Written by: Kyle Higgins
Art by: Trevor McCarthy & Dean White
Published by: DC Comics
“Oh dear boy…I wouldn’t be Lex Luthor if I didn’t have robots.”
Nightwing The New Order was a highlight of 2017, a book that almost made my top-10 list. It was so close, I tell you! Like, grab a ruler and look at an inch. That’s how close it was. One inch. What prevented it from hitting the list was its unfinished status, because a good book needs a good ending. I held out.
What I held out for is…fine. I honestly don’t want to get too into the plot for spoiler reasons, but suffice to say it starts great, takes a predictable turn, and then ends in a predictable fashion. Now, I’m not gonna sit here and call myself an authority on superhero books–I mostly don’t like them. But this elseworlds story set itself up for a big something, and it didn’t deliver. Nightwing shuts off all super powers to save the world, his kid has super powers, and a small war breaks out between super-powered rebels and super-powered cops.
Like shit, that’s ripe for discourse.
We don’t get much discourse. There’s some, but it’s pretty light, shoved aside for some really big, flashy battles, betrayals, and a tidy epilogue.
Is this bad? No. It’s fine. It’s executed well, the fights are flashy and really quite on point, and the ending is earned. The thing is, it’s kind of boring. The first six or seven pages are rife with tension–I had no idea where this was going to go–and then the turning point hit and I could predict the rest of it. For a book that’s not generic superhero, it lands at generic superhero by the final page.
I’m disappointed.
The writing is fine, the artwork is great, and the middle stuff is also adequate. It’s a good book. I just…damn.
I’m not quite sure where this puts me. On the one hand, I’m disappointed; on the other, the first five issues are exceptional and this one isn’t bad by any means. It takes an idea, runs with it, and trips a bit at the end. It doesn’t do something truly special. That I’m demanding it to might say more about me than the book, though.
