Nightwing #61 Review

Dousing The Flames

Written By: Dan Jurgens

Art By: Ronan Cliquet, Nick Filardi, Andworld Design

Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: June 19, 2019

The fire monster Backburn is causing a ruckus in Bludhaven and it's up to our Nightwing team to stop it and figure out who the monster is.  Right now, the Nightwings have a suspect in Melissa Stapleton, the daughter of an injured police officer back when Malcolm Hutch was in the academy, who is someone that has stated that she wants the Bludhaven PD to burn in hell....... So yeah, she's at the top of the list, but for anyone who's been reading this book we really only have two new characters for this arc, Melissa Stapleton and her father Walter, who's in a coma.  These are our suspects for Backburn, let's jump into this issue and see what our Nightwings do to save their city.  Let's check it out.

As we saw in the last issue, Backburn came to Melissa Stapleton's protection when the Nightwings, Zak and Colleen came to question the woman about whether or not she was a giant flaming monster looking for revenge.  As it turns out, that doesn't seem to be the case and thankfully, we have Ric Grayson continuing to make his rounds as the grease paint Nightwing because if he wasn't, I don't know if Colleen and Zak would have survived their encounter with Backburn.

I say Ric Grayson was the savior of this issue, but really, we do get to see some competent Nightwing-ing out of this brother-sister duo to the point where I actually have some faith in Zak's involvement with this team.  Also, we do get the continuation of Ric naming our Nightwings.  In the previous issue we saw that he calls Detective Sapienza Nightwing Prime and that he calls Malcolm Hutch Nightwing Red.  For our siblings we now have Colleen Edwards being called Nightwing Gold and her brother Zak Edwards being referred to as Nightwing Blue.  It's all pretty simple, but it's still nice to have code names for each of our heroes in this book.......... You know, except for Ric, who everyone still keeps referring to as "Cabbie".

All in all, this being the end of this arc, it didn't really feel as exciting as I was hoping with our team taking on what I thought was going to be a new villain for Bludhaven and even if you take the excitement idea out of it, I don't think this ending came off as emotional as the creators would have hoped.  Really, this mostly showcased our heroes working together and continued the narration between the different Nightwings in how they all feel about Ric Grayson on the team and what Ric thinks about them individually....... which wasn't bad.  I loved the art in this issue and can't wait to see what this team goes after next, it's just that this was a bit of a down issue and a down finale to an arc that wasn't too over exciting to begin with.  

Bits and Pieces:

While there is some good stuff to be found within the pages of this issue of Nightwing, the ending to this arc just kind of came off as a whimper and wasn't as emotional as I would have liked either.  It just kind of came off flat, but thankfully we had some amazing art and some really good looks at how this group of new heroes sees their new partner Ric Grayson and who he sees them.  Not to mention, everyone but Ric is named at this point and I'm really happy to know what to call these heroes.

6.8/10