SPOILER WARNING: This article contains spoilers for Nightwing #51 by Scott Lobdell, Fabian Nicieza, Travis Moore, Garry Brown, Hi-Fi, Nick Filardi and Deron Bennet, on sale now.


Dick Grayson hasn’t been feeling quite like himself lately. Ever since the Bat-villain KGBeast put a bullet in his brain in Batman #55, he hasn't been the easy-going ex-Robin or the friendly neighborhood Nightwing that fans know and love.

Over the past few issues of Nightwing, he's done everything he can to distance himself from his past. Although he physically recovered from his injuries, he lost 15 years of his memories. While he remembers his childhood as a trapeze artist with his parents at Haley's Circus, he's forgotten everything about his time as a hero.

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To him, Barbara Gordon and Alfred Pennyworth are complete strangers instead of his closest friends. While he said that he didn't care whether people called him Gray, Grayson, Richard, Rich, Ric or Dick in Nightwing #50, he settles on the name "Ric Grayson" in Nightwing #51, establishing a new identity for himself.

No matter what name he's using these days, Grayson has completely divorced himself from his time as a professional superhero. But this ex-Robin was singing a very different tune a short time ago.

After he was revealed to be Nightwing on live TV in the 2013 crossover Forever Evil, Dick began working as a secret agent for Spyral in the critically-acclaimed series Grayson. At the end of that series, Dick fought the mind-bending villain Doctor Dedalus, who took over Dick's body and erased every trace of Grayson's history from the public consciousness.

During the final showdown in his mind, Dick essentially defeated the doctor by embracing his roles as Robin, Nightwing and Batman, and scrambling the villains' brain using his hypnotic Hypnos implants.

Dick Grayson Robin Nightwing Mind

While most of the world forgot his identity, Grayson felt more like himself than ever before, which helped spur him into working as Nightwing again. But now, that dynamic has been flipped. Grayson doesn't feel like Robin, Nightwing or even Dick, and he's not being the hero, son or friend that all of his old allies want him to be.

Over the past decade, Batman lost his memories and his mind during a few similar incidents. After the devilish Doctor Hurt broke Batman's mind in 2008, the Dark Knight reverted to the Batman of Zurr-En-Arrh, a backup personality he created years earlier. When the events of the 2014 crossover "Endgame" erased Bruce Wayne's memories of Batman, he used a machine to essentially restore his mind to a fixed backup point.

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Even though Dick never had the foresight to do anything like that, technology could still be the key to helping him recover his lost memories. Grayson's Hypnos implants were deactivated when he left Spyral, but they could still be somewhere in his head.

During a dream sequence in Nightwing #51, he dreams of Batgirl and Robin with fingerprint-like spirals that obscure their faces. The effect looks a lot like Grayson's face did when it was obscured by his Hypnos implants during his Grayson-era secret missions. Since they were involved in so many mind-scrambling antics in Grayson, they could help un-scramble Grayson's mind now.

Dick Grayson clearly still has some of his old memories, he just can't access them right now. On instinct, he still gave a would-be mugger a Nightwing-style beatdown before he realized that he threw a punch. In addition to his crime-fighting dream, he still remembers how to speak German and pieces of oddly specific knowledge he acquired throughout his life.

Even though Nightwing's future looks murky right now, it will probably only be a matter of time before Dick Grayson rediscovers who he really is.