EDITOR'S NOTE: This review contains some SPOILERS.
I have to admit, that the first cover of this interesting NIGHTWING arc that I saw, almost made me sick. Not in a literal sense, but it was pretty disgusting.
A bride, a groom, a car, and a back seat filled with…
…mutilated bodies?
Yikes. The latest NIGHTWING arc was called “Bride and Groom.” This was kind of a bizarre plot for Nightwing’s world, as it deals with immortals seeking people with a certain “aura” in order to sustain their own lives for eons to come.
The catch? Each time they drain someone’s aura, the drainee dies. Gruesomely. All the skin gets shriveled up, blood starts to pour out, and it just leaves an empty, lifeless, mutilated husk. Eventually, the rising body count in New York attracts the attention of our favorite first Boy Wonder. Unfortunately for the perpetrators, some of the bodies they drain happen to be close acquaintances of the cobalt crusader Nightwing, and he gets really…really…pissed. Murderous rage pissed. That creates a really cool dichotomy that Dick is forced to wrestle with. Satisfy vengeance, or uphold the unbreakable DCU hero rule?
Yeah, we see Batman wrestle with this all the time, but Nightwing approaches it differently because frankly, he’s not nearly as emotionally disciplined as Batman is. This inner conflict in itself is reason enough for reading this arc, so major props to Mr. Wolfman for again proving his supreme Grayson-writing capability.
We’ve got a new penciller for this arc with Jamal Igle, and I think he was a good choice. His work is similar to that of previous artist Dan Jurgens, but not quite as stylized. He works GREAT with shadows, but still manages to add facial detail and keep the thing pretty enough to look at. Good aesthetic choice for the tone of the story.
Michael Golden’s covers were often GROSS. A back seat full of bodies that seem to be mutilated. His style seems kind of “chalky” for lack of a better term. That doesn’t mean its bad, by any means. It caught my eye just because that’s something I didn’t quite expect to see on the cover of a NIGHTWING book. Yikes.
Overall, I liked this arc quite a bit and look forward to more stories from Marv. Keep ‘em coming, we’re lapping them up!
Chris Clow is a student at Whatcom Community College where he is studying film, and is also an actor/writer for a pilot television series that has yet to be sold to a network. The first movie he ever saw in theaters was Tim Burton's original BATMAN, and he soon branched off into the Animated Series, and later the comics. He has written a critically acclaimed Batman fan script titled "Batman Interlude" which he hopes to create after receiving a film degree.
