Nightwing #29 – Review

By: Kyle Higgins (writer), Russell Dauterman (artist), Pete Pantazis (colorist)

The Story: We’re all a part of the circus, some of us are just lucky enough to be performing with nets.

The Review: Nightwing is something special. I’m obviously biased toward that opinion, but I really do believe it. Nightwing is Robin, but cool. Nightwing is the hero who grew up with us. Nightwing is the hero you wish you could be. In the end, it’s not even the Nightwing identity that we’ve attached to, but the man behind the mask. Dick Grayson was Robin. Dick Grayson was Batman. But Nightwing is Dick Grayson and that’s something that Kyle Higgins understood from Day One.

The structure of Nightwing #29 is a beautiful, peculiar little bird. Caught somewhere between a seventy-four year past, a heart-breaking present, and an uncertain future, Dick’s final adventure under Higgins’ pen is a simple story well told. The story alternates between Nightwing’s attempts to stop Zsasz and rescue Jen and Dick’s musings on loss, grief, and identity. While each half surrenders space to the other they come together to form a rather beautiful whole.

Though Dick’s tussle with Zsasz will not likely compare favorably with some of the more impressive fights he’s had in this series, the tension that Dick’s felt since the night his parents died and through twenty-nine issues is channeled through his reminiscences and into his worries about Jen, giving the issue the necessary dramatic arc and building the short battle into the climactic encounter that ends the series.