Yes, "chaotic arc" indeed. Unfortunately, it’s not much of a finale, because, well, nothing actually gets resolved. If you recall the last issue, you might remember that Jason Todd, dressed as Nightwing, was stuck in a solid gel of super-villain barf after pretending to be a super-hero; Cheyenne Freemont, dressed as Nightwing, was standing around in a fan-wank costume, pretending to be a super-hero; and Dick Grayson, dressed as Nightwing, was just pretending to be a super-hero. You can see Cheyenne in her costume on the cover to the side, but that’s not the actual cover that shipped.
The Nightwings were squaring off against Barry and Buddy Pierce, twins with ill-defined super-powers (one apparently can contract his atoms, the other can expand his). Oh, and they keep babbling about "Cleveland" in a way that makes every other character babble about "Cleveland."
Anyhow, Jason only has a certain amount of time before he suffocates. Time for a smack down! Nightwing (I’ll use that name to refer to Dick) and Cheyenne hatch an ingenious plan to make Barry free Jason by insulting the size of his penis. Barry’s penis, I mean, not Jason’s. But really, does it matter? Cheyenne is such a fan-service character that it really doesn’t matter.
With Jason free, Nightwing embarks on a fascinating plan to defeat 50% of the problem. He must have been reading all of Batman’s battle plans, since he comes up with a beauty: tire the guy out. Wow. Hard to believe this is the same guy who masterminded the defeat of Trigon. Oh, and they babble about "Cleveland" some more.
Finally, Nightwing gets Barry just where he wants him: a position that Nightwing should know well: Barry with his hands around Nightwing’s throat. Is that some sort of Bruce Jones fetish?
Jason Todd joins Nightwing, having gained the powers of the creature than swallowed him last issue. No kidding. Jason eats Barry, then barfs him up. Is that some sort of Bruce Jones fetish, too?
Anyhow, Buddy gets pissed that Jason ate and regurgitated his brother, so takes the opportunity to ramble about "Cleveland" then explodes. I guess they exploded in Cleveland, too, but considering the lameness of the explosion, I’m not sure why they kept harping on it.
So, at the end of the story, Jason (a murderer), gets away and nothing at all happens to the Pierce brothers. What a finale! Oh, and Cheyenne is also a murderer, but it was self-defense. Still, it was her own damn fault.
We still have Bruce Jones for a while longer, then Marv Wolfman gets an arc (I’m looking forward to it, because, truthfully, it’s got to be better than this). But let’s look at this arc from two perspectives: firstly, was it a good reintroduction to Nightwing? Not really. There’s nothing that makes me want to continue to read about the character, and there was no actual character development, and the supporting characters introduced are, well, underwhelming. Contrast that with some of the other "One Year Later" titles: Birds of Prey, for example, reintroduced the team and new mysteries, without sacrificing the core concept. Nightwing’s problem is that there is no core concept, so every writer just writes stories that could replace Nightwing with any other character and still be as good (or, in this case, as bad).
That leads to the next perspective: was this arc a good story? I’d go with "no." Nothing is resolved in the end, and the plot itself, if you can call it that, had no dramatic tension, no mystery that needed to be solved, nothing. It was a Nightwing comic that existed to simply be a Nightwing comic, to fill a place. It can’t even claim the Batman, Junior title that Chuck Dixon had turned Nightwing into.
With every writer of Nightwing, I’m just amazed at how DC Comics just can’t manage to make the character work (for me, at least, judging by the 122 issues of the series so far, it must be working for someone). That Nightwing has lasted so long must count for something: people like the character. I want to like the stories.
I’ll let Dick sum it up for me:
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Responses to “Nightwing #122: The Finale of Our Chaotic Arc?”
So…this issue was just as bad as it looked then.
There are so many directions to take Nightwing, so why was this chosen?
Almost makes Outsiders look coherent, even though it’s obvious that Winick’s Nightwing is supposed to be Jason Todd, not Dick Grayson.
The way things are going, maybe Dick would have been better off dying in Infinite Crisis.
July 31st, 2006 at 8:43 pm |
Out of morbid curiosity inspired by your Nightwing reviews, I actually read this one and, while not as mind-numbingly horrible as I had imagined it would be, it definitely was not even close to what one would call “good.” The Cleveland gag got old almost immediately, and the ill-defined bad guy powers made my head hurt like all ill-defined powers do. But, there wasn’t the total train-wreck nature here that I had been expecting from the eariler “Dick becomes a male model” plot line you described.
Then again, maybe it really was a train wreck, but didn’t feel like one because I read it after I read the Hindenburg level disaster that was the latest issue of JSA Classified, wherein Englehart completely butchers the characterization of both Vixen and Gypsy to an insane degree. Painful, pain ful, painful, and the story’s not yet done. It’s times like this that I regret pre-ordering my books online.
August 1st, 2006 at 10:00 am |