Nightwing #1

Writer: Tim Seeley
Artist: Javier Fernández
Colors: Chris Sotomayor
Letters: Chris M. Mangual
Publisher: DC Comics
 

On the Rebirth special, Dick Grayson extracted a bomb from Damian Wayne's brain, the Parliament of Owls was using said bomb to blackmail Nightwing into doing their biding. With the threat removed, Nightwing infiltrated the Parliament of Owls. That's basically the set-up for “Better than Batman” which is the first arc of Nightwing before the Monster Men crossover. More importantly though, Nightwing: Rebirth book was fun and clever, so I was looking forward to reading this issue.

Nightwing #1 follows Dick as he has started to work for the Parliament of Owls, he refuses to kill so the Parliament decides to pair him with Raptor, one of their operatives, for a mission in Europe. Dick working alongside morally ambiguous partners was the entire premise of Grayson, but Raptor seems to be more of a classical villain and having gone back and read the first few issues of Grayson over the weekend (shout out DC's Comixology sale) I can understand why Seeley would fall back on that template, even if this book has a darker tone.

Before leaving for Europe, Dick Grayson goes back to Gotham to say goodbye to Bruce Watne and Barbara Gordon. I had a bit of a problem with the better part of the book relying on Batgirl, Batman and Robin so much, it's not a terrible thing as Seeley is really good at writing Dick and Barbara together and his Damian is actually a lot of fun but it definitely feels like a retread of the Rebirth special. The book isn't as structured as the last one but Seeley does build Raptor into an interesting villain, his equipment is intriguing and his Suyolak speech is neat but I felt like some of his other dialogue was very clunky.

There's a definitely a drop-off in the quality of the art as well. With the same uneven layouts but less splash pages, the book ends up feeling congested. The art oscillates between being very clean and having a lot of heavy shadows which makes the characters look weird sometimes. While there's a lot of panels with lots of movement that have the characters out of focus, Fernández is great at drawing the character's bodies in believable poses and making the action scenes feel energetic.

I liked reading Nightwing: Rebirth a lot, and this book does enough to keep me interested in the series but in the end I found it lacking. Nightwing #1 repeats a lot of beats from the Rebirth one-shot, hopefully next issue picks up the pace.