Wednesday, March 1, 2023

Bullet Review: Nightwing #101

This will be an extremely short look at one aspect of Nightwing #101.

Writer Tom Taylor has been writing Nightwing for about 2 years and has injected a breezy feel to the proceedings. Dick Grayson is social justice warrior, using his money to help Bludhaven. Using his heroic activities to fight corruption. Taylor definitely has strong political opinions and he has put them in these stories. Somehow it works here better than in other titles. Perhaps street level stories lend themselves to more realistic stories and issues.

Taylor was also given the keys to Jon Kent in Superman: Son of Kal-El. He injected the same politics into that title. But in a book with someone as powerful as Jon, the political stories felt silly and ham-fisted. 

Taylor also tamped down the super-heroics of the Superman book. Jon seemed like a guest star in his own book. Taylor even bragged about how Superman never threw a punch the entire time the title was running. 

I never quite became embraced with the Son of Kal-El book. It ended when Kal returned to Earth. And now Jon will be heading into his own mini-series getting ready to battle both Ultraman and the Injustice Superman. Might be hard to do that if you don't jab now and then.

So ...

Nightwing #101 has two stories. One is the main story written by Taylor with art by Travis Moore.

The second feature is written by C.S. Pacat with art by Eduardo Pansica. 

We open with Nightwing laying the smack down on some hoods. At the same time he is talking to someone. The dialogue is interesing.

"You avoid punching. You avoid attacking."

Some day there will be a stronger opponent and there'll need to be some offensive attack. 


He's talking to Jon.

There is a plot about a circus in peril. But this opening bit grabbed me. 

Interesting this is happening here in Nightwing and not in some Jon-centric book. Interesting this is a story that Taylor didn't write, although that might not mean anything. 

At least we'll get Jon ready to ... well ... act like a superhero in combat with supervillains. Will we see him throw a punch here?

It feels like Jon has been shunted a bit out of the spotlight. A story where he has to learn to fight might be a symptom of the problem. Maybe there is a character correction or new direction ahead.

Interested to see where this goes. 

And to be honest, I am not a fan of the Injustice world at all so I don't know if I am too interested in that.

1 comment:

  1. Yep, this has to be a bit of course correction to make Jon more appealing to superhero fans. I wonder if the writer of the short is a protege of Taylor’s.

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