Nightwing #54 Review

Therapy Session

Written By: Scott Lobdell, Fabian Nicieza

Art By: Garry Brown, Will Conrad, Nick Filardi, Andworld Design

Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: December 5, 2018

If you've been on the internet lately and happened upon a discussion about the current state of Nightwing, well, you've probably seen that people aren't hip to the current status quo of our former Boy Wonder.  Me on the other hand...... I'm having a ball because while we don't have Dick Grayson currently rocking the Nightwing garb, what we do have is the most interesting thing to happen to this character since he moved to Bludhaven (in this continuity).  In our previous issue, we saw Detective Sapienza take on a gang by himself as the new Nightwing........ and boy did he get his ass whooped, but this was the catalyst to get his friends on board with joining him on his quest to stop the scum of Bludhaven.  Let's jump into this issue and see how that quest is going and what Ric Grayson thinks about the whole thing.

For this issue of Nightwing we finally discover what Scarecrow's connection is to the story at hand and while it kind of works and allows the character to kind of become a little obsessed with Ric Grayson, it also opens up a lot of questions for me because we have an extended flashback sequence........ or a retelling of what's been going down, which we don't need anymore of and we see in this that Dick Grayson was in the hospital for a long time after he was shot due to rehabilitation and all that.  While this makes sense for someone who's been shot, I have no idea how no one in the GCPD or who was hip to the fact that Nightwing got shot doesn't know his secret identity now.  Maybe that's just me thinking too much into it or just nitpicking, but that kind of bothers me.  

Nitpicking aside and the fact that I hate all the constant callbacks and reminders that Ric Grayson has lost his memories, there was a few bits in this that actually gave a bit of clarity in why Ric feels the way he does about his old life and the possibilities of who he could become that hit really well for me.  Moving away from Ric though, we get a bunch of scenes of the new Nightwings (to be given proper names coming up) cleaning up Bludhaven, which is pretty cool, but I would have liked a little bit more convincing from Detective Sapienza from the last issue to this because it's just kind of thrown in your face out of nowhere here that they're all working together as a vigilante team.  

All in all, the art is kind of lacking in my mind this issue and the story of Ric Grayson is getting a little stale at this point, even with some of the nice therapy revelations that we were given here, but hopefully that changes as the Scarecrow becomes more involved.  As for the Nightwing stuff...... Well, I'm on board with this because it's fun as hell and I'm excited and a little scared to see how it works out for them...... mostly because I know it won't work out well.  This issue is a mixed bag, but there's still some fun to be had and hopefully now that all the exposition is out of the way we can get to some real meat next issue.

Bits and Pieces:

While I'm still really interested in this story, this issue was a bit of a low point for me because of all the recap and sitting around, not to mention that the art wasn't really doing it for me this issue, but it did setup some fun to be had with the Scarecrow in Bludhaven and makes you wonder if the new Nightwings will be able to handle him once he makes his presence known. 

6.5/10

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