Living Out Those Superhero Fantasies: Reviewing ‘Nightwing’ #105

It would be easy to gaze upon the format of Nightwing #105 and declare that the issue is just a gimmick. That would be a disservice to the creators behind the book, and also to the medium. What appears to be a gimmick is a creative decision that embraces the versatility of comics, stretching norms to give readers something they don’t see regularly.

When it comes to creative choices that maximize what can be done within comics, the crew behind Nightwing is firing on all cylinders.

Tom Taylor, Bruno Redondo, Adriano Lucas, Wes Abbott, and editor Jessica Chen are such a force. Not only have they brought Nightwing as a character and series back to a hopeful fun place, but they’re also not content to just tell stories in a usual way. After crafting an issue that was one giant continuous panel, 2021’s #87, there was a natural place to go in their experimentation. A first-person visual experience.

Most readers or fans of superheroes probably wished they could take the hero’s place at some point. Well, that wish is granted with this issue. An entire issue was drawn to put us the reader right into the point-of-view of Nightwing. We’re the ones swinging through the city, saving lives, and taking down bad guys in this case.

We are Nightwing, and it’s so damn cool.

Everything that Redondo and Lucas have done artistically in this series has been beyond beautiful. Always so detailed, energetic, bright, colorful, and rife with personality and emotion. They capture this world and make it something that feels bigger than the page. In the aforementioned one-panel issue, it was about pulling out to show the whole of Blüdhaven. Making us a distant observer of all the action going down as it was large dynamic city-wide action.

This issue does the opposite.

Everything is right up in our faces because the reader wears Dick Grayson’s face here. Panels are at angles to mirror the way our vision would be if we were engaging in the movement that Nightwing employs. During an explosion at one point, the entire double-page spread is tumbling jumbled glorious chaos.

It’s all bright and shiny but in a way that is also quite natural in tone, reflective of the world around us. Lucas has such a great handle on light/shadows, and how they naturally change in any given space. It makes sure that any space feels unique and accurate, whether lit by the sun or moon or by artificial means.

Abbott’s lettering is a whole other character in these works, with just as much personality and energy as the rest of the art. Big bold loud SFX that punctuates any scene, and various bits of dialogue that match the tone and style of a character. Here we get a bonus of Nightwing’s dialogue getting a shift.

Naturally, the words can’t just be coming out of a normal speech bubble since we’re inhabiting Nightwing here. Instead, they are in lighter floating blue bubbles, done in a way that makes them feel present but distant. Sort of like how we hear ourselves at any given time. Not only that, but one of the cleverest things is the shape of the speech balloons.

There isn’t a need for the balloon tail that leads to the talking character since that talking character is us, essentially. Abbott draws them with what first appears to be a jagged slice missing out of the proverbial pie. It’s not a missing piece though. That balloon tail has been inverted and is basically pointing to the words because it’s “us” that is saying them.

This team just takes things and moves them so far above the bar, it seems almost impossible that they can pull off something else this big. And then they just do. Who knows what might be next? They might find a way to transport us into the book itself so that we live out the story that way.

As alluded to at the start, these types of issues are never done just for the sake of doing in this series. Even as the creative side stretches beyond norms for the medium, the story itself remains planted in the overall narrative. This story, while it can feel like a one-off adventure, is very much tied to the overall beats that have been seeded previously. Chiefly how the main antagonist here is the villain Heartless, even if Nightwing doesn’t know that.

We know that because Taylor made sure to craft out a whole annual where we learned the identity and origins of the villain. So, we the audience are pretending to be Nightwing in this issue, while knowing way more than the character knows about his world.

All of that is something I appreciate about this series. Tons of comics are trying to do the long-form sort of affair, plots that stretch through as many issues as possible. Some achieve it while others have a harder time. Those that make it work best are like Nightwing. Attention to character moments, fun, shorter arcs, naturally developing plots that move forward bit by bit, and just pure love for the overall happenings.

At this point, we’re twenty-seven issues (twenty-eight counting the annual) into the run and it doesn’t feel slow or overwhelming or anything. In fact, it still feels super fresh and fun, to the point that I forget that it’s been over two years since it began. How time flies.

Nightwing #105 is now available from DC Comics.