Nightwing, Volume 3: The Battle for Blüdhaven's Heart Review (Tom Taylor, Bruno Redondo)

SPOILERS

Dick Grayson opens Haven, an open-air sanctuary for the disadvantaged in society, in the middle of Bludhaven - but soon faces adversity as the corrupt forces-that-be seek to shut it down because they’re corrupt (boo! hiss!). While Nightwing squares off against Blockbuster for The Battle for Bludhaven’s Heart, a new villain - Heartless - is also on the prowl for, quite literally, hearts…

It’s tricky to get the right balance of earnestness in a story about why good must triumph over evil and Tom Taylor doesn’t strike that with his third volume of Nightwing. The art team carries this one entirely because Taylor’s script is really bad, lurching from cringe to dumb to plain hack and back again.

The good/bad guys - and it really is that basic - are only ever one-dimensional. Punch and Judy characters are more realistic than some of this lot. Haven is this perfect liberal fantasy where everything’s free and the people it’s meant for are all flawless and don’t take advantage or do anything subversive, and the ones opposing it are gangsters like Blockbuster and corrupt cops in masks. I don’t like when any overt politics, left or right, get shoe-horned into superhero comics and it was disappointing to see that far left-wing nonsense be so pervasive in this book.

There’s embarrassingly trite romantic melodrama between Dick and Babs - he says “I love you” and they both freak out like it’s an episode of ‘90s Friends. Can our characters behave like adults for a change? Nobody behaves like this outside of dumb sitcoms… do they?

There’s cheesy tropes like the smoking gun dossier that’ll bring down the corrupt people in power, and Dick/Babs spring a social media reveal on the corrupt cops during a press conference that goes off just so - it’s all so childishly plotted. Especially that final part when they decide to take down all the criminal operations at once and it all goes smoothly.

There’s never any threat from the big bad of this one, Blockbuster. He’s just there to be lectured by an ever-smug Dick and then defeated effortlessly to prove blah blah blah… Blockbuster’s such a joke of a villain in this story, the most nefarious thing he does is fire a missile at some masonry near Haven. That’s how pointless his villainy has become.

Oh yeah, and apparently Blockbuster didn’t know Nightwing was Dick Grayson. How is that possible? That tiny domino mask - really? I mean, I know this is the same publisher that went with Clark Kent’s glasses for the longest time but… come on. Dick doesn’t even try to wear his hair differently or hide his physique. This “revelation” just amplifies the stupid of this comic.

Bruno Redondo’s art is exemplary though, as it always is. I loved the retro art of the opening chapter, the covers throughout this Nightwing run have been consistently fantastic, the splash pages are amazing - more than a few in these books could easily be posters in themselves - and Adriano Lucas’ colours are equally incredible. Redondo’s art wouldn’t be the same without Lucas’ contributions - this art team is first-rate, through and through. Even if Taylor’s script did nothing for me, I was always taken with the visuals.

From the plot cliches to the lazy characterisation, simplistic worldview, hackneyed storytelling, and simply boring narrative, Nightwing, Volume 3: The Battle for Bludhaven’s Fart is a poorly-written and uninteresting clunker of a read - one of the weakest entries in the series so far.