Nightwing #16 Review and *SPOILERS*

Baby Mama Drama

Written By: Tim Seeley

Art By: Javier Fernandez, Chris Sotomayor, Carlos M. Mangual

Cover Price $2.99

Release Date: March 1, 2017

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

Well, Nightwing went and got his fool self falling in love and like any other time that any hero in the history of comics has gone and done this out of nowhere........ it's never turned out well.  In the previous issue we walked through the first two months of Dick and Shawn's relationship and saw all the highs and lows and even the self sabotaging moments that Shawn created because she wasn't quite sure of who she really was or whether or not she really deserved happiness because of her past transgressions has a super villain.  It all seemed to work itself out though by the end........... and why wouldn't it?  Dick's superpower seems to be just being a great guy and we saw that in spades last issue and even saw him telling Bruce that he loves his new girlfriend.  Too bad that someone came up behind her and either took her or just straight up hurt her.  Let's jump into this issue and find out what happened to Shawn Tsang and hopefully find out that she's fine because I'd hate to see Nightwing suffer with this kind of guilt.  Let's check it out.

Explain It!:

Our issue begins with Dick and Shawn hanging upside down on a pole outside of her apartment window just making out........... you know, what the kids do, but he's called away by an armored car robbery and we see our hero swing into action.  At some time before this, we see Damian Wayne just sitting around the San Francisco Titans Tower reading twitter when he seems to lose his damn mind at some tweets that people are throwing out there about how Nightwing is the Batman of Bludhaven until he takes on the cowl of Batman proper.......... which we've seen before, but for whatever reason this really gets Damian's blood pumping to the point that he goes and sees Dick in Bludhaven to find out his intentions about becoming Batman one day.

Dick doesn't have time for Damian's nonsense though because after the two take care of some ridiculous horse masked robbers, Dick gets a voicemail from Shawn telling him that she's late........ and that she's never been this late.  Yeah, it looks like Dick might be a daddy coming up and after flipping Damian on his back so that he would shut the hell up about his problems, Dick swings off to go see Shawn and that's when our hero learns what we already knew from the previous issue........ That's right, somebody has taken her and is clearly calling our hero out because whoever took her also spray painted "Daddy" on the canvas that Shawn had been working on.  

In the end, Damian finds a pregnancy test that Dick had brought to Shawn's apartment before the evening was turned on its head and decides that he needs to help his fellow Robin out and as we leave this issue, we see that the armed robbers that Dick and Damian had taken out previously have all been murdered as well as the police that arrived on the scene from somebody rocking a black and red Nightwing costume, who's calling himself "Deathwing".

That's it for this issue of Nightwing and while I love seeing Damian and Dick working together like the good old days and dealing with a story that I found myself really getting into in the previous issue, I was immediately taken out of this issue a bit because we have Javier Fernandez back as artist in this issue, who had previously started the series off with Tim Seeley and I find that I just don't care for his style of art and desperately want someone else to be drawing this series.  Besides that though, I'm really interested in who this Deathwing is and I really want to find out whether Shawn Tsang is actually pregnant or not because the possibility of Dick being a daddy is something that really intrigues me because if it's true, it's one of the biggest things to happen to the character in a long time, becoming a spy notwithstanding.  

Bits and Pieces:

We get a great development in this issue along with a great guest star, but overall I found myself feeling a tad disappointed because the art is back to looking like it did at the beginning of the series and after having this book look so great, it's tough trying to deal with that again.  I did enjoy this issue though even with this problem........ I just wish we'd get a different regular artist on this book.

7/10