Nightwing #96 // Review
Blüdhaven is burning. Dick Grayson is face-to-face with the guy who is responsible for the fire. The bad news: the gentleman in question knows that he’s Dick Grayson. He confronted the guy in costume, and now one of the most dangerous men in Gotham City knows who he is. Things get quite a bit more complicated in Nightwing #96. Writer Tom Taylor wraps up “The Battle for Blüdhaven’s Heart” with an issue featuring art by Bruno Redondo with inks by Caio Filipe. A deep and impressive atmosphere is added to the page by colorist Adriano Lucas.
Blockbuster is beating the hell out of Nightwing. He’s okay, though. It’s not like he hasn’t faced someone twice his size before. And Nightwing’s pretty resourceful. A well-placed hardcover Melville might be used as a weapon. Meanwhile, Batgirl’s outside helping put out fires of a couple of different kinds. There are a lot of different ways to defuse a conflict. Sometimes all you need is the right information. And things might seem impossible, but with the right leverage, even the biggest problems can be thrown through the nearest window. There’s always going to be another threat, but given the right momentum, Dick Grayson will come out on top.
Taylor’s sense of humor gets a little weird in places. It doesn’t always fit the dark and gritty action mood of the series. Comics Code-like seals covering obscenities? Cute, but it doesn’t quite work in context. Moby-Dick as a weapon? Well...that actually IS kind of cool. Some of the dialogue has a brilliant wit for action drama. Taylor’s pacing is nearly perfect as well. What’s more--Taylor has a better grasp of what makes Batgirl appealing than most writers have managed in recent years as well. All in all, it’s one of the more entertaining straight-ahead action comics of the month.
Redondo and Filipe have a cleverly playful sense of kinetic action that lights up the page as Nightwing faces Blockbuster. Smaller heroes have been facing-off against big, hulking villains since the dawn of comics, but Redondo and Filipe manage to make the trope feel fresh and interesting visually. The art team follows Taylor’s grasp of what makes Batgirl cool as well. She’s brave. She’s confident. And she looks totally badass in the dark blue lipstick Lucas provides her with. Lucas’s colors also manage to capture some of the distinctive look of the sky over a burning neighborhood, giving the action a very strong and dramatic grounding.
Taylor and Redondo have been doing some really remarkable work with Nightwing. It’s a fresh look at Gotham that delivers depth in comedy, drama, and action while also giving the look and feel of the varied architecture in the background that one might expect out of the second largest city in the DC Universe’s US. It’s so rare that a series works so well on so many different levels. With any luck, the series can look forward to many more months of Taylor and Redondo. (It’s always so frustrating when a team like this fades out of a series.)
