Review: Nightwing Vol. 6: Standing at the Edge trade paperback (DC Comics)

Tom Taylor offers a bit of grace to a lesser part of the Nightwing mythos in Nightwing Vol. 6: Standing at the Edge. It’s a kindness that was hardly required, and my esteem for Taylor rises in how much he’s worked into his Nightwing run history that others might have left untouched.

But as I’ve been saying for many volumes now and probably will again before this run is up, Taylor treats Nightwing with kid gloves and it’s a liability for the series. As we head toward the finale — and a final book called Fallen Grayson — I did indeed think Taylor might raise the stakes; instead, the drama continues to come to naught, here to an almost cartoonish degree. And as Nightwing achieves its “legacy” 300th issue, there’s an element of congratulations that, yes, the character deserves, but felt somewhat self-serving as well.

This is the dilemma of the high level that Taylor is writing at. When you’ve got characters who at this point ought be competent, ought make good choices, ought have healthy relationships, and you write them as such, good on you — you’ve transcended the mistakes that have plagued lesser writers for decades. But then you’re left to build suspense without relying on those old tropes, and that’s the problem I don’t think Taylor has cracked yet.

[Review contains spoilers]

As far back as Nightwing Vol. 1: Leaping Into the Light, Taylor’s had a good relationship with Nightwing’s troubled “Ric Grayson” era, with a clever joke that acknowledged “this happened, it’s cool, and it’s not so hard to integrate it into the whole of Nightwing’s life.” But amnesia gags are one thing; actually using Beatrice Bennett, Nightwing’s love interest created specifically for that era, is quite another. (Put a different way, “Ric Grayson” was in continuity, but now it’s in continuity.)

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

And insofar as Bea was rather bland before (as I said in my review of Nightwing: The Gray Son Legacy, Bea didn’t have much to do “beside vaguely tending bar and worrying over Ric’s well-being”), Taylor recasts that as an intentional feint, making story points from previous writers' gaffes like how Bea could hold her own against KGBeast. I’m sure there’s nothing in Taylor’s contract that said he had to make a cohesive whole out of a mess not of his creation, and so all the more credit to him that he does.

What with “Fallen Grayson” aborning, I still find it hard to believe someone’s not going to die before the end, and my money’s been on newly introduced half-sister Melinda Zucco for a while now. (I hate to think Taylor might “fridge” Melinda, but that’s what most writers would do.) Though Bea’s death hardly seems like it would have the impact to trigger a “Dick Grayson rethinks Nightwing from the ground up” walkabout, I suspected that’s where we were when, at the end of the third chapter, Bea’s rogue brother runs her through with a sword and then throws her off a cliff into the water below.

Bea’s fine, though — Nightwing employs some of Alfred’s medical techniques and pirate queen Bea’s swashbuckling again just a few pages later without even a scar! (Tsk to artist Stephen Byrne and the editors.) It’s comics, I know, but a character just walking away from an injury like that is as if out of Looney Tunes, and belies the seriousness of the whole thing.

Similarly, too (what I’m now interpreting “Fallen Grayson” to mean, that Nightwing has suddenly become paralyzingly afraid to use his acrobatic abilities. Again, there are writers and artists who would have depicted this with Nightwing covered in flop sweat, narrating his fear as Nightwing struggles … to … move — instead Byrne’s got Nightwing simply stock still and Taylor writing, “I can’t jump,” and later, “I just froze.” On one hand, I absolutely love the anti-angst, that Taylor and Byrne do not employ the melodrama that would take the seriousness out of the situation. On the other hand, neither does Nightwing’s predicament seem that serious when the story doesn’t treat it so — and, when Bea falls off a cliff, suddenly Nightwing’s temporarily able to jump again for the needs of the plot.

All of this is in service of Nightwing recovering a mysterious package, which turns out to be footage (CD-ROM!) of Tony Zucco sabotaging the Flying Grayson’s trapeze. Finally, Nightwing says, he can prove Zucco killed his parents … wait, what? I grant that my conception of Dick Grayson’s origins are filtered through many iterations, but I thought Robin’s canonical first mission was taking down Zucco with Batman. Indeed when Dick has spoken earlier about the man who killed his parents getting out of jail, I assumed the first part of that was related to the second. Yes, sure, fine, let’s see Nightwing finally bring his parents' killer to justice, but it’s the darnedest lack of foreshadowing for this title to not have more clearly indicated that this hadn’t already happened before.

Standing at the Edge skips an issue (collected in Titans: Beast World Tour) before picking up with a two-part Batman team-up and that 300th issue. Batman’s narration here, thinking of Nightwing as “my son” and “the boy that [he and Alfred] raised together,” is sweet, and in line with the “Batman as father, Bat-family as kids” approach that I think the zeitgeist wants these days. But given that we’re just past Batman doing a significant not-nice thing in Batman/Catwoman: The Gotham War and he and Nightwing having some words about it, the team-up seems oddly out of step, especially when Beast War gets a big follow-up here but Gotham War is elided (which could have to do with Taylor was privy to and what he wasn’t).

I don’t mean to sound heartless (no pun intended), but as nice as it is in the 300th issue to see Marv Wolfman pen his own conversation with Dick Grayson (and with tribute to George Perez), this felt off to me too. The plot is that Dick and Barbara Gordon are getting keys to Bludhaven for their charitable works (as written by Taylor) and then friend “Marv” gives him further praise. It’s lovely, but all of this charity has only come during Taylor’s own run; in a sense, the praise that Dick and Barbara are receiving is Taylor’s characters praising Taylor’s own story decisions. Arguably, I’m sure, we could posit this as the high heights before Nightwing faces his biggest challenge, but something about how it’s oriented as the focal point of the 300th issue rang false.

Curiously, there’s a lot that isn’t collected in Nightwing Vol. 6: Standing at the Edge — a variety of backup stories, as well as the Nightwing 2024 Annual that seems most relevant to the proceedings here. Even as not all of that is written by Tom Taylor, I very much hope DC will include it in Nightwing Vol. 7: Fallen Grayson and not just leave it out or hold it for the omnibus of Taylor’s run; if it was sufficient for the monthly issues, I’d like to read it too.

[Includes original and variant covers]

Rating 2.25