Even if you don't read comics, you've probably heard of Dick Grayson.

You know, Bruce Wayne's ward. Batman's Robin the Boy Wonder.

Dick hasn't worn the Robin suit in a long time, though. In the 1980s, he left the nest — or the Batcave, anyway — and became a new costumed crime fighter, Nightwing. He graduated to his own self-titled series in the '90s.

That series recently got a new writer: Marv Wolfman, who along with artist George Perez created the Nightwing character more than 20 years ago.

"It's a thrill," Wolfman says. "I had wanted to write the book originally and wasn't really given the opportunity."

Dick Grayson was 18 or so when he became Nightwing. He's hardly ready to pluck out gray hairs, but he has aged several years since then.

"He's a lot older than he was when I first wrote him," Wolfman says, "So the trick is to take that personality that I wrote back then and figure out what he would be like at approximately 25, where his head would be."

Dick is seeking his place in the world, Wolfman says. He trained under Batman, but he doesn't want to be Batman.

"He doesn't want to be only about fighting crime. He knows to be a good Nightwing he should be a good person, and that's what he's trying to develop now is the human side of him."

If DC executive editor Dan DiDio had had his way, Nightwing would be pushing up daisies instead of embarking on a journey of personal exploration.

DiDio wanted to kill Nightwing in the universe-shaking "Infinite Crisis" mini-series that wrapped up early this year.

"In my opinion, Dick was becoming slightly disenfranchised within the DC universe and wasn't being used as a character," DiDio says. "He's a character who's never going to become Batman, he was no longer Robin, and because of that, he seemed a little bit displaced in time."

In Wolfman's first issue of "Nightwing," in a development DiDio says will evolve into a major story line, a disembodied voice tells Dick he had been fated to die in "the crisis."

Fans would have been in an uproar if Nightwing had been killed, Wolfman says, noting that for many years readers voted him one of the top 10 characters in comics.

"I think nobody realized how big the fandom for Dick Grayson was. So my goal is to try to ground him again, try to set him up for the future, to show how strong of a character he actually is."