Percy, Benjamin

AVERAGE REVIEW SCORE:

3 out of 5

(1 book)

Nightwing Vol. 7: The Bleeding Edge

(Art by Chris Mooneyham, Klaus Janson, Amancay Nahuelpan, Otto Schmidt, Scott Hanna and Lalit Kumar Sharma)

As Bludhaven is flooded with remarkable new technology intended to ultra-modernise the city, Nightwing and Batgirl discovers that there is a dark power behind the technology bent on stealing the intimate details of everyone's lives.

The intrusion of technology into every aspect of our lives is absolutely the kind of theme I want to see explored in media, highlighting both its positives and its negatives and discussing how the digitisation of our entire lives affects us as breathing human beings.  That's what this book goes for, but unfortunately it's something of a swing and a miss.  In part because the message about technology is rather hamfistedly delivered through the medium of Nightwing being old-fashioned and anti-technology, something which in no way tracks with his character (he claims to miss Walter Kronkite at one point and I reckon 90% of this book's readership will have little or no knowledge of Kronkite).  Dick was raised in the Batcave, so the idea that he's averse to technology just seems shoe-horned in to give a foil to the technology-based villain of the piece, Wyrm.

On top of the wonky delivery of the core conflict, the book overall lacks cohesion, jumping from Bludhaven to Gotham to, for some reason, the fairy caves under an Irish island.  It felt so jarring to suddenly go from facing cyberterrorists in Gotham to an all-weirdo motorbike race run by a Celtic god that I wondered if I'd accidentally skipped a few pages explaining what was happening (turns out I hadn't).

But, with all that negativity out of the way, I would like to applaud this book's best element, which gives it heart that carries some of the less engaging aspects.  That element is the relationship between Dick and Barbara.  I've always been a fan of those characters are a couple and here they show just why they make such good foils for each other.  As I say, it adds an emotional core that holds the book together far better than it really deserves.

3 out of 5

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DC Comics (here)