More words than anyone could possibly want on 2025's Nightwing Vol. 1: Bludhaven (collecting the 1995 miniseries and the first eight issues of the ongoing)

While I read a lot of Batman comics in the '90s, I sat out Chuck Dixon and Scott McDaniel's Nightwing ongoing series. I mean, as a teenager and college student with limited income, I had to draw the line somewhere, and that seemed like a good place to draw it. 

I had obviously read a lot of Dixon, and while he was not a particularly colorful nor imaginative writer, he was great at coming up with new crimes and heists on a monthly basis, and penning comics that read like mini action movies that happened to have a superhero in them. I wasn't familiar with McDaniel at all. I imagine if the book had been drawn by Norm Breyfogle or Tim Sale or Vince Giarrano or Jim Balent, I might have snapped it up, but it was not (I am now trying to imagine the book drawn by any of the above and can't quite see it).

Also, I remember balking at the very existence of Bludhaven, the fact that Gotham City happened to have a neighboring big city that was even more corrupt and crime-ridden that no one had ever mentioned before. That was too much for Teenage Caleb's suspension of disbelief (Grown-up Caleb doesn't care and, in fact, I now see it was completely integral to making the Nightwing ongoing interesting; having Dick as Batman Lite fighting crime in Gotham City just wouldn't have worked).

So why am I reading it now, especially given the fact that the reputations of the series' creators are now so, as Travis Hedge Coke pointed out on my Bluesky post about it put it, "tarnished"...? Well, as I explained a few posts back, my teenage nephew is starting to get into comics, and  he said he liked Nightwing. I ordered this particular trade paperback online for him and, when it arrived, I noticed that not only did it collect the beginning of the monthly, but also a four-issue 1995 miniseries penned by the late Denny O'Neil. 

That was of particular interest to me, as not only had I not read the miniseries, but I don't think I had ever even known it existed. Released when it was, the mini, penciled by some guy named Greg Land and inked by a Mike Sellers, would have slotted in between the events of "Prodigal", the multi-book event storyline during which Dick Grayson temporarily became Batman after "KnightsEnd", and the launch of the Nightwing ongoing.

So, after giving my nephew a brand-new copy for his birthday ("Can you pose like that?" his mother asked after he unwrapped it, trying to strike the pose Nightwing did on McDaniel's cover for the trade), I ordered a copy from the library to read for myself...and, of course, blog about.

Having now read the four-issue miniseries, I'm not entirely sure why it was published (Pretty great Brian Stelfreeze cover though, right? Unfortunately, it has Dick in his previous costume, and probably wouldn't have worked for the collection cover; Stelfreeze also drew the cover of the second issue, and McDaniel provided those for issues #2 and #3, neither of which are quite as strong, and McDaniel covered the fourth and final issue).

It's not exactly that nothing happens, but not much of real consequence does. The plot provides a couple of potential big, life-altering events for the Dick Grayson—he decides to quit superheroing and try out life as a civilian, he meets a new love interest and he learns a secret that might mean he was wrong about who actually killed his parents—but, by the fourth issue, all of those things are resolved in such a way that he's pretty much right back where he was at the beginning of the series, albeit it wearing a new costume. 

If the point was simply to get him into a new costume, DC probably didn't need to a publish a 90-page story. Surely that could have happened in Nightwing #1...or simply off-panel. I wonder if perhaps the reason DC published a Nightwing miniserires was to test the waters and gauge market interest in a Nightwing ongoing series.  DC had just published a one-shot—Nightwing: Alfred's Return—a few months previous, and the monthly launched about nine months after the mini concluded.

Regardless of the why of it, let's discuss the what of it.

The opening scene finds Nightwing, still wearing the costume seen on the cover above, atop a rooftop at night, looking down on a quartet of very large men in an alley, one of whom is about to execute a young woman with a pistol. He intervenes, chattily beating everyone up and saving the girl...but not before the leader of the gang forcefully drives her face into a brick wall, knocking off her glasses and knocking her out.

"Without her glasses, she's beautiful," Nightwing thinks, and then follows that up with "I can't believe I thought that.

For reference, here she is with glasses:

And here she is without: 

Jeez, what does Dick have against glasses...? If he went to the high school in She's All That, I suppose he would have thought Rachael Leigh Cook was some sort of hideous monster before Jenna Malone gave her a makeover. 

Ironically, the last I knew, Dick was in a relationship with Barbara Gordon, who famously wears glasses.

Anyway, Batman shows up and the two glare at one another as if they are about to fight, but, instead, they chat a bit about what just happened.

The girl is Miggie Webster, she had been kidnapped and the cops were unable to crack the case...but Nightwing was able to find and rescue her in the nick of time. The former Dynamic Duo talk about their history over the course of a few pages of climbing a wall, swinging from extremely thick ropes that get all McFarlaney below where they hold them and running across rooftops.

At the end of the scene, Dick says he's going to quit the hero business, and hands Batman his old costume: "Put it in a trophy case. Give it to the Salvation Army. Burn it."

The next day, Dick goes to see Miggie in the hospital, and gives this weird-ass explanation:

You probably don't remember me...My name is Dick Grayson. I was there--in the alley a couple of hours ago... I have a friend who was one of the paramedics... Anyway, I was in the neighborhood and I thought I'd see how you are--

I found this amusing because not only does Nightwing have a relatively small mask (It's not like it might disguise his facial features the way that Batman or Daredevil's masks hide theirs) but at this point he also has a very distinct, flowing blue-black mullet. I mean, if you encounter two such young, fit guys with that same exact hairstyle in a matter of hours, you might be a wee bit suspicious, no...? I think of this hairstyle a little like I've always thought of Oliver Queen's distinct goatee; it's just a little too distinct to successfully pull off a double identity with.

I don't know if Miggie does recognize Dick as Nightwing or not. As he's leaving, she says, "I feel I owe you something...a cup of cappuccino?"

If she knows he's Nightwing, sure, that makes sense. He did save her life. The least she can do is take him out for coffee. But if he was just some guy in the alley with his friend, what does she owe him for...? For checking on her the next day...?

Well, whatever. Dick returns to his dusty, grocery-less Gotham apartment and lays atop his blanket-less bed in a tiny pair of red and blue briefs.

(A little something for the ladies, from Greg Land and Mike Sellers.)

The next morning, Alfred, who Dick's narration tells us is his best friend (Take that, Wally!), arrives with a plate of pancakes, a thermos of coffee and a bunch of papers, in order to feed Dick and talk about how happy he is that he's considering a life beyond vigilantism. (Dick is considering law school, he says).

Among the papers, however, is something that will fuel the events of the rest of the series. A threatening letter written in yellow scrript—what, did the writer use a highlighter?—addressed to his parents, mere days before their deaths. It reads:

If you say anything about what you saw, they will kill you and your whole family.

Be warned.

Pickles The Clown

It was in an envelope postmarked from the Principality of Kravia, one of those little fake countries that must make the maps in the DC and Marvel Universes so much more complicated than those in ours. Apparently, Haly's Circus visited there shortly before the Flying Graysons were killed, and now Dick is questioning whether it was really Tony Zucco who killed his parents all those years ago...or someone from Kravia.

Just when he thought he was out of the hero game, he finds himself pulled back in...!

Kravia is ruled by a rather ridiculous looking dictator named Prince Balsik, who wears a blue, green, purple military uniform with lots of medals, shoulder cords and a sword. His face is badly scarred with big, thick scars that look like a wild animal had mauled him. 

His soldiers wear orange and yellow armor and helmets that looks like something out of a video game...or, perhaps, the future, and though their guns fire bullets, Land draws them more like laser guns. 

When Grayson starts making inquiries, the prince sends an assassin after him, but between meeting the assassin and then having the first of two fights with him, Dick manages to go on a date with Miggie, who seems oddly desperate to spend time with Dick (This is, for the detectives at home, Clue #2 that Miggie's life isn't as perfect as Dick, who spent his childhood training under the World's Greatest Detective, assumes it must be).

Eventually, Dick visits the Batcave, gets a briefing from Oracle, whom he just refers to as "Oracle" (no mention of how she looks in glasses) and, now regretting his decision to give Batman his superhero outfit, is in need of something to wear.

Enter Harold, "Batman's chief mechanic, computer whiz and all 'round genius...not to mention costume maker!"

It is Harold who is responsible for Nightwing's new costume, the simple, mostly-black one with the stylized blue "V" over the chest that runs down his arms. I'm pretty sure this is the very best of all of Nightwing's costumes (and, notably, all of those that followed it over the course of the next 30 years have mostly just been slight variations of it). While Harold is responsible for it in-comic, I wonder which real-world artist designed it.

Anyway, here's Dick's first appearance in it:

For some reason, Land gave him long, claw-like nails on two of the fingers on his right hand and, amusingly, once Dick puts his hair into a ponytail, it seems to be about five times as long as it was when he was wearing it down. Did Harold also give Dick extensions...?

From there, Dick infiltrates Kravia, and does so during Prince Baslik's first night of an ethnic cleansing. In a rather grim scene, one that prefigures that one gag from Family Guy, Baslik hands a subordinate a light brown card and asks, "Your men have copies of this card, Colonel?"

When he responds affirmatively, the prince follows up with, "They understand they are to terminate anyone whose skin is darker than this?"

Dick's not there to save the country or end Baslik's rule, but he inadvertently does so, in the process fighting lots of those weird futuristic-looking soldiers, discovering a very dark and melodramatic secret about the Kravian leadership, escaping a particularly scary-sounding deathtrap, deciding whether or not to kill someone who might have had his parents killed and ultimately learning the truth behind Pickles The Clown's threat to his parents.

As I said earlier, after his little adventure, Nightwing's status quo reverts to where it was on page one, the only real change aside from his costume being his acknowledgement or acceptance that Batman and Alfred had given him a good childhood after all. "You and Alfred gave me a home and you gave me what we don't mention," Dick tells Batman on the penultimate page. "The L word." (Unfortunately, Scott Pilgrim ruined the moment for me.) 

I've shared enough imagery above that you probably have a good sense of what the miniseries looked like. It's always interesting to see Land's work from this early in his career, when it seems to have genuinely been created by Land putting pencil to paper...something that can't be said of his work in the 21st century.

I mean, I have no idea exactly how he creates his artwork, but, when I think of Land, I think of images like this now, images so obviously photo-referenced that it seems as if he is finding photographs and then digitally manipulating them to add on superhero costumes...and not even with much care, so that, say, Reed Richards or Sue Storm's face may look like those of completely different people from panel to panel.

I honestly don't get it, as that seems just as tiresome to me as drawing would. (But maybe easier on the hand?)

 There are a few examples of...well, let's say shortcuts in this series, published 31 years ago.

Here, for example, is an image of Batman and Nightwing swinging through the night together:

And here, on the very next page, is Batman and Dick-as-Robin swinging through the night together:

Obviously, the point is that the images should be similar, demonstrating how Dick has changed even if his partnership with Batman hasn't, but jeez, if Land was going to repurpose the Batman pose, couldn't he at least have changed up the exact weird tangling of the ropes, or the angle of his wrists, or which foot is visible or something...? Like, gestured towards making them look different...? Colorist Cathi Bertrand did a little bit more work in distinguishing the two images of Batman, making his costume seem a bit bluer in the second image.

(Again, these images appear on consecutive pages; in fact, there are only five panels between them). 

Here's another, more obvious one, in which Dick punches the assassin four times in the mid-section in four panels, although Land only drew two panels and then repeated them:

A pre-cursor of what was to come, perhaps...

With the miniseries now out of the way, the rest of the trade is devoted to the first eight issues of Dixon and Beatty's ongoing, which was inked by Karl Story. 

That's a pretty hefty chunk of comics there, twelve issues total, in a $19.99 trade paperback. Pulling up the calculator on my phone, that works out to $1.66 per issue...a pretty solid value, really. 

Now, while the miniseries isn't really necessary, and doesn't really come into play at all in the events that follow, those first eight issues of the ongoing do all belong together, as they are all more-or-less a single storyline. 

In it, Batman sends Nightwing to Bludhaven in order to find out who was responsible for killing 21 men in a very particular fashion (Their heads were all turned around backwards and they were thrown in the water, eventually floating into Gotham), and Dick spends those eight issues trying to get to the bottom of that particular mystery...which involves the city's kingpin of crime Angel Marin going missing, and some unknown player seemingly assuming his role in secret.

It's only in the later issues that Dixon and McDaniel start to hint at the new kingpin of crime (and yeah, I'm using "kingpin" on purpose, as the title seems less Batman Lite and more Daredevil Lite, including having a very large villain in the suit in the antagonist role). 

Fist he's just a voice, then a figure in the shadows, and then a civilian name being bandied about and, ultimately, on the very last page of the seventh issue, hie revealed visually and his supervillain identity spoken aloud (In a very dramatic lead-up to that splash, McDaniel draws three consecutive panels of Nightwing addressing him, gradually falling under a shadow as the gigantic crime boss apparently stands up in front of him).

Now, these comics are from 1996, so, chances are you already know who this mysterious villain is. I mean, I did, and, as I said, I didn't read Nightwing back then...I just knew Dixon had made use of the character via osmosis I guess, seeing issue of Nightwing on the new comics racks and, eventually, reading about it on the Internet. 

If the comics weren't 30 years old, I'd be hesitant to name the character at all here, but, well, they are 30 years old, so I guess I will name him eventually, so I guess you can stop reading now if you don't want his identity spoiled.

The book isn't presented as a mystery—that is, there are no suspects, and Dixon doesn't provide the reader with enough clues to guess at who the crime boss might be—but it is mysterious, and Dick spends seven issues trying to get to the bottom of it as he feels out the local criminal underworld.

It seems unusual to me as it is essentially a single, eight-issue story arc, with the mysterious villain revealed at the end and, while the conflict isn't resolved, it is only at that particular point that the book's premise is finally unveiled and the hero gets a new status quo. 

The hopelessly corrupt city lacks anything approaching a hero and is portrayed a lot like Frank Miller presented the Gotham City that Batman returned to in the Batman arc "Year One" (Although Bludhaven lacks a Jim Gordon and a Harvey Dent to help Batman do his work) and, realizing all of this and the fact that it is in the clutches of an honest-to-goodness supervillain, what started as a mission for Dick becomes his vocation.

Just as Batman has his Gotham City, then, here Nightwing gets Bludhaven.

While I said these eight issues basically constitute a single storyline, this isn't any sort of Bendis-ian decompression...in fact, was there decompressed storytelling in mainstream comics circa 1996...? Dixon breaks the eight-issue story into smaller chunks, one-issue stories and short arcs, even if they are all part of the same story (Outside of the big crossover events, I'm having a hard time thinking of a Batman arc from the '90s that went on quite as long as this; that is, Nightwing #1-8 weren't advertised as an event, but the story was more event-sized than most comics from the Bat-office at the time).

Each issue has a big action sequence and features Nightwing foiling some kind of crime. In some cases, these are the work of "Reynard", a member of Gotham gangster Black Mask's False Face Society who wears a fox mask; in other, they involve Nightwing going after pressure points in Marin's organization in an attempt to find out where he is and who it is that is replacing him.

Along the way, Dick rents a seedy apartment in a terrible neighborhood, an act that introduces a running gag and, I assume, a potential love interest. The building's super is a woman named "Clancy" with an Irish accent that seems to always be behind a closed door or somehow covering her face when Dick tries to talk to her (washing her hair in the sink, carrying a stack of boxes, etc.) She turns out to be of Chinese descent (Though she was adopted by an Irish family, which is where she picked up the accent, before moving to the states).

Dick also takes a job as a bartender at a local cop bar, which he hopes will provide him with a source of intel.

Oh, and he loses the ponytail during his first encounter with Reynard and Black Mask's gang.

Dixon and McDaniel thus stock the book with brand-new supporting characters, although familiar faces do pop up. There's a page in the first issue, in which Batman charges Nightwing with the murder investigation and Bats later checks in via computer. Oracle and Wally West literally phone-in appearances. And Robin Tim Drake guest-stars in issue #6, where, during some downtime in crime-fighting, they discuss how different the pair are when it comes to the role of Robin.

Ah, the simpler days, when there were only ever three Robins, and one of them was totally dead forever...!

The creators also introduce the first of several new villains created for the series: Lady Vic, a British aristocrat/assassin who fights with various bladed weapons. McDaniel gives her an interesting look, although I have to admit it's one of those designs that doesn't quite look right when someone else draws it (And thus probably isn't the best of designs). I think it's the mask/helmet that does it.

As for the major villain, that is of course, Roland Desmond AKA Blockbuster. The second Blockbuster, to be precise, although he was basically just like his brother, the fist Blockbuster: A big, strong, simple-minded engine of destruction. 

During 1995 event Underworld Unleashed, he had sold his soul to the devil Neron, and in exchange was given brains to match his brawn (visibly signified by his huge, swollen head, from which dangled a skullet). He menaced Manchester, Alabama in the Impulse tie-in issue to the event series before Dixon decided to use him as a Wilson Fisk-like giant, super-strong crime lord in Nightwing.

Earlier in the post, I mentioned that it was hard to imagine this series being drawn by some of my favorite Batman artists of the '90s, and that was largely because of how distinct it was visually. Yes, the cover of the trade that my sister made fun of isn't that great (That of the first issue, or #7 might have been better choices), but the art inside is much better.

McDaniel is a completely original artist, to the point that, looking at his art, I can't really see who might have influenced him, nor can I think of other artists with whom to compare him. His art is instantly recognizable and, although I wasn't a big fan of it back then, I've come to appreciate more and more. 

His page layouts are all quite dynamic, but his art doesn't necessarily look animated or invigorated on a panel by panel (or panel to panel) basis. Many of his static images nevertheless seem to violently fly off the page at you; there's a real in-your-face quality to much of the action, particularly when it involves Nightwing leaping, which he does a lot of.

A signature technique that McDaniel employs, and the thing I think of when I think of his art, is to draw multiple images of Nightwing in the same panel to indicate how much and how fast he moves. It's an old comics trick, although I find it notable that McDaniel doesn't accompany the multiple figures with speedlines, nor does he draw the "past" images of Nightwing as less substantial than the "current" one...he'll just draw 3-12 Nightwings in a panel or splash, inviting the reader to follow the character as he jumps and flips and swings around.

It is, of course, a great trick for a character known for his athletics and acrobatics—and the sleek, cape-less character design makes it easier to pull off than it might for a character like Batman—and it allows a reader to appreciate how Nightwing moves. 

It's also pretty effective in fight scenes, as it gives one the impression that Nightwing is everywhere all at once (One thing I always liked about Breyfogle's art is how he would pose Batman so that he was fighting multiple opponents at once. So that, for example, he might be standing on one leg while he kicks one guy in the face, his right hand might be smashing a second guy's face against a wall or table, and his left hand extended in a throw, as a batrang whizzes across the room at a third guy. Sometimes when McDaniel draws Nightwing fighting a group, he does so by drawing four Nightwing figures in the panels executing different moves against different guys).

It looks like the previously linked-to cover for Nightwing #7 is the first time we see McDaniel's multiple Nightwings on a cover. Inside the book, it's on the tenth page of the first issue, wherein he leaps from a rooftop onto a speeding truck below:

Later, there's a fight atop a speeding train going through a tunnel, and McDaniel draws Nightwing doing what looks like a combination of an acrobatic routine and a live-action game of Frogger as he jumps off the train before it enters the tunnel, crosses the traffic on the overpass while thet train is passing through the tunnel, and then lands back on the roof of the train right behind his opponents, who used the more traditional strategy of guys on top of a train when it's about to go through a tunnel and ducked.

This is probably my favorite example, though, as Dick Grayson leaps back and forth between buildings in a way that suggests the old Ninja Gaiden videogame to me:

So yeah, I passed on this book in the '90s and, given the reputations of the creators of late, I hadn't felt any urgency to check it out, but I'll be damned, this is a pretty good action comic about a vigilante fighting crime and, thanks to McDaniel's idiosyncratic work—which often I appreciate more than I necessarily like—I can't think of another book that looks anything like it. (Other than, maybe, other McDaniel-drawn books, of course). 

The pair certainly did their job with these first eight issues too, as I now kind of want to know what happens next...