Nightwing #111 review

Now that’s a great cover. Bruno Redondo understands composition, colour and how a great logo can play well against the visuals. And I always like a good dot matrix. I think we need a tee shirt.

The interiors aren’t by Redondo but they still look terrific. Sami Basri brings this Gotham-set issue to visual life, with page after page of strong storytelling, marrying sharp layouts to nicely rendered characters. Basri provides full art on a few pages with Vicente Cifuentes inking the majority of the book and I can’t tell the difference, they work very well together.

If this is Basri auditioning for a regular Gotham gig, surely he has it in the bag – he draws a striking Batman.

‘There’s a child.’ That line becomes a mantra for this issue, as the little lad who has just seen his dad murdered prompts memories of the day the Flying Graysons died, leaving Dick in the hands of Bruce and Alfred.

The repetition by writer Tom Taylor doesn’t make the story poetic, but neither does it particularly bring down proceedings; he does a good job. First off, marks for remembering there’s a killer named Heartless on the loose… it’s been so long since we’ve seen him that I’m not sure readers will. Why this villain has kept Dick Grayson on his toes for about three years of real time, I have no idea. And this issue, as he apparently moves his operations to Gotham, Dick doth protest too much.

Nightwing is one of the World’s Greatest Detectives, up there with Detective Chimp, the Elongated Man and Batman himself. If he applied himself he’d have caught the killer by now; heck, Heartless has taunted Dick with the fact he knows his dual identity, should that not provide some impetus to get him off the streets? Along with the small matter of horribly slaughtered citizens of Blüdhaven.

Ah well, now Dick has Batman on the case too, surely the killer who Hoovers out hearts – including that of big Nightwing baddie Blockbuster – will soon be in Arkham, or Blackgate, or better still, the grave. There is, though, a bump in the road as regards what should be a comfortable reteaming of hero and sidekick.

Nightwing can’t jump, something we first saw in #107 but not really since then, unless my memory has been scrambled by all the Knight Terrors and Beast World shenanigans since then. That’s entirely possible.

The story takes a couple of surprising turns, and I look forward to seeing what happens next. I could have lived without a fair amount of this issue focusing on what Dick means to Batman – Bruce even narrates proceedings. It’s familiar stuff, but I did enjoy seeing Alfred in the flashback to Dick’s origin, chiding the brat we readers know will grow up to be Heartless.

Scenes like this remind us how stupid it is that DC is keeping Alfred off the page in current day stories. So he’s dead. Bring him back alive.

Then he can tell me what book he’s on about here.

Going back to the art for a sec, look at that lady with the kid outside the Big Top, Basri has thought through how people would react to seeing performers murdered before their eyes. There’s also a great shot showing the feet of audience members scurrying away in a panic.

The lovely colours are, as usual, by Adriano Lucas, while Wes Abbott letters this story and the back-up strip with his usual grace.

All in all, this is my favourite Nightwing chapter in quite a while, it’s good to finally get back to Heartless after months of Titans tales followed by a pirate storyline whose only purpose seemed to be to get Dick into sexy buccaneer gear.

And then there’s that back-up. Which really did get my back up. Do excuse me, I’m going to re-read it, having come to it yesterday when I was on strong painkillers for a randomly painful left foot… safe to say Gray man can’t jump. Anyway, two ticks…

OK. Read it twice more. It’s still not my cup of tea. ‘The Son of Gray’ constitutes moody artwork illustrated in full colour by the superb Francesco Francavilla of a young fella in 14th-century Normandy running around after finding his father’s corpse and getting revenge on some of the people involved.

We meet their boss on the final page, and it’s a great design, but basically a medieval version of a very familiar figure. And the Dick ancestor has a Nightwing-style symbol on his chest, paints on a mask with the ashes of his father and uses pikestaffs in the manner of Nightwing and his Bat-sticks. I’m so over the ‘hero’s ancestor was a hero prototype’ bit. This final scene is where we get the only spoken dialogue in the story and it is horribly contrived, and worse, predictable. Editor Jessica Berbey should have said, ‘Non’.

Perhaps the closing part next issue will be more compelling – I enjoyed some of Conrad’s Wonder Woman work hugely – but this is terribly tedious. I wish this series would just dump the back-ups and lower the price.