Nightwing #2 Review and *SPOILERS*

Birds Of A Feather

Written By: Tim Seeley
Art By: Javier Fernandez, Chris Sotomayor, Carlos M. Mangual
Cover Price: $2.99
Release Date: August 3, 2016

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

Holy shit, Nightwing is out again already?  I guess there's just too much story to wait another week before we get the next installment of our high flying acrobat....... That or it's a new month and DC is trying to get this on some sort of normal schedule that doesn't throw a shit ton of Bat books out on the same day........ Either way, I hope that this story kind of goes against the grain of the previous issue and the Rebirth issue because man, that just screamed Grayson and I'm not here to read Grayson because that time is over, it's time to get into Nightwing taking on the Parliament of the Owls........ which may prove difficult as we saw in the previous issue because the Owls have saddled Dick with a new partner to keep him from......... doing good guy things?  Maybe just to make sure that he doesn't decide to go all rogue on their asses, Either way, it's going to prove pretty damn difficult to have a secret agenda now that Raptor is hanging around........ and hell, maybe the partnership won't last at all because when we left the previous issue, we saw Raptor just beat the holy hell out of Dick, while he went on and on about how his gauntlet reads him, as he reads people.  I don't know what that means, but I hope to find out here.  Let's jump into this issue and see if Dick's mission to take down the Owls has ended prematurely or if Raptor and him have already become besties.  Let's check it out.

Explain It!:

Our issue begins right where we left off in the previous issue, with Dick getting his ass whooped, but now that the whole male dominance thing is taken care of and Raptor explains that kicking the ass of another superhero is the equivalent of bonding when it comes to partnerships....... Well, all the hard feelings seem to be squashed and our two......... Well, I don't want to say heroes, what with both of them working for the Parliament of the Owls, but our two partners head off on their newest assignment, which is all about recovering cargo within a ship that Kobra has taken over.  With this you get the normal kind of Nightwing posturing, especially since he seems to be in a bit over his head all of a sudden.......... and to my surprise, we get more of Batgirl, who is now calling Dick from Japan and claims that his globe trotting antics actually inspired her to go for her own walkabout.  Yeah, that just sounds like nonsense to me, but all this is to just allow Barbara and Dick to make a date for Japan together the following day............. You think Dick's going to make it?

So yeah, after the Barbara bits, we see Dick and Raptor go and take control of the Kobra infested ship........ after Raptor was attacked by the Creature from The Black Lagoon, which was weird as hell and once Dick goes off on his own to see what it could be that the Owls want from this ship so bad........ the fucking book becomes terrifying in that we see a person crawl out of a great big fat woman's stomach........ and it's at this point that I decided that I never want to see anything to do with Kobra ever again because they are fucking gross and should really reevaluate their housing situation......... and I thought it smelled bad on the outside.  Nasty. 

In the end, Dick and Raptor take out Kobra and find out that the cargo they had of the Parliament was actually a shit ton of people and now that the Owls have them back, they plan on using them for slave labor to build the walls around their stronghold for the elite.  Obviously, Dick is pissed that he was a part of this whole operation and after Dick and Raptor get a new assignment, it looks like it's going to lead to fisticuffs again because of how much Dick resents Raptor for being a a part of this and really because of Dick's own guilt and the thought that Raptor and him had something in common.  Instead of a fight though, we find out that Raptor has something on the Owls that can bring them down, but in order to do that, Dick has to continue playing ball because this plan is all about the long game and sadly that game doesn't include Barbara, who Dick stands up because he's decided to figuratively get in bed with Raptor.

That's it for this issue of Nightwing and while we still have some remnants of the Grayson series in this style of story telling, I have to say that I liked this issue a bit more than the previous one because we actually get to see Dick having to make the hard choices in order to keep his cover within the Parliament, unlike all the swinging around and whispering we saw him do in issue #1.  There are actual stakes here and Raptor has become a compelling enough character to get me at least a bit invested because I need to know whether he'll screw over our hero or actually work alongside him to take the Owls out.  So yeah, while I liked those aspects of the book, the art was still a bit of a let down to me, even though I found myself enjoying it more the previous issue and another thing that bothered me....... that really doesn't matter I guess, but I found myself thinking about it throughout this whole issue is that still don't have any idea what the hell Raptor's gauntlet does or how it works and I was really hoping to get more of an explanation about it here because that "While I read you, it reads me" explanation is just fucking nonsense.  Really, it doesn't matter for what we get here I guess, I just would have liked something.

Bits and Pieces:

This issue of Nightwing actually ups the ante a bit and gives some weight to the whole Nightwing working for the Parliament of the Owls situation and I found myself liking this issue more than the last just because of that aspect.  Something else that I feel is a bit better here is the art, but it's still a little rough at times and I hope that with each issue it picks up a bit like it seems to be doing.  Overall though I actually see something out of this series that I think I can get behind and I was really worried that I wasn't going to get that and I'd have to be a Negative Nancy throughout this series.

7.5/10