt to the participatory drama of avant garde theater to the brilliant comedy team of Penn and Teller expressing mock envy that we beat them to “the kill-your-partner-900-number scam.” But then came the backlash, ugly and, to me at least, totally unexpected: one reporter claimed that the whole event had been rigged—that, in fact, we had decided on Jason’s demise ahead of time and staged an elaborate charade; a teary grandmother said that her grandchildren loved Jason and now we’d killed him; several colleagues accused us of turning our magazines into a “Roman circus.” Cynical was a word used. And exploitive. Sleazy. Dishonorable. Wait a minute, I wanted to reply. Jason Todd is just a phantom, a figment of several imaginations. No real kid died. No real anything died. It’s all just stories—

I would have been wrong. Batman, and Superman, and Wonder Woman and their supporting casts are quite a bit more than “just stories” if, by “stories,” we mean ephemeral amusements. They’ve been in continuous magazine publication for a half-century, and they’ve been in movies, and television shows, and in novels, and on cereal boxes and T-shirts and underwear and candy bars and yo-yos and games—thousands of ventures. For fifty years. Fifty years! Although the circulation of our magazines is relatively modest, these characters have been so enduring, so pervasive, they have permeated our collective consciousness. Everybody recognizes them. They are our post-industrial folklore and, as such, they mean much more to people than a few minutes’ idle amusement. They’re part of the psychic family. The public and apparently callous slaying of one of their number was, to some, a vicious attack on the special part of their souls that needs awe, magic, heroism.

We had promised to abide by the telephone poll, and we would. But within a few days, it became apparent that we’d have to begin growing another Robin. We had forgotten that Batman exists outside the pages of our comics, is not the exclusive property of DC’s editorial staff; because he is both popular and imperishable, hundreds of others have some legitimate interest in him (not the least of whom are the readers who, for one reason or another, had missed the voting.) Our medium may have kept him alive, but others have added immeasurably to his success. When we began hearing from them, the consensus was that a Batman without a Robin wasn't quite a Batman. I wasn’t surprised. Nor did I disagree, particularly. So our problem became: how to create Robin III without generating the hostility that plagued poor Jason. Dick Grayson was the answer. If, as we thought, readers felt Jason had somehow usurped Dick’s place, then we should link the new Robin to Dick—give Robin III his predecessor’s stamp of approval. One writer had done almost all of the Dick Grayson material DC had published for a decade: Marv Wolfman, co-creator (with George Pérez) of the New Teen Titans. That made Mary the first, and really only, choice to undertake the task of giving Batman a new helper. And if we were using Marv, why not have some of the story happen in the pages of THE NEW TITANS, which he was already writing, and thus be able to take advantage of the very considerable talents of Marv's collaborator on the Titans, George Pérez? George volunteered to co-plot the story with Mary and do layouts on the TITANS episodes, and editor Mike Carlin enlisted Tom Grummett and Bob McLeod to complete George's graphics work. I asked the regular BATMAN artists, Jim Aparo and Mike DeCarlo, to handle the BATMAN issues. Finally, we chose a name for Robin III—Tim Drake—and, after a couple of editorial conferences, six gifted gentlemen retired to do what they do best.

The result seemed worthy of being collected between one set of covers, to be read as a graphic novel. We decided to do that and you’re holding the result. I hope you enjoy it. But please don’t think it’s the end of the Robin III saga. Dick Grayson’s lasted 50 years, after all, and Tim Drake does have his blessing.

Dennis O’Neil

April 1990

[notfeelingthyaster]

"jason is bruce's favorite child" no, bruce treated jason horribly multiple times.

"cass is bruce's favorite child" no, that's a fanon cop-out, as is cass as batman.

bruce's favorite changes by the run but it's probably nightwing.

[basalting]

bruharvey with jason: Thinking about how tiny robin jason was, Harvey and Bruce must have been like giants to him.

(this got long so i added a cut. sorry im incapable of shutting up <3) jason was sooooooo small. preteen small and malnourished small and late bloomer small all at once.

totally encapsulated by bruce's cloak and harvey's jacket, small and safe and secure.

how enraptured they must of been with him? dick was small too but dick didnt want them the way jason does, didnt NEED them the way jason does.

dick needed people to believe in him, to let him be useful, to burn through that tar pit of rage and hurt zucco left in him. dick didnt want or need new parents (the fact that bruce ended up considering him a son anyway was irrelevant to dick) and it meant that bruce and harvey didnt have to be there emotionally as much

jason was different, jason demanded care. not attention, dick needed attention. was born to have eyes on him watching in awe. jason hated attention, hard-eyed adults and cold alleys had taught jason that attention was dangerous. but he wanted to be taken care of. he wanted bruce to remember when he had a test due and to ask him about it without being reminded. he wanted harvey to remember what show he was watching and that he likes hot chocolate but not peppermint.

for all that they would hide it. behind snarls and gruffness. behind a blank face and quiet grunts. harvey and bruce loved jason, he was theirs. they were his. and then he was gone.

what a blessing, to be loved so dearly by a child

what a curse, to have to mourn the loss of that love

[unexpectedbrickattack]

heehee (pepstavo under the cut)

[flwrkid14]

Damian Wayne’s LPS Collection – It’s Not Playing with Toys

Okay, so imagine this: Damian Wayne has a secret Littlest Pet Shop collection.

Not because he likes toys, of course—don’t even dare suggest that to him—but because they’re tiny animals. And we all know Damian has a soft spot for animals. If he can’t have a real shark, lion, or eagle in Wayne Manor (not that he hasn’t tried to convince Bruce), he compensates by collecting their miniature versions.

Each animal has a name. Every. Single. One. They all have distinct personalities too. His tiger, for example, is named ‘Asad,’ and it’s fierce but gentle. His dolphin, ‘Iris,’ is curious and stubborn. There’s a black-and-white shorthair named ‘Sable’ who bears an uncanny resemblance to Alfred the Cat (and might just be his favorite). Damian has meticulously thought up their likes, dislikes, favorite foods, and even specific ways they “interact” with one another.

But here’s the kicker: Damian refuses to admit that these figures are anything remotely close to toys. No, no—he collects them. They help him stay in tune with animals he respects but can’t keep. He’s not playing with them, he’s “accompanying” them.

Example? Damian shows up to dinner, Sable tucked into his jacket pocket. When Dick raises an eyebrow, Damian coolly explains, “No, Grayson, I am not playing with toys. She is merely accompanying me at dinner. I find her presence comforting.” Dick tries to hide his smirk because, seriously, it’s so Damian.

Deep down, though, these LPS figures give Damian something important. They allow him to be a kid—in a way he’s always struggled with. Sure, he’ll never admit that, and yes, he might even find the act of “playing” with figures completely beneath him. But these tiny animals let him indulge in a bit of imagination, something he didn’t have much of growing up in the League. It’s quiet. It’s personal. And it’s something that brings him comfort in a world that can often feel too big and too serious for a boy his age.

So if you catch Damian in the Batcave with a mini lion figure on the desk while he’s working on mission intel? Just know he’s not playing. That’s ‘Shahir,’ and he’s only there for… company.

[citrusai]

cole not showing up in veilguard despite literally joining solas & his cause is so... then again the whole fen'harel agents and elven rebellion plot was scrapped and solas' character was reduced to going oooo rook you wanna repeat the cycle of abuse and indentured servitude i am in currently ooooo rook you wanna be me soooo bad ooooo rook you wanna kill the evanuris for me and then i'll tear down the veil anyway oooooo rook go prey on your companions' trust in you to kill themselves for you like i was willing to do for mythal. oh u got her to forgive me? oh and the inquisitors here too and they forgive me? oh and you forgive me even though it's clear idgaf about you or your opinions? well alright the veil can stay. despite the fact that it's obviously deteriorating anyway and me making the black city golden again won't do a fucking thing. ok i'll go :)

[harbingersecho]

you will accept chaos, by choice or by force!