Comic Couples We Love: Nightwing & Oracle Personify Real Love

There’s one type of relationship that’s not portrayed enough in comics. Comics romances usually run hot and heavy or slow burns. One thing we don’t see is long time friends whose platonic love grows into a deeper romantic love … except in one case.

For our last entry in this year’s Comics Couples We Love, we take a look at one of our absolute favorites: Richard Grayson and Barbara Gordon.

Now, I wanted to talk about this pairing from the perspective of one story in particular. Babs and Dick have a long history though. The two have been friends (sometimes with flirtatious energy, sometimes with sibling energy) practically since Barbara’s debut. In the late 1990s we started to see that energy shift, though, and in Birds of Prey #8 by Chuck Dixon, Greg Land, Drew Geraci, Gloria Vasquez, and Albert T. De Guzman, we see it earnestly shift into something more.

I want to note also, if you want to hear me talk about this issue — as well as two others that are about some of Nightwing’s closest relationships — check out my appearance on Bat-Chat With Matt & Will from a couple years ago. But enough shameless plugs, on with the show.

In Birds of Prey #8, Nightwing and Black Canary cross paths, and Canary sets Dick on a path that he’s been considering recently. What exactly are Dick and Babs — not as Nightwing and Oracle but as Dick and Barbara?

The remainder of the story takes place on a recent outing the two took. Not long before, Dick had bought Haley’s circus, his childhood troupe. That led the duo to a night out together at the circus in Bludhaven. 

Here, Dixon does a wonderful job establishing their relationship. They laugh, they tease, they connect. We see them both as people first, and that lens builds the relationship they have. Additionally, he deals with both Dick and Babs’ trauma — his at losing his parents and hers about her injury and disability.

At this point, Barbara had been crippled by the Joker over a decade before (our time). However, not enough writers had centered the events from Babs’ point of view. It was about how it affected her father or Batman. In one brilliant page, she tells Dick how she doesn’t want closure. She wanted — and to a small degree still wants — revenge. It’s a vulnerable moment between the characters that draw them so close together that what happens next is one of the greatest romantic sequences in comics history.

He asks her what she misses the most. It’s the moment of freefall, when you swing off a rooftop, reach the apex of your swing and leap into the air. She misses flying.

So what does he do? He takes her to the circus’s big tent, sets up the trapeze, and helps her fly again. And in that moment, they trust each other completely in a way that no one else ever could.

The flashback actually ends with Babs turning Dick down for another date … but it was only a couple months later when the duo would reunite in the midst of the No Man’s Land event. They connected with a kiss, and the rest is history.

If you ever want to understand the “DickBabs” ship, “On Wings” is the perfect story for it. But more than that, it’s a beautiful study of two characters that we all thought we knew. It shows the real human connection between these two. Even with nearly every moment of their lives being chronicled for comics tales, we still learned more about them. But more importantly, we get the perfect example how friends can turn into two people who deeply love each other, making Nightwing and Oracle perhaps the greatest couple we love.