Review: Nightwing Vol. 4: Second City trade paperback (DC Comics)

I was sorry to see artist Eddy Barrows leaving the Nightwing title, apt as his art was for that book. I was especially sad to see Barrows going to Teen Titans, where I hadn't favored his work previously, and to see Titans's Brett Booth coming to Nightwing; Booth's wild, cartoony style worked for the Titans, but his early Nightwing covers seemed to distort the character in a way I didn't like.

With Nightwing Vol. 4: Second City, however, writer Kyle Higgins and artist Booth breathe new life into an already successful book. To an extent it feels like the Nightwing title has been waiting from the beginning to get to this point, and it's only a shame it took almost twenty issues to do so, especially with the title about to be cancelled. Away from both Bat-continuity and Bat-crossovers, Nightwing soars telling its own story; Booth's work and even his new touches to the Nightwing costume give the title a vibrancy we never knew was missing.

[Review contains spoilers]

The last time a writer moved Nightwing to a new city, it was Chuck Dixon and Bludhaven, arguably the most lasting new city of the post-Crisis on Infinite Earths era until it was destroyed to rubble. Higgins, therefore, has big shoes to fill moving Nighting to Chicago; it's a double threat, since Higgins has to create essentially a new locale in the New 52 while still hewing generally to what we know of real-world Chicago, and without just cloning Metropolis or Gotham.

Higgins succeeds on all counts by making Chicago the New 52's "anti-vigilante city." Sure, the police might shoot at Batman some times, but Higgins's Chicago mistrusts superheroes from the politicians down to the regular people, and the city itself even bears some scars of previous metahuman action. At once, Higgins gives this New 52 Chicago both a clear character and a complex back-history, and both of these serve to establish Chicago as a prime DC Universe setting, hopefully for a long time to come.

Higgins's villain of the piece, Prankster Oswald Loomis, is perhaps a somewhat obscure Superman villain, but as a long-time Superman fan I'm actually quite familiar with him. I hadn't seen pictures of Higgins and Booth's masked Prankster until this book, and I was initially taken aback by the differences between the new Prankster and old. But despite the "Ha"-ridden Nightwing #19 cover, this Prankster leans more toward hacking and torture than whoopie cushions and joy buzzers, and I think that works for Nightwing; the Prankster is an exuberant but serious threat, not in any regard a "silly" villain for Nightwing.

Indeed though the Prankster ultimately has ulterior motives for his crimes, there's a point in the book where the Prankster strongly reminded me of Alan Grant's Anarky, and both his appearance and seeming motivations back that up. Anarky has reappeared elsewhere in the DC Universe, so I hear, but this resemblance helped warm me to Higgins's Prankster, that he's convincing as a Bat-villain -- with some precedent, even -- despite his origins as a Superman villain.

The New 52 Nightwing title has worked best when Higgins's stories revolve around Nightwing's own character, as both the "Night of the Owls" and "Death of the Family" stories did, and less so when it's just Nightwing versus a villain (i.e. the "Paragon" storyline). Second City is thankfully the former, as Higgins never loses sight of the story's real conflict, that of Nightwing Dick Grayson hunting his parents' killer, Tony Zucco. Second City's conclusion, quite aptly, turns on Nightwing having to team up with Zucco against the Prankster, and Higgins does well with Nightwing's mixed feelings when Zucco is finally arrested.

Higgins refers a couple of times to Nightwing's earlier encounters with Zucco, which haven't been shown in the New 52 and which were fuzzy even in the pre-Flashpoint universe. I recognize Higgins is off Nightwing now in favor of the new Grayson team, but I'd be curious to see Higgins write some New 52 "Nightwing: Year One" stories some time, especially as it relates to Nightwing and Zucco. Was it Nightwing who finally arrested Zucco, or Robin? Does Zucco have some sense of Nightwing/Robin's identity? All of this seems worthy of further exploration to me.

I had been concerned about an abstract, distorted Nightwing under Brett Booth's pen, but what Booth presents is a fairly restrained yet fluid Nightwing, somewhere on the scale closer to Scott McDaniel's Nightwing than Eddy Barrows's. Certainly Booth is right for this more widescreen Prankster story than Barrows would have been, and especially in making the Prankster's costume outlandish but still realistic within the confines of the story.

What really struck me, however, were the little details Booth added to Nightwing's costume. There's red accents now on the mask, as well as the return of Nightwing's finger stripes, and also it seems some additional red at the waistline. That Nightwing should wear red makes more and more sense to me, homage that it is to his Robin costume, and Booth makes the costume pop in these pages in a way that's a real credit to the artist.

In Nightwing Vol. 4: Second City, writer Kyle Higgins finally gets six uninterrupted issues to tell his own story, something I don't think we've seen since volume one. With a great new status quo for the character, a credible villain, a cogent mystery, seeds hewn for stories to come, and a distinct look for the title courtesy Brett Booth, Nightwing hits all its marks here. Pity the book ends with the next volume, but it seems like it's going out on top.

More about →

Review: Nightwing: Old Friends, New Enemies trade paperback (DC Comics)

I whole-heartedly approve of DC Comics releasing Nightwing: Old Friends, New Enemies, collecting stories from Action Comics #613-618 and #627-634. Someone may know better, but I believe this is the first time DC has collected a story from Action Comics Weekly, during the time in the late 1980s when Action Comics broke from being one of the Superman titles and became a weekly anthology (before eventually rejoining the Super-family and became a "Triangle Title").

Among not-insignificant events in the series, especially for an anthology, was Green Lantern stories that included the murder of John Stewart's girlfriend Katma Tui; there were also Superman stories written by Roger Stern and illustrated by Curt Swan that are due out in a collection next year.

Nightwing: Old Friends, New Enemies is in a way exactly what I want from a comics collection. The stories collected within (along with an issue of Secret Origins) are neither largely important nor significant. Rather they are "just" stories, published in the years just after Crisis on Infinite Earths; for those of us interested in that time period, this is the only way to read these stories without a large-scale back issue hunt. I love these kinds of "read it how it happened" collections; it's why I was excited about the New Teen Titans Omnibuses, seemingly collecting the New Teen Titans issues in order, until that went bad. It's why I picked up Showcase Presents Booster Gold despite being black-and-white (because, the full twenty-five issue series in one book) and why I'll pick up the Showcase Presents Blue Beetle book, too.

So, this collection gets my thumbs up before even cracking the cover, and if DC saw fit to keep reprinting Action Comics Weekly stories (namely the Green Lantern stuff), I'm all for it.

That said, Old Friends is a somewhat confused and uneven book, especially if you go into it with expectations about the characters or plot. Though Nightwing gets top billing, he is largely a guest star in the two stories; in the first story Nightwing participates but it really has nothing to do with him, and in the second story Nightwing is mostly absent. The book is largely Speedy (later Arsenal) Roy Harper's; probably labeling this a Green Arrow book would equally be a misnomer, but what we really have here is a Teen Titans book, not a Nightwing book. If you're a fan of Nightwing and Speedy and the Titans, so much the better, but someone coming from Chuck Dixon or Kyle Higgins's Nightwing collections and expecting a Nightwing-focused story would be disappointed.

[Review contains spoilers]

Old Friends includes two stories from Action Comics Weekly, "Cheshire Contract" and "Rocks and Hard Places." The former, written by Titans scribe Marv Wolfman, is clearly the star of the show (it gets a mention on the back cover, while the second story does not). I have for a long time found the conflict between Roy and Cheshire interesting (probably spurred first by the "Deathstroke: Nuclear Winter" storyline), and so this early encounter held special interest for me. In this story, Lian Harper, so much a part of later Titans stories, is with Cheshire, and Roy has never met her; this is almost the first meeting of Roy and Lian, and that's notable for Titans buffs especially who mostly encountered Roy as Lian's single dad.

"Almost" is a key word there, because the book references but does not include New Teen Titans (second series) #20-21, which actually introduced Lian and the Roy/Cheshire conflict. Were this book owning up to its true identity as a Speedy collection, then these issues would be a logical fit. Instead we have Secret Origins #13; I wouldn't turn down the 1980s Secret Origins series being collected, either, but this book in total doesn't need a Nightwing origin the same as it needs to tell Roy and Lian's story the whole way instead of halfway.

Still, Wolfman does well with story in which Nightwing and Speedy try to foil Cheshire's assassination plots and rescue Lian (who is surprisingly red-haired in these stories, though her hair would later be depicted as black and her features more Asian like her mother's). The story, and also considerable use of narration blocks, all reflect the time in which they were written and understandably don't come off as "modern"; at the same time, Wolfman choreographs some surprisingly suspenseful fight sequences between Nightwing and Cheshire.

That "Cheshire Contract" is relatively strong, however, makes even more apparent that "Rocks and Hard Places" is not. Wolfman contributes a bit to the story's beginning, but the writer here is mainly Cherie Wilkerson; what little I could find is that Wilkerson has written for numerous animated shows but this is one of her few comics credits. The story posits an Irish heritage for Roy (which I'm not sure was canon or if Wilkerson extrapolated it from Roy's red hair), and it seems promising at least initially in presenting the next stage of new-dad Roy and Lian's lives, vacationing to find their roots.

The story, however, ultimately delves too deeply in the real-life facts of the conflict in Northern Ireland. On one hand, Wilkerson seems to assume in the reader a familiarity with the situation that they may not actually have (possibly this was less the case at the time when the conflict was more in the news than now); on the other hand, however, Wilkerson's story is at times groan-worthily silly, as when Nightwing and Speedy fight the terrorist F.O.E.s and the "foes of the F.O.E.s." The resolution also involved real apparently corrupt European politicians, and references to a variety of political matters; I don't want my comics dumbed-down by any stretch, but this felt too esoteric to me.

Nightwing disappears mid-way through the adventure and it is basically Speedy's story; I didn't mind that myself, but again, someone expecting Nightwing stories would be surprised.

Wilkerson also includes two plucky kids who help save the day a couple of times; this is probably par for the course in comics in the late 1980s, but I felt it came off as too cutesy. It's always nice to see more of artist Tom Mandrake's work, and he contributes moody images of both Nightwing and Speedy, but with the hair and clothing styles of the 1980s I found it difficult to discern the childrens' genders throughout.

One interesting artifact I noticed is that both Nightwing and Speedy's late-1980s costumes included a significant cut down the front, such to expose each character's "cleavage," if you will. They are surprisingly revealing male superhero costumes, at least by today's standards, and they suggest perhaps a comfortableness at the time simply with superheroes of both genders being muscular and attractive, instead of just the female ones. Nowadays we need the Hawkeye Initiative to point out inequities in male and female superhero costumes; the costumes in Old Friends offer a glimpse at a better time when everyone's costumes were silly, but more innocently so.

It's hard to see the exact sales angle intended for Nightwing: Old Friends, New Enemies. It trades, of course, on the popularity of the Nightwing character, but ultimately it's not really a Nightwing book; this is a Speedy collection, though I agree a Speedy-titled collection probably wouldn't sell. One has to believe the Arrow television show had something to do with the inception of this book ("If you like Roy Harper, here's some more stories about him"); a while ago DC published a collection of post-Crisis Superman stories under the Lois and Clark TV banner (stories that inspired the show), and quite possibly that's what this needed to be -- Tales of Arrow or some such (hey, someone publish that). As it is, this collection doesn't really hold up, but I'm glad to see a collection from this era nonetheless.

[Includes some covers]

More about →

Review: Nightwing Vol. 3: Death of the Family trade paperback (DC Comics)

Unfortunately the New 52 Nightwing series still fails to live up to the promise of the first volume, though there's always next time. Nightwing Vol. 3: Death of the Family, while drawn well specifically by artist Eddie Barrows, seems six issues really only in service of one or two big moments, with lots of filler in between. Writer Kyle Higgins offers another great cliffhanger that's likely to bring me back for the fourth volume even though the second and third didn't impress, though that's a trick I'm only likely to fall for so many times.

[Review contains spoilers]

The six issues in this collection (plus the mostly-generic Young Romance short) make up three stories: Nightwing vs. Lady Shiva, by guest-writer Tom DeFalco and artist Andres Guinaldo; the "Death of the Family" tie-in, by Higgins and Barrows, and then an epilogue and "Requiem" tie-in by Higgins and Juan Jose Ryp. The book's strongest story, not surprisingly, is by the title's regular team, though this volume marks Barrows's final issues in the series.

The New 52 debut of assassin Lady Shiva ought be a momentous occasion, but it seemed to me DeFalco's approach was too subtle on this one. In the first part, Nightwing perceives a drop-off in criminal activity, so he goes to ask the Penguin why, and Penguin straightaway tells him that it's because Lady Shiva is in town. Nightwing learns about a mobster trying to preemptively kill Shiva, except after a four-page gun battle it turns out Shiva's never there at all.

Shiva barely appears in the issue, and essentially her entire reputation for the reader is built on her past incarnations and hearsay -- as when Penguin emotes, "A wildcard is headed for Gotham -- an elite assassin who gives nightmares to even the sickest sociopaths! Lady Shiva," like something out of a Silver Age narration box -- rather than actually showing Shiva on the page. When Shiva does appear in the second part, her ten-page fight with Nightwing is impressive, and DeFalco wisely connects Shiva's goals to Nightwing Dick Grayson's own life. The two-parter, however, comes off as a fluffy one-parter that could have been shorter, and this is a trend that continues into the "Death of the Family" tie-in.

With the third issue, Barrows returns, and his dark, detailed art is perfect for the the story's late-night setting (DeFalco's Shiva battle took place in the day, which seems "off" for the Bat-family). But even as the first part of the "Death" tie-in is drawn nicely, Higgin's story lacks weight. Nightwing has to fight Raya, an old friend who betrayed him the first volume; though she never displayed any fighting prowess in that story, now she chases Nightwing around the room with knives. Higgins doesn't make Raya's inclusion about anything, other than simply being someone Dick knows; maybe that makes this story more reader-friendly for new readers, but to me it felt like a wasted opportunity. Raya here could as easily be Sonia Branch or Paragon from the second volume, and again this suggests to me the whole encounter is mainly filler to pass time for the second "Death" issue.

That second tie-in issue, Nightwing #16, is Higgins and Barrows's crowning triumph in this collection. Finally we get to the real (gruesome) meat of the story, in which the Joker "Joker-izes" Haly's Circus and the Amusement Mile that Dick has worked so hard to build. The purpose of the supporting cast Higgins has built of late, including the Sorranos family, comes clear as the Joker uses then all against Nightwing ... and then wholly destroys the circus. Kudos to Higgins, who has deftly built up Nightwing's life with no hints that he'd be wiping it all out; Barrows's splash page of the falling Ferris wheel captures the moment perfectly.

Ultimately Higgins's "Death of the Family" story is not as fraught at Gail Simone's Batgirl tie-in, nor does Barrows quite achieve the horrifying depiction of the Joker that Patrick Gleason does in Batman and Robin, but certainly this second issue is sufficient to show that Nightwing doesn't get out of "Death of the Family" unscathed.

The final two issues deal with Nightwing's guilt first over the destruction of the circus, and second over Damian Wayne's death over in Batman, Incorporated. These are two good issues, though reading this in a collection the flashbacks between the second and the first don't quite work; Damian is shown to be saying the same thing he just said, for the reader, two pages earlier.

For me, that these issues don't come off stronger has mainly to do with guest-artist Rip, whose characters' faces are wooden and unreadable (see Dick and Sonia in the coffee shop, sixth page of the final chapter). Also, Higgins risks sending Nightwing back into Black Mirror territory, and what was a wholly frightening villain under writer Scott Snyder and artist Jock seems run-of-the-mill now; rather than gaining strength from referencing Black Mirror, Higgins's use underlines how much less effective this story is than that one.

And then, Higgins hits us with the cliffhanger. I knew Nightwing would be moving to Chicago though I wasn't sure why or how Higgins would differentiate nighttime Chicago from Gotham, necessarily, but the book's last pages explain everything. Resurrecting Dick's parents' killer Tony Zucco might seem a cheap trick -- in essence, this gives Higgins license to tell "Robin's Reckoning" all over again -- but I'll be darned if seeing Nightwing track down Tony Zucco isn't just as much fun as Batman in Joe Chill stories. I have not been enthusiastic about this book's last two volumes, but oh, Nightwing versus Tony Zucco. It is a hard decision.

The titular portion of Nightwing Vol. 3: Death of the Family is good -- not great, but good. This is one, frankly, you might be better off reading in the Joker: Death of the Family collection than in Nightwing, and by and large you won't miss much. This is a case where I like the character but the series hasn't been thrilling me; what to do?

[Includes covers, Young Romance short; no bonus materials]

Later this week, Joe Harris's X-Files Season 10! 

More about →

Review: Nightwing Vol. 2: Night of the Owls trade paperback (DC Comics)

I praised Kyle Higgins and Eddy Barrows's first outing on the New 52 Nightwing as worthy of following that gold standard of Nightwing runs, Chuck Dixon's. If anything, I hoped Higgins would branch out and make Nightwing more his own, and the lead-up to the "Night of the Owls" crossover seemed headed in that direction.

Unfortunately, though I enjoyed Nightwing Vol. 2: Night of the Owls's "Owl" tie-in issues, I felt the series mostly took a step backward with this volume. Gone is Higgins's interesting Fugitive-eqsue device of having Dick Grayson travel the country with Haly's Circus, fighting crime from town to town as Nightwing; instead, Nightwing is largely Gotham-bound here, fighting an overblown and not very engaging villain.

Nightwing changes far less in this collection than I'd hoped, and I was left feeling as though I'd read a respectable Nightwing story, but not one that made me stand up and cheer like the first volume.

[Review contains spoilers]

It seemed to me there was a lot of story potential for Nightwing coming out of the "Night of the Owls" crossover. Dick has learned that he was secretly meant to be a Talon, one of the Court of Owl's undead assassins; his connection to the Court has also driven a small wedge between himself and Batman. "Night of the Owls" ought have irrevocably changed Nightwing -- his great-grandfather was a Talon, and now Nightwing can see the potential in himself for both heroism and villainy; how will Nightwing balance this new duality?

The answer is, by ignoring it almost entirely. After "Owls," Nightwing is framed for murder, but Higgins draws no parallels between Nightwing as a suspected murderer and what he's just learned about his history with the Court -- no consideration that the Court might be behind the murders, no suspicious glances from Batman, nada. "Night of Owls" could essentially not have happened and the subsequent three-part story wouldn't be any different.

Nightwing was framed, as it turns out, by the cult leader Paragon, whose group the Republic of Tomorrow wants to kill Gotham's heroes for some ill-defined reason that has to do with the "destruction" the Bat-family brings to Gotham. Paragon's obsessions lack nuance -- there's little discussion of how Paragon reconciles all the good the Bat-family does, or how Paragon would be a "better" hero himself.

The greater problem, however, is that Higgins passes up another opportunity to tie the book together thematically -- Paragon says that for Gotham to live, Nightwing must die, just like the Talon-obsessed Saiko did in Traps and Trapeezes, but here the story never considers Nightwing's dual roles as hero and threat or indeed whether his presence is good for Gotham. In the story, Paragon is simply an evil, crazed villain that the good Nightwing has to fight, without any shades of gray to their conflict.

It does not help that at a key moment in the Paragon story, series artist Eddy Barrows steps back and fill-in artist Andres Guinaldo takes over. It took a while for me to come around to Barrows's art, which seemed out of place on both Superman and Teen Titans but is perfectly suited for Nightwing's mostly-dark, nighttime scenes. Barrows has bold, clearly defined figures, and while Guinaldo echoes his style well, the fill-in chapters are less sure-footed -- Dick Grayson's face in issue #11 when he realizes Paragon's identity, for instance, could be suggesting pain or electrocution just the same as it could revelation. The art falters at the same time the story does, so the difficulties are doubly apparent.

A couple of times Higgins refers to the "Rossini murders," which as near as I can tell is a case Higgins made up for this story. Apparently during the New 52 "five-year gap," a Detective Nie planted evidence in order to turn the police against Batman, which makes Nie a suspect for a time in framing Nightwing. Higgin's inventing of the Rossini murders is mildly confusing but mostly intriguing; the main image the reader gets of the incident is Batman being chased down by a helicopter a la the first pages of Justice League: Origin, and I wondered if there was material here to help explain the New 52 Batman's uncertain relationship with Gotham PD, though Higgins doesn't make any more of it this time around.

The book finishes with the Nightwing "Zero Month" issue, teaming Higgins again with Barrows. The origin Higgins offers for Dick Grayson hews pretty closely to the pre-New 52 and/or to the animated Batman versions; Higgins hits the right emotional touchstones in hinting how Bruce Wayne sees his own tragic childhood in the murder of Dick's parents. Higgins adds some new touches that might be controversial, though I was happy to see Higgins putting his own spin on it -- that Dick works the computers for Batman for a while, like the pre-New 52 Tim Drake; that Dick deduces Batman's identity himself, also like the old Tim Drake; but also that Dick figures this out based on "reading" Batman's body language, like former Batgirl Cassandra Cain. Dick's "reading ability" isn't used anywhere else in the book, but I hope Higgins makes more of it, especially given Nightwing's upcoming run-in with Lady Shiva foreshadowed here.

It's an interesting choice that the origin Higgins gives us is Dick Grayson's as the first Robin, not as Nightwing, leaving the whys and wherefores of Dick Grayson "graduating" to Nightwing still to be told. Possibly that material is in the Red Hood and the Outlaws or Teen Titans "Zero Month" issues. It could also be that revealing Nightwing's origin would ventures too far into the New 52 continuity morass that DC has to this point left uncharted: the time in which we've been told Nightwing, Starfire, Arsenal, and others worked together pre-Outlaws, though not as "Titans." I might as soon have read Nightwing's origin here, and had all the Robin origins revealed in Batman and Robin or such.

In all, Kyle Higgins writes a respectable Nightwing and presents Dick Grayson's voice well; Eddy Barrows's flipping, flying figures are well suited for this series. Yet Nightwing Vol. 2: Night of the Owls doesn't distinguish itself this time past the crossover, and that's a shame. I'll be back to see how Nightwing fares in "Death of the Family," of course, and I understand there's both a change of venue for the hero coming up, plus Nightwing's big role in Forever Evil, so it's unlikely I'll be dropping this title soon; DC keeps devising ways to get me reading this book, but I wouldn't say I'm quite "hooked" yet.

[Includes full covers, sketches by Barrows, designs by Barrows, Brett Booth, and Kenneth Rocafort]

New reviews on the way!

More about →

Review: Nightwing Vol. 1: Traps and Trapezes trade paperback (DC Comics)

Kyle Higgins and Eddy Barrows's Nightwing: Traps and Trapezes is a good book. The DC Universe has lacked a Nightwing series for a few years and it's been the lesser for it, and it's nice to have one back and one that competently presents Nightwing Dick Grayson, too.

Nightwing is the book that offers the everyperson perspective on the DC Universe, the closest thing to a Batman book that doesn't star Batman and can equally tell stories about small Gotham crime or cosmic Justice League-level events. Grant Morrison and Scott Snyder told great Dick Grayson-as-Batman stories, but Higgins reminds the reader it's not the same thing as a Nightwing story.

Higgins and Barrows's New 52 Nightwing must inevitably be compared, however, to Chuck Dixon and Scott McDaniel's over a decade ago. Then, a Nightwing-out-on-his-own title was revolutionary, and Dixon's blend of action and humor and McDaniel's Nightwing flipping from panel to panel defined what a Nightwing series should be. Higgins and Barrows do not redefine Nightwing, despite some origin secrets that Higgins reveals here -- theirs is perfectly in line with what Nightwing has been before, no worse but not necessarily any fresher. Nothing wrong with that, though the reader might hope Higgins dares more as the series continues.

[Review contains spoilers]

Kyle Higgins's biggest accomplishment in Traps and Trapezes is to demonstrate he understands Nightwing. Higgins's Dick Grayson is pitch-perfect -- his quips when he fights crime; his confident-yet-self-depricating narration; that in each adventure he inevitably ends up in someone's bed, not because Dick is a ladies' man necessarily, but rather a fairly honest person that everyone takes a liking to. (On one end of the "likable person" spectrum is Dick Grayson and on the other end is John Constantine, which would make a team-up fascinating.) That just about every character learns Dick Grayson is Nightwing before the end of the book is par for the course -- the same has been true for a bevy of Nightwing's adventures.

Whereas Tony Daniel's Savage Hawkman made some updates to the character but otherwise told a story that didn't center on Hawkman per se, Higgins's Traps and Trapezes truly utilizes Dick Grayson. By the end of the first issue, Dick's back with the Haly's Circus of his childhood; by the end of the second issue, he owns the circus; and by the third, he's traveling on the circus train, fighting crime wherever it might stop. There is an overarching story, of course, but Higgins's vision for the book is clear, how Nightwing can be his own person, remain abreast of the goings-on in Gotham, but also have easy opportunities to interact with the larger DC Universe at the same time.

This is most apparent in the book's fifth and sixth issues, which have the least to do with the ongoing "secrets of Haly's Circus" storyline. In the fifth, the Haly's train stops in Chicago just as Batgirl just-so-happens to track a shapeshifting assassin there, so a team-up naturally occurs. In the sixth, a demon controlled by a jilted lover kidnaps the circus's clown and Nightwing has to rescue him. These are fine reads, though the least effective of the book's chapters since they don't forward the larger plot -- but they emerge like non-mythology X-Files episodes, the kinds of things The Fugitive would deal with when he wasn't looking for the one-armed man. For a book that's about to subsume two Batman crossovers, "Night of the Owls" and "Death of the Family," that Higgins demonstrates Nightwing can handle one-off stories isn't a bad thing.

The tweak that Higgins (and likely "Night of the Owls" writer Scott Snyder) make to Dick Grayson's origins is quite brilliant. Rather than muck with Dick's past with Batman or his process of becoming Robin (something that's earned Scott Lobdell some ire with Red Robin Tim Drake in Teen Titans), Higgins reveals a secret about Haly's Circus that Dick didn't even know. It's unfortunately only that -- so far as the reader knows right now -- the Court of Owls never had a chance to influence young Dick at all; the idea that Dick would have inevitably become part of the super-universe -- that Court of Owls training allowed him to become Robin, or else he would have been an evil Talon -- is an interesting one.

In the conclusion, Higgins duplicates a scene from Snyder's Batman: Court of Owls, telling it from Nightwing's perspective -- not coincidentally, what turns into a heated encounter is the first appearance of Batman in Higgins's Nightwing series. It's subjective, but Higgins and Barrows handle this scene better than Snyder and artist Greg Capullo did -- or, at least, the fact that Nightwing calls Batman unemotional and Batman punches Nightwing in the mouth plays better here than it did there.

Perhaps it's because, in the scene in Court of Owls, Batman is largely unemotional, and his striking Nightwing is cruel when Batman is otherwise calm. In contrast, Barrows puts the camera on Nightwing, who's nearly raving with an anger that has nothing to do with Batman, and the punch helps bring him back to his senses. Nightwing and Batman as enemies is a story already told to tiredness, and hopefully that's not the direction here, but in telling the "other half" of the story, Higgins and Barrows help mitigate the controversy of the scene.

Eddy Barrows's art has trended too dark at times, as in issues of the pre-New 52 Teen Titans, and didn't quite mesh with the cosmic superheroics of the Superman titles and the New Krypton books. But roundabout Superman: Grounded, Barrows's lines gained a certain solidity, especially when simply depicting two characters talking -- and Nightwing is a perfect venue for all Barrows's strengths; plenty of night scenes, plenty of talking. These pages are so strong that it's immediately apparent when Barrows cedes to a guest artist -- though having former pre-52 Nightwing artist Trevor McCarthy here gives nice continuity to the volume.

Ultimately, Nightwing is in safe hands with Kyle Higgins. Nightwing: Traps and Trapezes does not break new ground and is a book largely in service to Scott Snyder's Batman book -- and it seems that it will be for the next volume or two, at least -- but for Nightwing fans who have been missing a Nightwing title, that just might be OK.

[Includes original covers. Sketchbook page by Cully Hamner and by Eddy Barrows]

Next week, I'll be popping up for some holiday conversation, but review-wise you will be in the capable hands of our guest bloggers Doug Glassman, Zach King, and Greg Elias. Happy holidays everyone!

More about →

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 ... ?

More about →

Review: Nightwing: The Great Leap trade paperback (DC Comics)

[Contains spoilers for Battle of the Cowl and the general new Batman direction]

Peter Tomasi offers an impressive end to a troubled book in Nightwing: The Great Leap. In many ways it seems the "Batman Reborn" storyline coming out of Batman: RIP is less about the popular Grant-Morrison-helmed Batman title itself than about the ancilliary Bat-titles, none of which were hitting the top of the charts given numerous rotating creative teams. Each must now bow out, and there are right and wrong ways to do so; Tomasi gets it right, and believably sets up Nightwing for the next phase in his life.

Nightwing, most readers know by now, becomes the new Batman in the wake of Battle for the Cowl; this trajectory is something I couldn't help but see in The Great Leap, and as well surely something that Tomasi intends. One of the winningest moments of this book is when Tomasi has Dick Grayson leave his home in New York and take the train in to Gotham City, much as a young Bruce Wayne, in Batman: Year One took the train into Gotham after his travels abroad.

In this, Tomasi suggests that all of Nightwing's past to this point is prologue, and his role now as Gotham's protector is where the real story begins. Tomasi ends the story clearing away much of the baggage that other writers created between Batman and Nightwing, leaving it that Bruce Wayne cared for Dick Grayson, and now Dick will care for Gotham in Bruce's stead. There's plenty of ways in which this is too easy or quick, but certainly it's the happy ending that the Nightwing title always needed to end with, and I very much admire Tomasi for delivering it.

In the wake of Batman's disappearance, the Harvey Dent aspect of Two-Face recruits Nightwing to help save an endangered trial witness from Two-Face himself. The encounter with Two-Face reminds Nightwing of their early defining battle when he was Robin, even as the Bat-family comes to grips with Batman's apparent death. Nightwing must later contend with Ra's al Ghul while deciding what his role will be in a Gotham without Batman.

Roundabouts Batman: Prodigal, another story that saw Nightwing considering life post-Batman, someone at DC noticed that Two-Face factored heavily into the origins of Robins Jason Todd and Tim Drake, and as such retroactively added a major fight between Dick Grayson and Two-Face. Viola; instant arch-enemy. Though not much has been done with that story since, Tomasi picks it up here, giving Nightwing and Two-Face a relationship somewhat akin to Wally West and Zoom in Flash -- Two-Face becomes like Nightwing's "other father," opposite of Batman, who introduced Dick to fear rather than hope from a young age.

Most notably, Tomasi offers an epilogue to "The Great Leap" storyline (with great art by Doug Mahnke) where Nightwing and Two-Face simply talk, and where Nightwing notes that he does not see the former Harvey Dent when he looks at Two-Face, only the villain. This is a startling difference between Nightwing and Batman, well-concieved by Tomasi, and it's part of Tomasi's characterization of Nightwing in this book that helps one see Nightwing not so much as his own man, but as a worthy successor to the Batman. Nightwing appears here as having learned the lessons of his mentor, enough such that as Batman he would do his mentor proud.

There's many such instances like that in this book. Deb, Tomasi's romantic complication du jour for Dick Grayson, breaks up with him in one of the most bloodless and amicable splits in comic book (and certainly Batman) history; Dick accepts that his life is now meant to be spent in service of Gotham City and he takes only that role without the angst we've seen before. When Nightwing assists the Justice League with the building of a heroes' memorial, we see in Nightwing the friendship with other heroes that Batman couldn't accomplish; when Dick Grayson jumps out of an airplance, breaking records only he will know about, we see his peace in an inner life that Bruce Wayne never had. This is a Nightwing, the reader understands, who has learned both from Batman's tutelage and mistakes, and as such his ascension to the cowl makes a perfect sense when at times it couldn't have seemed more unlikely.

For me, The Great Leap cements Peter Tomasi as a writer to watch. The climactic fight that he writes between Nightwing and Two-Face, with scarred acidic pennies raining from the sky and Nightwing jumping between flying dirigibles to reach Two-Face is nothing short of an astounding action scene (with credit, too, to Doug Kramer and Rags Morales for selling these concepts throughout the book). One of my favorite Batman stories is Marv Wolfman's A Lonely Place of Dying, which introduced Tim Drake but also pits Batman against Two-Face; Two-Face is in his hokey glory here with exploding death traps and "two"-related clues; it was that kind of widescreen, manic, Bat-action joy that I felt Tomasi captured. I've liked Tomasi's work on Green Lantern Corps, and the action and heart he brings to The Great Leap make me eager for what this writer might do next.

[Contains full and variant covers, Origins & Omens pages]

Read another review of Nightwing: The Great Leap at Oz and Ends.

More about →

Review: Nightwing: Freefall trade paperback (DC Comics)

Peter J. Tomasi offers the most respectful, appropriate rendition of Nightwing that we've seen in a long, long time in Nightwing: Freefall. It still strikes me as another in a series of entirely misguided takes on the character, and it's hardly surprising that, a few trades from now, DC Comics has decided to cancel and/or relaunch this title. But Tomasi, at least, has his heart in the right place; this is the Nightwing that DC should have started with after Infinite Crisis.

Freefall finds Nightwing on the trail of someone snatching superheroic corpses, a scheme tied up in the war between Talia al Ghul and her recently resurrected father. It's an investigation Nightwing joins largely by accident, and I wondered at times whether this was truly a Nightwing-specific story, or one where any hero could play the title role. What I found is that, were this a Batman story, the Dark Knight would be so tied up in mixed feelings about Talia that the story couldn't help but deal in melodrama; with Nightwing, Tomasi's instead able to give us a straightforward, more upbeat superhero detective story without all the strings attached. Here, Nightwing isn't Batman-light but Batman-lighter; Freefall offers the action without the grim and gritty.

Tomasi writes Nightwing as I'd like him to be (if not exactly where and why). Considering the sleazy Dick Grayson we saw in Bruce Jones's Nightwing: Brothers in Blood, Tomasi's Dick Grayson is a saint, charming around his new co-workers and love interest, and moreover friends with the entire DCU Universe, from the Bat-family to Superman, the Titans, and the JSA. This was Batman's object lesson in changing his ways during Infinite Crisis (legend has it that Dan DiDio halted Nightwing's Infinite Crisis death sentence for this reason also), and it's on display here. Tomasi's Dick Grayson acts normal, and it's hard to understand why others writers couldn't pose him the same.

Great credit for this story must also go to Rags Morales, who drew an emotional Nightwing in Identity Crisis and does an equally nice job here. Much of this far-more-proper Nightwing comes through in Morales' clean lines, detailed architecture, and renditions of New York City. Morales is also the perfect pick to draw the great assembly of DCU characters who appear here; Morales, in my opinion, still draws the definitive Dr. Mid-Nite off his pivotal scene in Identity Crisis.

And yet, Tomasi's Nightwing, for all its respectfulness, doesn't hit the mark either. Dick Grayson, as head curator of the Cloisters? Not only is Dick suddenly gleaning all the knowledge necessary to head one of the foremost medieval museums in the county more far-fetched than a man dressed as a bat fighting crime, but it's also completely and totally out of character. I far sooner see Dick as a police officer or gym instructor (as lacking in dramatic tension as that may be) than a museum curator.

Not a little of Dick's new job seems to be in service of Tomasi's determination to make New York city a main character in his stories. As with Tomasi's Green Lantern Corps issue of The Sinestro Corps War, it seems Tomasi has literally mapped out how a superhero might get from here to there in New York City, and then populates the story accordingly. This is on one hand a lot of fun (I liked Nightwing swinging past Lincoln Center), and on the other hand incredibly annoying and beginning to get repetitive. When Nightwing talks about obscure New York landmarks, Tomasi loses the character's voice in favor of his own, and it drew me, at least, out of the story (though I learned a lot!).

Chuck Dixon wrote what I think will ultimately be remembered as the definitive Nightwing, positing Dick Grayson as a down-to-earth twenty-something with an urban home base fighting police corruption, up to and including Dick becoming a police officer himself. Of the writers who have come after, none of their renditions have quite achieved my own imagining, at least, of what the original Robin might be like as an adult--not reluctant mobster, not damaged playboy, not soul-searching gymnastics instructor, and not museum curator, either.

But I give Peter Tomasi credit for writing a comic--and a Bat-family comic especially--that is deeply steeped in the DC Universe, and one that puts a bit of shine back on the original Robin, to boot. Tomasi's got me for the next volume, no question.

[Includes full covers]

Next up in the Bat-verse is Robin: Violent Tendencies, with the return of ... ?

More about →