Nightwing #118 Comic Book Review

The finale to the Tom Taylor/Bruno Redondo run is here! In Nightwing #118, Dick Grayson battles Heartless in a final showdown!

Writer: Tom Taylor
Artist: Bruno Redondo
Colorists: Bruno Redondo & Adriano Lucas
Letter: Wes Abbott
Cover Artist: Bruno Redondo
Variant Cover Artists: Jamal Campbell, Serg Acuna, Bruno Redondo, Nicola Scott & Tirso Cons
Release Date: October 16, 2024

This comic book review contains spoilers.

Tony Zucco is arrested, but quickly set free after one of the arresting officers reveals that Heartless has his child abducted. Speaking of Heartless, Gerald warns him that the heart he took from Blockbuster is starting to give out, but Shelton Lyle reassures Gerald that it will last long enough for Dick Grayson’s heart to replace it. Posing as Dick, Heartless announces that he will raze The Haven and kill anyone who stands in his way.

The Bat-family are all on the job in finding the kidnapped children, while Dick takes Haley over to the Haven where a group of Bludhaven’s citizens are standing against Heartless and his men. As everyone realizes that Dick was framed, he’s informed by Oracle and Melinda that the kids have all be found safely. Heartless’ men immediately turn on him, prompting his escape. Dick chases after him as Nightwing, unknowingly followed by Haley. Heartless presumes he can get away due to Dick’s fear of heights, but realizes too late that that fear has been conquered before getting kicked in the face.

Just as Nightwing is about to apprehend Heartless once and for all, Gerald and Zucco show up at the docks, putting Dick at gunpoint. Haley arrives in the nick of time, chomping Gerald’s arm and sending him into the water, but not before he gets a shot off, shooting Bite-Wing in the chest. Lyle, now furious at Zucco after learning the mobster’s original intention was to kill young Dick Grayson, takes his revenge by stabbing Zucco in the face with his Heart-Gun, killing him instantly. Hoping the violence takes Dick off his game, Heartless is instead told what a pathetic loser he is and is roundly outmatched by Nightwing. Since fleeing The Haven, his Blockbuster heart had been smoking and is finally starting to give out. Nightwing asks how can he save him, to which Lyle grabs for Dick’s chest. Dick pushes him off and watches him die slowly, telling him that he’ll keep his identity secret, and make names out of his victims, so that Blüdhaven will never again be defined by crime and murder.

At the end, Dick, Babs, Melinda and Audre visit the graves of John and Mary Grayson. Dick apologizes for not having visited earlier, introduces them to Melinda, and tells them that he intends to marry Barbara some day. As he and Babs put a bouquet of Pennyworth Blue flowers at their grave, he tells them that he found a new home where his heart is. We end on a colorfully blue shot of the Blüdhaven skyline as Nightwing, Oracle and Bite-Wing look on. THE END.

After three and a half years, we’ve finally reached the end of the momentous, award-winning run of issues by Writer Tom Taylor and Artist Bruno Redondo. While my personal feelings on the run have been up and down, it’s safe to say that this will go down as one of the most memorable and widely enjoyed series in the character’s canon, and for good reason. Nightwing has been a tricky series to maintain over the years, after the stellar series began with writer Chuck Dixon and artist Scot McDaniel. That run – like everything else on the shelves at the time in the late 90s – is rightly held up as a classic. And while I very much enjoy Devin Grayson’s run on the title up until issue #93, it’s been a series of hit and misses throughout the years. The runs by Peter Tomasi and Kyle Higgins were solid, but other eras to my mind haven’t really risen above the others. Most notoriously was the Ben Percy/Dan Jurgens “Ric Grayson” era, which was more editorially mandated than anything, but by most agreed remains a low point in Nightwing’s franchise. To go from that to an Eisner-winning series by Taylor and Redondo is a wonderful feat, and should rightly be exalted.

Ultimately, it’s my opinion that Taylor and Redondo’s run peaked around Nightwing #100 or around the time the Blockbuster arc ended. While that arc was somewhat a retread of Dixon’s run with Blockbuster being the main crime lord that Nightwing had to defeat, there was enough fresh energy and fun writing that kept it engaging, as well as differentiating it from what came before. Crucially, we were also given to revival of the Dick and Babs romance. This has gone underdiscussed, but in my opinion the best thing Taylor did during his era was reestablish their romance, as DC had been against it for too long in the past couple of decades. Dick and Babs hadn’t been romantically involved since the Devin Grayson run (about 20 years), and every time they’ve been hinted at getting close together, such as the Batman/Catwoman marriage tie-in issue, something calamitous would happen. Things reached an egregious head in Batgirl #50 where Barbara blamed Dick for his own head trauma and amnesia. Things just were not good between them for too long a time, and although I’ve seen readers roll their eyes and blanche at the gooey lovey-dovey ness of their love, it feels far more right than not, and also another boon to the Dixon run where their romance originally began in earnest.

More than anything else, Taylor’s run signaled an embracing of positivity and heroism in the DC Universe, with Nightwing being positioned as the hero best suited to carry on legacy of the previous generation, which is another element to the character that had been lost. While the era under Dan Didio saw Dick faking his death and getting amnesia, previous eras had established Nightwing as a crucial pillar which pulled relationships together. This goes back to several eras of the Titans, including Geoff Johns’ 2003 run, Devin Grayson’s JLA/Titans and way back even further with the Titans/Outsiders crossover in the 1980s when Dick took charge over directing the two teams, commanded over by Batman. Several times in this series, Taylor has shown that heroes will drop everything to help out Nightwing, and while that reeked of being an easy crutch, it always made sense from a character perspective. It was also not for nothing, with Dick being presented as the most outgoing, optimistic hero aside from Superman. The issues where he’s helping Jon Kent and teaming up with Tim Drake were terrific, and showed that the creative team could do wonders with the character because they had such a mastery of who he was and how he interacts with people.

Unfortunately, it would be those positive points that over time brought the run down in my eyes. As nice and happy and fun to read as the book generally was, reading month to month revealed Taylor’s aversion to steep stakes and actual danger. Too often things would get solved off-panel, or Oracle would be monitoring the situation just enough to get back-up to Nightwing right on time so that the bad guys never stood a chance. A show of power of that magnitude is logical for iconic heroes like these, but too often and it becomes the death of suspense and drama. And while there were sufficient cliffhangers such as Blockbuster about to kill Melinda or finding Nightwing unmasked, or even bombing his apartment building, everything was solved with such speed and anodyne harmlessness that it became clear we were going to be taken on much of a thrill ride with this book. By the second year, it was apparent that Nightwing was the title you went for good vibes. Did that tone match Dick Grayson’s character? Certainly, but it also failed in my opinion at providing basic logic when the story needed it most.

Take for example Dick’s sudden fear of heights. It’s never been mentioned before, and when it happens it’s not dwelled upon too much before the scenes change over. Then, one issue, Dick tells us the reader that he fell when he was a kid and had a phobia for a while until he got help (later revealed to be from Deadman). Then, in last issue when he realizes the cause of his fear, he solves it in between the panels.

That kind of writing when it comes to personalizing the hero’s trauma was far too much telling without showing. A fear of heights is something that should absorb an entire issue of Nightwing with us inside Dick’s head, heart racing just as his does. But either the plot has to move at a certain pace or, more believably to my mind, Taylor didn’t want to stick with it for too long so as to not have the book become too heavy.

A lot of my reviews over the years has been presuming what’s in Tom Taylor’s head, and I never mean any disparagement or offense. He’s a very solid writer and definitively one of the very best Nightwing writers of all time. But with this final issue, all of the familiar problems rear their heads, and I just circle back to years’-long critiques.

So finally, Nightwing #118

What I enjoyed most about this finale (in addition to Redondo’s glamourous artwork), was the seeding of Heartless’ heart giving out on him, which was dropped early in the issue and through the art carried through to its natural end. I also liked his men immediately turning on him, showing not just that they hated him for kidnapping their children, but that Dick’s presence and hopefulness really did change Blüdhaven for the better. I liked the way Heartless died, and that while Nightwing tried to save him, he didn’t mourn the fact that he couldn’t (Dick in this issue overall appeared very mature and there was a minute speck of Batman in how Redondo drew him). The final scene at the graves of the Graysons was also nice.

Unfortunately there was familiar dissatisfaction with how things turned out in this final issue. The devil is in the details.

1. What exactly was Heartless going to do with Zucco? Taylor had given him some hero worship, but it’s not until things turned pear-shaped that he kills him that he starts ranting about how Zucco wanted to kill Dick, not his parents, and that Heartless is a self-made man. I get him killing Zucco as a means of denying Nightwing justice (a bit abstract but I get it still), but the scene plays out like it’s a sudden realization. It’s unclear. Also, what difference does it make to Heartless whether Zucco tried to kill Dick or his parents?
2. Zucco’s presence in this whole run has been problematic from start to finish. Revisiting elements from the origin story with new details and retcons is too big a swing to pull off successfully, and although in the long run I turn around on the idea that Dick was meant to die as being interesting, because it is, I’m not sure what it adds. Remember, Zucco has had a daughter before in the Higgins New 52 run, quickly forgotten about. Despite this being a famous series of issues, do we think Melinda is going to stick around for much longer after Taylor? Maybe she will, but it doesn’t feel like it, as her characterization hasn’t been much to speak of when it comes to Zucco being back in the series. That sems to be why he was brought back. There’s also just the irritating fumbling about Dick’s origin in the finer details, such as the idea that Zucco was never apprehended for the murder of the Graysons to begin with. It reads less of a retcon and more of just a mistake. If Taylor had presented a flashback to Dick’s first case as Robin and him and Batman arresting Zucco on different charges, vowing to tie him to the Graysons’ murder some day, I would roll with that. But it’s taken for granted that Zucco is like Joe Chill, and that he got away with his crimes. But he didn’t! Which returns to the point I raised in Nightwing #99 that Zucco has been brought back several times before and always dies sooner or later in those instances, the difference being that he was quickly taken down for killing the Graysons.

I think it would’ve been better if Zucco never appeared in this book at all. He’s not innately threatening, and Taylor establishes pretty quick that Nightwing isn’t going to kill him, so there’s little tension there aside from nagging at Dick’s heartstrings. But I feel the character would actually have more menace if he weren’t around, and his ghost haunted Melinda and inspired Heartless (figuratively speaking). Him just standing around, being broken out of prison or freed from arrest again and again implies that he’s going to do something, but he basically just stands around until he’s killed for the fifth or sixth time, making the entire use of him feel shallow.

3. Did Gerald die? From getting bitten in the arm and falling into water? Was he a robot? I don’t remember.

My biggest issue with this is just the pacing and sequencing of events. It’s not surprising that the Bat-family find the kids off-panel, but there’s a scene of them searching which gives the idea that we might see them deduce their location. But no, one scene they’re looking and the next, the kids are found. Same with the citizens of Blüdhaven who arrive at The Haven to fend off Heartless. A scene of what’s going through their heads as they are about to fight who they think is their hero Dick Grayson would’ve added more pathos to that whole sequence, but they aren’t even given much dialogue. Also, what was Heartless’ plan at the end? Was he going to just destroy Blüdhaven, then skip town? Where would he head to next, Gotham?  Lyle Shelton was an evil man, but this level of unexplained villainy is too one-dimensional to invest in.

Ultimately this issue – and to some extent the last year or so of Nightwing – reads as though Taylor began skipping steps in the drafting, as he may have been bogged down due to time. Three years ago he was only writing this and Dark Knights of Steel. Since then he took on Superman, Titans and Titans Beast World. Without suggesting that his enjoyment of writing Nightwing has tapered off, it feels as though he may’ve been too distracted to fine-tune the end of this arc. So many things happen too quickly and without much time to leave any marks. Remember Bruce suiting up as Nightwing’s replacement when Dick was out of action? That was barely three pages between two issues. I’m looking forward to Taylor on Detective Comics, but the last year-plus of his work has shown me the highs and lows of his efforts in scripting details.

In the end, this run – despite all of its blemishes – is still ending up in the upper echelon of Nightwing runs of all time. Top five minimum, personally I’d even have it crack the top three. Despite my problems with the writing, characterization was rarely an issue, and that takes precedent above all else. Add that with some amazing artwork and and ultimately appreciable sense of optimism and positivity, and you still have a run for the ages.

Editor’s Note: You can find this comic and help support TBU in the process by purchasing this issue digitally on Amazon or a physical copy of the title through Things From Another World.