The first comics books ever given to me were a couple of Sonic the Hedgehog issues by a friend in no discriminate order. I know that I read them until they basically fell apart, but I couldn’t tell you what issues or what happened in those books. They still left an impression as a kid, but not as much as Kingdom Hearts at the time. It wasn’t until I started going to college where my interest in comics rose. That’s the time I want to tell you about, the first comic I ever bought!
I started relatively later compared to my contemporaries with DC’s New 52. There had been buzzing among my friends that a local comic shop would give out three free comics on Wednesdays so we went to check it out. Little did I know that the first two comics I’d buy would be Talon #0 and #1 right off the stands as they were being released. They were purchased on whim, no one in the store at the time bothered to read any of DC’s books because of the relaunch. When I got home to flip through these books, the idea of a shadow organization under Gotham that churned out assassins shook me. I knew quite a bit about the Robins at that time, but knew nothing of the Court of Owls and how they used their power and influence to keep scum running in Gotham. And when a Talon finally breaks free from that, being an escape artist, you get to see how his life is eerily connected to Dick Grayson.
Also, he breaks free from Batman not once, but twice. Who just breaks free of Batman’s cuffs like that in front of the Dark Knight himself? An escape artist. Calvin Rose was a funny guy who just wanted to live a normal life. But between Batman and his family, and the entire entity that was the Court of Owls, he was being hunted. I fell in love with this grueling story of a man trying to do right by the people he’s wronged in the past, get murdered then resurrected over it, all because he’s a replacement for the true Talon: Dick Grayson.
Within the next few months, I went to Megacon Orlando and purchased N52 Nightwing Vol 1 and it’s been downhill ever since. Unfortunately, in a move I lost those issues of Talon I had gotten so I’ll probably be purchasing those in the coming weeks with all this nostalgia pouring out of me. Can you believe Talon was written by Scott Snyder and James Tynion IV? Wild.
