In this review of Nightwing #126, Nightwing, Oracle, and Maggie Sawyer wrap up the case of Captain Hallow, but can’t find a way forward.
Nightwing #126 main cover by Dexter Soy (DC Comics)
Nightwing #126
“By the Book, Finale: Bad Cop/Good Cop”
Writer: Dan Watters
Artist: Francesco Francavilla
Colors: Francesco Francavilla
Main Cover: Dexter Soy
Variant Covers: Jorge Fornes, Francesco Francavilla, Vasco Georgiev (1 in 25 incentive variant)
Release Date: May 21, 2025
This review contains spoilers
Nightwing #126 begins as the crooked Bludhaven cops behind the Captain Hallow scheme meet under the docks, planning to kill Maggie for breaking the code.
Maggie and her girlfriend Katie pick up Katie’s daughter Claire.
Dick and Babs analyze the coat he grabbed from Captain Hallow, discovering the smoke he uses is expired fear gas from Scarecrow.
Claire asks Maggie if she can trust the cops now, and says she is afraid of the Spherical mechs stalking the streets.
Babs discovers the hideout of the Captain Hallow gang – an old burned orphanage, and Nightwing kicks the door in.
Maggie tries to explain the need for the Spherical mechs to Claire as the girl draws pictures of the Dark Clown. Maggie says she follows Superman’s example, and Claire asks why they don’t work with Nightwing.
Nightwing beats down the Captain Hallow cops, but realizes one is missing.
Captain Hallow appears at Katie’s house, taking Claire hostage. Maggie stabs Hallow, and doesn’t recognize the cop beneath the mask. Terrified, Claire runs for the roof, and Nightwing catches her.
Later, at the Hallow hideout, Maggie meets Nightwing, and says the police house she thought she had cleaned still has corruption – and mentions the Mayor is missing too. She wants to trust someone, but she doesn’t trust Nightwing, and he doesn’t trust her. As Nightwing #126 ends, we see someone stealing the Captain Hallow suit from police evidence.
Analysis
While the first issue of this two-issue arc “By the Book” was a pretty efficient, creepy and atmospheric noir tale of police corruption, Nightwing #126 resolves things too quickly and thematically quite lazily. You can make a solid case that part of this structural weakness is that Watters wants this plot to be an ongoing thread in the series, but that doesn’t really excuse a lot of the other weaknesses of the arc.
When it comes to thematic weakness, please allow me to take a slight detour. I’ve been watching The Rookie tv show with Nathan Fillion, and in season 3, the first post-2020 season of the show, the show suddenly takes a nosedive in quality as every episode suddenly has multiple preachy sermons delivered by characters regardless of appropriate situation or relationship. Reading Nightwing #126 feels like Dan Watters is still stuck in that tribalistic and immature time period. You can argue that a noir should have a cynical and distrustful worldview, but when it’s overlaid with lazy and obnoxious talking points from current politics, it’s not just atmosphere, it’s sermonizing thinly veiled. Especially given that Maggie and the first cop murdered by Hallow are the ONLY police characters who have any sort of depth, leading to a sense of extreme caricature – the picture perfect cop who turns out to be a sadist and worst man imaginable, and Maggie, the Superman-inspired cop who is struggling with a broken system in a new city. If you compare this to other DC Comics series that have dealt with the police, most notably GCPD, Gordon’s Law, Gotham Central, and Gotham by Midnight (I draw a veil over the generally disrespectful and lazy Blue Line miniseries), there’s careful attention paid to giving investment in the moral dilemma through the character investment. Here we ONLY have Maggie, and it feels like Watters really just wants to use her as a punching bag for being stupid enough to still be a cop in “today’s climate.”
Adding to this thematic shallowness, Francesco Francavilla’s art is stretched to places where it just doesn’t quite work. While the creepy and emotional moments land pretty solidly, when Watters asks Francavilla to create a montage of Nightwing fighting the Hallow cop gang while Maggie is talking to her girlfriend’s daughter, the fight scenes are confusing, clunky, and don’t really demonstrate the kind of strong storytelling that a complex fight scene layout needs.
All in all, while I definitely appreciate the greater sophistication in narrative structure that Watters adds in this side story – Maggie and Nightwing’s perspectives make it feel a lot richer than the Nightwing-only storyline for the first arc – I hope that a LOT more care is taken with the handling of themes as the run progresses.
The main cover by Dexter Soy shows a huge Captain Hollow over a mist-shrouded Nightwing – I would be very intrigued to see how Soy would have handled the interiors after this excellent cover. Jorge Fornes’ variant shows Nightwing lying on a bed of doves in the shape of the Nightwing symbol – pretty, but nothing to do with the Hollow plot. Francavilla’s cover matches his interiors – Nightwing haunted by a shadowy and misty Hollow – not too dynamic, but still pretty atmospheric. Lastly, the 1 in 25 incentive variant features Nightwing as a graffiti mural – artist Vasco Georgiev features a lot of blue feathers as a design on the wall, plus some fun Bludhaven citizens walking by – though it once again has nothing to do with the interiors.
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Final Thoughts
Nightwing #126 is a spooky tale with excellent atmosphere but frustratingly immature thematic development and weak action.
