Nightwing needs to protect Maroni long enough to testify in court - but his former associates are determined he won’t live long enough to do so. Tony Zucco, the man who killed Dick Grayson’s parents, leaves prison early and is soon up to no good, while Heartless continues his terror campaign in Bludhaven.
It sounds like an action-packed book - should be riveting, right? And yet, it’s not. Tom Taylor and Bruno Redondo’s Nightwing series has become the most rote, unimaginative farce of a comic by this fourth book. Nightwing is Taylor’s wish fulfiller for all the world’s wrongs - no matter the societal issue, Nightwing (and similarly Jon Kent in Taylor’s Superman series) can fix it effortlessly through flawless progressivism. And it’s so uninteresting to read as a result.
The Maroni subplot is something that’s been done in Batman a zillion times before and Taylor brings nothing new to his version of it. Talking of derivative, Nightwing gets his own Bat-Mite for no reason: Nite-Mite. The Zucco storyline features someone literally getting shot in the head, not dying, and stopping the bleeding by putting on an eyepatch. It’s indicative of the lazy attitude of the team behind this title that something like that actually made it to publication. Nobody’s trying anymore.
I couldn’t have cared less about the Heartless storyline because of how Taylor’s written all of the conflict in this series to date. Having seen Nightwing deal with every other threat with ease, it’s no surprise to see how this latest “threat” plays out. Also, Nightwing’s apparently leading the Justice League now and the Titans are on the way, two details that mean nothing to me as I don’t - nor want to - read those crummy titles.
Because Nightwing #100 is an anniversary issue, it’s gotta be padded out with a bunch of short stories to make it unnecessarily long. So we get Heartless’ origin, Haley the dog’s fantasy (wherein we also discover Dick is a crap dog owner), and Nightwing teaches Jon Kent to fight. None of it was entertaining.
Relentlessly tedious and instantly forgettable, Taylor and Redondo’s Nightwing hits a new low in Volume 4: The Leap… into boring!
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