Cancelled Trade Cavalcade: Nightwing: Target and Weird Worlds

Cancelled Trade Cavalcade -- where the Collected Editions blog looks back at some trades that never quite made print. Today we've got an interesting item called Nightwing: Target. Here's the description:

Dick Grayson, the first Robin and teen sidekick to Batman, stepped out of the Dark Knight''s shadow to become Nightwing. This is the story behind that transformation and how it affected Batman, the Teen Titans, and Dick himself.

Nightwing: The Target (note difference) was a Nightwing one-shot by the early Nightwing title team of Chuck Dixon and Scott McDaniel (some would argue McDaniel's art never looked as good as it did on Nightwing), published after McDaniel had left the title. Whether this was a leftover stock story from the Dixon/McDaniel days on Nightwing or if DC just saw some profit in getting the band back together, I'm not sure.

The story involves Nightwing taking on the identity of the Target (almost as bad as "the Insider") to clear his own name after Nightwing's accused of a murder. I recall the story was briefly mentioned during the Bruce Wayne: Murderer/Fugitive days (as in, "Batman made Nightwing clear his own name when accused of murder, but won't do so himself," etc.), but it didn't otherwise have much consequence and was never collected, as one-shots often aren't (or weren't in those days).

Solicitations for the Nightwing: Target trade list as the writers both Chuck Dixon and Peter Tomasi, suggesting that this trade would have potentially collected some of Tomasi's Nightwing run from issues #140-153. Those stories were later collected on their own in Nightwing: Freefall and Nightwing: The Great Leap.

Not many details in the description as to what Nightwing: Target might've been about, versus what DC eventually published. Could be the Tomasi stories ended up being enough to fill a trade on their own, or the change could again relate to the fallout between Chuck Dixon and DC (promise, every "Cancelled Trade Cavalcade" will not be about DC/Dixon!). Either way, Nightwing: The Target remains uncollected, the kind of thing we might see in a DC Comics Presents sometime alongside some other Nightwing issues.

In other cancelled trade collection news ... DC announced the official cancellation of the Weird Worlds paperback this past week (via ComicList). I'm not surprised; the only established character in this six-issue miniseries was Lobo, and I never heard much acclaim for Weird Worlds the first time around, so it's not a shock that trade pre-orders were low.

DC has already released the first issue of the sequel miniseries, My Greatest Adventure -- this one has the character Garbage Man meeting Batman, so that's something, but in all I'm not optimistic about a trade for that one, either.

Recent cancellations of note:

• Doom Patrol: Fire Away
• JSA All-Stars: The Puzzle Men
• Weird Worlds
• Supergirl: Good-Looking Corpse

Read earlier Cancelled Trade Cavalcade columns.

By the way ... remember when you used to be able to click a link and see Justice League International Vol. 7 ... ?