In this review of Nightwing #124, as the Nightwing risks his life to save gang members, the members of Cirque du Sin reveal themselves to him and his half-sister the Mayor.
Nightwing #124 main cover by Dexter Soy (DC Comics)
Nightwing #124
“On With the Show – Finale: Ringmaster”
Writer: Dan Watters
Art and Main Cover: Dexter Soy
Colors: Veronica Gandini
Variant Covers: Jorge Fornes, Gleb Melnikov, Amancay Nahuelpan, Giuseppe Camuncoli
Release Date: March 19, 2025
This review contains spoilers
Nightwing #124 kicks off with Nightwing on a gurney. As Babs advises him from her control center, Nightwing donates a huge amount of blood (6 pints) to three Flyboiz gang members to try to dilute the mutagen in their blood that’s killing them. As he becomes delirious from blood loss, the dark clown figure from this arc reveals himself to Dick and the reader as “The Zanni.” Claiming to be the dark heart of art, Zanni torments Dick until the Flyboiz leader/scientist gives Nightwing a huge shot of adrenaline to restart his heart. Two of the Flyboiz died, but one survived thanks to Nightwing’s donation. The Teddies and the Flyboiz almost get in a fight, but the youngest Teddy intervenes to break it up, making Nightwing proud.
Babs reluctantly tells Dick that his half-sister the Mayor has unleashed Spheric Solutions’s animal-driven robots onto the Bludhaven streets. After angrily calling his sister, Nightwing roars off on his motorcycle, still seeing The Zanni due to his blood loss.
Meanwhile, Olivia, head of Spheric, rips off her face to reveal her true self to the Mayor as a member of the Cirque du Sin (though we don’t see what the Mayor sees).
As a blood-loss-shaken Nightwing faces one of the robots, the young Teddy boy he inspired shoots the robot down, with a Nightwing symbol painted on his gang jacket sleeve.
Analysis
As he ends his first arc on Nightwing, Dan Watters reveals a lot of the themes he’s playing with. The Zanni’s comments about the “children of Wertham” (a clear reference to the “Seduction of the Innocent” author who forced/was used to implement the Comics Code Authority), violence in video games, and how art is subversive. Since The Zanni is clearly coded as a dark, if not outright villainous figure, it’s hard to tell where Watters is endorsing the ideas The Zanni articulates. Given the complexity of his series Coffin Bound and its treatment of drugs and violence, Watters is likely working to show the power and destruction of this side of art, but it’s an odd choice to go directly 4th wall breaking with thematic villain monologue.
Aside from these fascinating if deliberately disturbing thematic revelations, Watters does push Nightwing to his physical limits, draining literally half his blood and then stopping his heart, only to push him into an intense action sequence minutes later. That pushes the narrative past plausibility for me, sadly, as despite the “hallucinations” there’s no real consequences for losing so much blood in the same time period.
The final pages reveal two character developments that will obviously play out in the next several issues, possibly for the whole arc. The young boy Teddy gang member, Bryce, shooting an imprisoned animal robot with a Nightwing symbol is a bit of an interesting repeated motif in Nightwing comics. First with Tad, Nite-Wing in Chuck Dixon’s seminal run on the character – a psychopathic murderer “inspired” by Dick’s heroism. Then with the young kid at the beginning of Tom King’s “Robin War” crossover during the Grayson/DC You era, shooting an armed robber in a convenience store while wearing We Are Robin colors. Watters clearly intends sympathy for the boy, given the cuteness of the Teddy gang and his heroic actions standing up for Nightwing earlier in this book. But hopefully some complexity continues to develop from this wrinkle in Nightwing’s inspirational effect.
The other character reveal which will continue to reverberate is Olivia/Columbina literally ripping her face off in front of Dick’s half-sister the mayor. Though Watters chooses not to show us the full reveal of her skinless face, the Mayor now knows that Nightwing’s instincts were correct and something deeply dark is behind Spheric Solutions, despite his near complete lack of evidence.
All in all, there’s a LOT going on in this Nightwing run, which is a bit frustrating as the storytelling itself is a bit overly straightforward. The plot and action barrels forward too quickly for many of these revelations to really hit past a sequence of events. Add to that the unnecessary plausibility shaking blood donation levels, and the arc feels both rushed and decompressed. Hopefully a bit more balance between pacing and plotting complexity will bring more narrative satisfying to the arcs following this opening one.
The art by Dexter Soy and colorist Veronica Gandini continues to be appealing and atmospheric, though not a standout. It’s good to see Soy getting solid action and some effectively creepy imagery on the page consistently, so hopefully the art team on the book will continue to function as smoothly as they have for this first arc.
Dexter Soy’s main cover is a reasonable rendering of Nightwing on a bike fighting the Spheric animal-bots, but surprisingly for a cover done by the interior artist (though maybe not given the schedule of covers vs. interior pages) doesn’t give a good sense of this issue’s story or tone. Jorge Fornes continues with his design-heavy cover style, a polaroid camera with a collage of shots forming Nightwing jumping through a city scene – clever, though it makes me a bit sad that Fornes’s pencils are being overwhelmed by his design creativity. Gleb Melnikov’s Nightwing and puppy cover is quite fun – though completely at odds with the extremely dark and spooky issue inside! It’s a bit disappointing to see the complex and evocative pencils of Giuseppe Camuncoli used for what is basically a joke cover in the Courtside basketball themed line this month – but Camuncoli’s work is still nice. Lastly, Amancay Nahuelpan plays with black, white, and blue simple color scheme in an intensely dramatic action shot of Nightwing flipping through the skyscrapers, framed by his symbol – grinning the whole way!
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Final Thoughts
While some nice creepy effects of Watters’s new villains deploy on the page, the overly simple storyline, stretching of plausibility, and weak thematic and character development leave this arc finale a bit underwhelming.
