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Sunday 12 February 2017

Nightwing, Volume 1: Better Than Batman Review (Tim Seeley, Javier Fernandez)


Nightwing is the worst Rebirth title I’ve read so far. I don’t know how Tim Seeley’s made the charismatic former sidekick of Batman so charmless, uninteresting and soul-crushingly boring but he’s done it! What a garbage writer.

This book picks up where the New 52 Grayson series ended so I was lost immediately as I haven’t been reading that title (I stopped after the terrible first volume, also written by Seeley). Dick stops being Agent 37 of Spyral and becomes Nightwing again for a crap reason then tries to bring down an offshoot of the Court of Owls, the Parliament of Owls, with a cheap Batman knockoff partner called Raptor. How? By stealing the plans of a labyrinth... or something?! Christ, it’s awful. 

The lack of anything vaguely resembling a clear, compelling plot made this so maddeningly dull. Seeley’s got Dick running around everywhere but who the fuck can follow what’s going on or why - that’s how sloppy his writing is. Someone in the Parliament turns into an actual monster, Raptor is Dick’s enemy then his buddy then back again (it doesn’t matter), Dick’s sorta dating Batgirl, Raptor’s unnecessarily connected to Dick’s ma, and all this nonsense that adds up to nothing. I kept putting it down because I couldn’t read more than a few pages at a time it was so dull and stupid. 

I could go on but I’d just be repeating the same thing: this was a badly-written sleeping aid that’s not worth the effort of struggling through. I like Dick Grayson and I want to read a great Nightwing comic but Tim Seeley hasn’t got the talent to give us that. “Better Than Batman”? HA! It’s not even better than explosive diarrhea!

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