Nightwing #66 Review

He Wears His Sunglasses At Night

Written By: Dan Jurgens

Art By: Ronan Cliquet, Nick Filardi, Andworld Design

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

After we got the background of what's been going on with Dick Grayson in the Nightwing Annual, I couldn't wait to see more about Dick's amnesia that was purposely caused by the Court of Owls in order to finally get their "Gray Son" in line to become the Talon they always wanted him to be.  Let's jump into this issue and see if William Cobb's plans will be successful now that he has memory implanting goggles on Ric, which will fill in the gaps in his memory, but in all the wrong ways.  Let's check it out.

While I couldn't wait to get this issue because it finally seemed like there was an over-arcing purpose in turning Dick Grayson into Ric Grayson, not to say that I didn't mind Ric Grayson, it was something new, but it feels like it's run its course and it's time to get back to basics and this development feels like a way to get there.  I just didn't get "wow"ed the way that I was hoping when I opened up this book.

We got the basics of what was going down with Ric, William Cobb and the Court of Owls during the Annual issue, but really....... we do little than what we already knew about here.  Dick's mind was erased of anything dealing with Bruce Wayne and Batman and now those gaps are being filled with Court of Owls business, turning heavy drinker, cabbie driving, Ric Grayson into the assassin they always wanted, but beyond a few altered flashbacks that are showing us what Ric now believes to be his past, the entire story is William Cobb telling Ric's girlfriend, Beatrice Bennett what's happening, while Ric is frozen like a statue.  Not a great way to tell a story in my mind.  All this goes on, while our Nightwing Squad continues to save people in the city, but even this portion wasn't all that exciting either and just leads to them being confronted by a mind altered Ric Grayson in full Talon garb.

All in all, the art is great this issue, but the storytelling left a lot to be desired in my mind because beyond some new memories being implanted, some Owls standing around and talking implant jargon and the Nightwing Squad making up all the action in this issue with some rescues, nothing really happened in this issue and our main character just stood around for the majority of it with his hip new shades.  Hopefully now that all the memories are implanted and all the Owl implant jargon is out of the way we can actually see some progression moving forward with Ric's new role as Talon because this series really needs to start doing something beyond having a new concept.

Bits and Pieces:

A lot of what we already found out about in the Nightwing Annual comes to place here, which really just shows our title character standing around frozen as his new sunglasses fill his mind with new memories.  It's a cool concept, but the execution here left a lot to be desired because William Cobb telling Ric Grayson's girlfriend his evil plan left me pretty bored.  Thankfully though, I loved the art and hope that now that this is out of the way we'll actually get some progression from here on out.

5.8/10