For not at all contrived or absurd reasons, Gotham City has been turned into a police state ruled over by The Magistrate, whose militarised private police force are keeping down vigilantes and ordinary people alike. Also in the mix is the mysterious Seer who has managed to hack into Oracle’s network and is using it to spread lies. It’s down to Nightwing and the Bat-fambly to set things right - nobody spies on or beats up the people of Gotham besides them!
I really hate that DC (and Marvel too) always do this - they take a promising new series and immediately hamstring it by ignoring what the first volume was setting up and forcing it to tie into some stupid event they’ve got going on. That’s what they’ve done with Nightwing which pointlessly gets dragged into the Fear State nonsense. And that’s what makes this second book such a disappointing follow-up to the decent first volume.
Not that you need to be reading Fear State to get a handle on the three-part tie-in story here. I had no problems figuring out what was what thanks to Tom Taylor letting the reader know what’s going on - not that it’s all that difficult to grasp in the first place.
And that’s the problem: Fear State is such an uninteresting storyline. Fear is bad, and, uh, so are police states, fake news and deepfakes - thems is things? Fascinating. Because all the big stuff has to happen in the main Fear State storyline, Taylor’s story is a fringe one, told around the main storyline. So all Taylor can let Nightwing and co. do is fight a bunch of one-dimensional robot suits and drones, led by similarly forgettable baddies like Magistrate and Seer, for three issues while occasionally huffing in some Scarecrow Fear Toxin. It’s very weak and unsatisfying. It also seems to be more about Babs than Dick - not great for fans wanting to read about Nightwing in a Nightwing book - and I’m not a huge fan of Robbi Rodriguez’s art either.
Padding out the rest of the book are a couple of one-shots. Blood Brothers sees “Red Hood” murder someone in cold blood - but is it Jason?! Hmm. Oo, my poor bonce in figgering it out. Yeah, the solution is a tired one at this point - they’ve used that particular character way too much recently. Taylor does write some decent scenes between Dick and Jason that expands on their friendship and Cian Tormey/Daniel HDR’s art is pretty good too, though ultimately it’s a throwaway story that has filler written all over it.
And then there’s Tini Howard and Christian Duce’s The Bats of Christmas Past that has Dick huff Scarecrow gas again (how creative!) and goes through a version of A Christmas Carol (how creative!). Duce’s art is solid but I couldn’t have been more bored with this one. Howard is a bad writer and this is a bad comic. Boo! Boo I say! (how creative!)
Is Nightwing, Volume 2: Fear State good? Nay! Will Nightwing, Volume 3 be good? Hopefully - tell DC to fuck off with their synergy meddling bullcrap and it might stand a better chance than this skippable volume did!
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