In this review of Nightwing #128, Nightwing faces many versions of himself in the 5th dimensional mutation of Titans Tower.
Nightwing #128 main cover by Dexter Soy (DC Comics)
NIGHTWING #128
Writer: DAN WATTERS
Art and Main Cover: DEXTER SOY
Variant Covers: JORGE FORNÉS, JUAN FERREYRA, MARCIO TAKARA, SERG ACUÑA
Page Count: 32 pages
Release Date: July 16, 2025
This review contains spoilers
Nightwing #128 begins as Oliva gives her Spheric troops 24 hours until they go into the 5th Dimensional Titans Goop Tower Kappa rays blazing, as Nite-Mite calls for Nightwing to save him.
The dark hero Nightwing of Kandor, a Kryptonian, patrols his planet Titanis, and discovers Nightwing, who has walked through the front door. He rescues him from fighting phantoms of Nightwing’s past – Deathwing and Discowing.
Commissioner Maggie Sawyer visits Mayor Melinda Grayson-Lin, who has just woken up, and they argue about whether trusting Nightwing without any evidence is good city policy.
After evading “sketchy archers”, which Dick recognizes as his childhood drawings of Robin Hood, Nightwing of Kandor betrays Dick to “keep the peace” by trying to feed him to the monster mutation of his dog.
Analysis
The first issue of this arc combined Dan Watters’s love of horror with Nightwing’s recent history of gaining Nite-Mite as a supporting character in a reasonably efficient, clever way. However, Nightwing #128 is padded with pointlessly long fights, character decisions that are either arbitrary plot convenience or thunderingly obvious and annoying, and continued vamping on the villains being scary without actually giving any new information.
In the category of “arbitrary character choices”, why does our Spheric/Zanni villainess Oliva need to give Nightwing 24 hours? That feels like pure villain nonsense. Why is Maggie Sawyer wrong that the mayor of a city cannot base city policy decisions on unsupported assertion by a superhero? That’s just nonsense. The delay of revealing more about Oliva herself also baffles me – I get that we can’t get into the Dragon Knight for the Big Bad too soon – but that just means you shouldn’t have revealed her as the Dragon so soon! This is Heartless all over again – the villain keeps wandering around doing horrible stuff, but you learn nothing about them and the hero makes zero progress fighting them because it’s not time in the story to do so yet. It’s extremely inorganic and leads to a completely arbitrary feeling about the importance and threat from the villains.
To add to this arbitrary feeling, we have 6 pages of Nightwing fighting apparitions of previous villains that DOES NOT MATTER because we know they won’t win and since they’re obviously apparitions, there’s nothing at stake in the fight. SIX WASTED PAGES – Dexter Soy and Veronica Gandini make the fights look good, but there’s absolutely no point except to use up space in this padded second chapter of an arc that’s seriously threatening to reveal itself as a two parter flattened into more issues for the trade.
On a more positive note, on a structural level this issue is a step up from the first, where I felt the single POV from Nightwing seriously made the pacing poor. The Maggie POV really helps give Bludhaven and the narrative overall feel like it’s not just Dick Grayson, so hopefully that will continue to give the book structural depth and pacing strength.
Dexter Soy’s main cover for Nightwing #128 shows Nightwing entering the “Tower of Terror” – offering no really new visuals, but nicely reflecting what actually happens in the issue. Jorge Fornes’s variant emphasizes design again, with an extreme “NIGHTWING” in wacky font surrounding Dick’s head light a dark red halo. Juan Ferreyra’s variant shows half of Nightwing’s face and torso in the rain, with very nice rain droplet effects! Poison Ivy artist Marcio Takara’s Gotham City Sirens variant features Nightwing tied up by Poison Ivy’s vines as Selina and Harley look on in amusement – nothing super original, but beautifully rendered as always by Takara. Serg Acuna’s 1 in 25 incentive variant features Nightwing surrounded by dragons and other mythical beasts, looking up at the reader – very creative, but a bit puzzling as to inspiration.
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Final Thoughts
Solid art can’t save this padded thin entry of a chapter – hopefully next issue offers a LOT more meat.
