In this review of the Nightwing 2025 Annual #1, Commissioner Maggie Sawyer investigates Olivia Pearce, head of Spheric Solutions, and what she finds is a meta-fictional trip!
Nightwing 2025 Annual #1 main cover by Francesco Francavilla (DC Comics)
Nightwing 2025 Annual #1
“Death Trap”
Writer: Dan Watters
Art and Main Cover: Francesco Francavilla
Page Count: 48 pages
Release Date: July 30, 2025
This review contains spoilers
The Nightwing 2025 Annual #1 begins long ago, a frothing at the mouth lawyer screams at a jury about the evils of comic books, waving a Gray Ghost and Wonder Boy comic as a distressed blonde girl watches from the audience.
In Bludhaven now, Commissioner Maggie Sawyer walks past the fifth-dimensional-body-horror Titans Tower, asking the CEO of Spheric Solutions, Olivia Pearce, what the situation is. Searching Olivia’s face for the horror that Dick Grayson’s sister, the Mayor of Bludhaven, saw, Maggie vows to find more. By phone, she learns all of Olivia’s current paperwork is false.
Meanwhile, Olivia watches Titans Tower, and talks to her dark, demonic clown ally, the Zanni, working for the Cirque du Sin. She remembers meeting Zanni leaping out of an old Gray Ghost comic as a child.
At Arkham Tower, Maggie meets Dr. Chase Meridian, who guides her to a man called Ringmaster, the only survivor of the Cirque du Sin who wasn’t murdered on A-Day (at the beginning of the Infinite Frontier initiative). He remembers being kidnapped by an extremely young Olivia, called Columbina, because he was the writer of the Gray Ghost comic. She tells him of the dark god of the carnival and chaos and story who hates superheroes because they are the destructive energy of the circus sanitized for the forces of order. The writer refuses in terror, but the Zanni thrusts his fingers in the writer’s brain to create a leader for his evil purposes.
While we, the audience, see this backstory, Maggie only hears rantings about the Zanni and the girl.
Another flashback shows the writer, named Lloyd Caroll, meeting Olivia for the first time as a girl in a comic shop, who tells him she wishes he would let the villains win.
Maggie visits the same comic shop, and learns about Lloyd Carroll from the clerk.
Oliva and Zanni dance in the Spheric Solutions skyscraper, monologuing about their plan to turn Bludhaven into a death trap to create endless fear.
Flashback shows young Olivia coming home with her Gray Ghost comic, and her father, the lunatic lawyer from the first scene, beats her for disobeying his hatred of comic books, and as he tries to shove her into the basement for punishment, she kills him by pushing him down the stairs instead.
Reading old Gray Ghost comics, Maggie discovers fan letters from Olivia Hillman, digs more and finds her lawyer father who got the comic book code passed. She vows to protect Bludhaven from Olivia’s death traps.
Analysis
Dan Watters teams up with Francisco Francavilla again for another Maggie Sawyer focused story in the Nightwing 2025 Annual #1. However, instead of a noir-focused police procedural story, Watters spins a deeply meta-fictional story about the history, meaning, and power of comic books. Drawing from the real history of the comics code, observations about superhero comics by Alan Moore and others, and his own love of the supernatural horror genre, he spins an intriguing but ultimately deeply frustrating tale about the villains vs. the lonely detective in Bludhaven.
Francavilla’s art – colored by himself as well – tells the story brilliantly, shading old timey golden/silver/bronze age comic book adventure storytelling into creepy horror beautifully. The Zanni is a bit scarier when Dexter Soy draws him, but he’s plenty horrifying here. The shifting timescale, clever tricks like highlighting Olivia in a crowd by giving her slightly more vivid color – it’s an artistic treat. The only bit that doesn’t quite work is the use of old four panel comic suspense montages. While fun, it’s also a bit filler-y and used a few too many times – the kind of thing thrown in when you have an Annual with a bigger page count, but not QUITE enough story pages to quite fill the requirements.
The frustrations comes when you examine Watters’ argument – emotional and intellectual. In addition to yet again falling into the cheap, lazy tool of having the villain who holds the wrong beliefs (Olivia’s father) also be a ridiculously over the top child abuser (last deployed by Watters in his other collaboration with Francavilla on this run), the arguments here fall into a trap also accidentally sprung by writers as gifted as Sir Terry Pratchett. In his Witches series, Pratchett railed against the ignorant colonial era peasants who feared and persecuted witches, which we modern people all know don’t exist. Except he ALSO writes witches as having enormous supernatural powers and doing things that are quite dangerous and frightening – always for the greater good, because Pratchett wants to make the witches his heroines – but it’s a serious incoherence. You can’t say people are stupid for hating something that doesn’t exist, then write a story where actually they do exist and expect that to make sense. Similarly, Watters acts like only horrifically, cartoonishly (pun intended) evil and abusive people supported the comics code, but also that pre-code comics could summon demons that lead to a girl killing her father and becoming a CEO obsessed with terrorizing people with death traps.
There’s a lot of clever, interesting ideas in this comic – like how the Gray Ghost writer is worried that Olivia doesn’t understand what he’s trying to say with his comic books – but it’s overshadowed by the central incoherence of the argumentation.
Francesco Francavilla’s cover for this annual is the only one – surprising! It’s quite clever, using lots of design elements to get the credits across, really showcasing that it’s a Maggie Sawyer story.
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Final Thoughts
The intellectual incoherence of the Nightwing 2025 Annual #1’s argument and moral point bog down the generally solid craftsmanship heavily. 2 out of 5 Batarangs.
