Nightwing #57 Review

War Of The Classes

Written By: Scott Lobdell, Zack Kaplan

Art By: Travis Moore, Tamra Bonvillain, Andworld Designs

Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: February 20, 2019

After the last issue, where we saw the Nightwing team joined by Ric Grayson so that they could take down the Scarecrow together, it looked like even though Ric had no intention of ever picking up his superhero past again....... fate had different plans.  Let's see wear those plans take our hero as he tries to continue his new life, while his old life slowly creeps back in.......... not to mention, the Joker's Daughter coming to town.  Looks like old Ric is going to have his hands full.  Let's check it out.

For this issue of Nightwing we move past the previous Scarecrow story to deal with the gentrification of Bludhaven and the relocation of the city's homeless, which because of her past in Gotham, seems to get the attention of Duela Dent, who seems to just want to be the champion of the downtrodden and the scourge of the upper class.  Now while Joker's Daughter has had a rough background ever since she was reintroduced in the New 52, it was in Scott Lobdell's Redhood/Arsenal title that I thought the character really started coming into her own and while I don't think that that story ended as well as it could have, it is the point that I really started caring about Duela Dent and thought that she may become an interesting character..... The only problem here....... it seems that she's only really focusing on her past before that point and I'm afraid that she's going to become a one-trick pony here and that feels like it's a shame because I want to see some real progression in her character and maybe see some new motivations behind what she's doing because her past formula is pretty stale now.  

So while we do have something kind of interesting going on with Joker's Daughter coming to town, beyond that........ we really just continue the recap like scenarios that this series has been plagued with since Dick Grayson lost his memory and became Ric Grayson.  It constantly wants to remind us what Ric's been doing, who he's been doing it with and the idea that his past, in this issue taking the form of Barbara Gordon, want him back.  This is getting really old at this point and even the forward progression that we get in Ric Grayson joining the Nightwing team feels like it's just retreading what we already had in the previous issue.

All in all, the art while different and less gritty than we've been getting in this series looks amazing and makes me look forward to this book continuing to look as good as it does this issue.  Besides that though, this story feels kind of played out while it only just began.  While I do look forward to see what Joker's Daughter does here and how the Nightwing team will handle it, the gentrification angle and the mistreatment of the homeless is something that just really bored me in this issue.  Yeah, it showed that Ric's new main squeeze is someone you'd want our hero to be around, but it was a bit of a slog to get through while I was just waiting for some real forward progression to our hero's story.  

Bits and Pieces:

While I'm happy to see some of the side characters of this series get some background, while continuing to show the Nightwing team in action, the story that we're moving into felt a bit boring to me and a bit overdone.  Yeah, it is something that would befell a city such as Bludhaven, but it came off as a bit of a dud, while much of this issue was used to catch up new readers to what's going on in the world of Nightwing.  I love the art and the prospect of the villain at hand, but overall I felt that this issue was lacking.

6/10