Spy Hard
Written By: Tim Seeley
Art By: Javier Fernandez, Chris Sotomayor, Carlos M. Mangual
Cover Price: $2.99
Release Date: August 16, 2017
*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*
Even though we've already dealt with Spyral in the Nightwing series during its short run, it's time to get back in touch with Dick's Agent 37 persona as Huntress and him track down Giz' killer and find out that Spyral is actually the Second Hand, who have been bringing advanced weapons into Bludhaven. It's such a weird progression of events though because at the end of the Grayson series, Tiger was a double agent for Checkmate, but as we began this title, he was simply the head of Spyral and all of his nefarious side dealings were wiped away, only to show up here as a bad guy again. Hopefully, that's all explained as we go deeper into this Nightwing story with this issue. Let's check it out.
Explain It!:
Our issue begins with Huntress and Nightwing jumping across rooftop after rooftop until they're confronted by Tiger and his....... troops? It's weird because even though we're presented with strange characters backing Tiger up here, they're never really spelled out, which means to me that they're not all that important........... or I'm already supposed to know who they are, but don't...... Either way, I guess it doesn't matter because they're only in this issue to give Huntress and Nightwing a fight, which goes on way too long before our two heroes bolt and are picked up by the Spyral Skullgirls, who Nightwing used to train in gym class back at St. Hadrians and once that happens, we get a bit of backstory about what's been going on at Spyral.
So yeah, we know now that Spyral and the Second Hand are one in the same and that Tiger wants Spyral to get back to its roots by killing superheroes who get out of line, but we find out here that he's gone way too far by going after the Skull Girls after one of them took a piece of tech from Tiger and then used it so that the other girls could get away, but now it's time to go rescue her and that means infiltrating St. Hadrians while they're ahead of Tiger....... and man does the spy infiltration really pad out this issue.
In the end, we see that Mouse is going back to her old way now that Giz is dead, but what she's really after I have no idea and this also shows us Shawn going back to her DeFacer persona as her and Pigeon begin their plan to remove a statue from the Marcus Casino, but none of that is really explored in this issue and doesn't give you a lot. What we do find out though back on the Spyral front is that the Skull Girl our heroes tried to rescue isn't herself anymore and after emitting a light that seemed to knock all of our heroes out, Nightwing finds himself at the mercy of Tiger........ in hologram form at least and we see that this Tiger isn't Tiger at all, but someone who has stolen the past memories of Agent 1 and who now wants to do the same to Nightwing.
That's it for this issue of Nightwing and man was this a strange issue. Yeah, it was padded out with a useless fight scene and then a useless Mission Impossible like scene, but by the end I found myself strangely engaged to what was going on and all into finding out who or what is behind the Second Hand and how they were able to infiltrate Spyral in the first place. Now, by no means does that make this a good issue, but at this point with how down I've been on this title, being interested in something is at least something more than I've been lately and if that's all I've got, then I'll take it because I want to love this title, it's just been hard though, especially with this art involved in this arc. Hopefully, things get better and are truly explored with the coming issues because like I said, I'm at least interested and I'd like to see what happens next......... with less padding going forward.
Bits and Pieces:
While this issue is seriously padded out with a lot of nothing, there was a moment towards the end of the issue that I found myself interested in what's going on here, but even with that interest, this is by no means a good issue of Nightwing. I'm not a fan of the art, plus it was a lot of filler to get us to the end, but at least I can say that I want to go forward and find out what this cliffhanger actually means.
5.5/10
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