In this review of the Nightwing 2024 Annual, the origin story of Bea Bennett – who she really is and how she came to be – is finally revealed!
Nightwing 2024 Annual
Written by: Travis Moore
Art by: Travis Moore
Cover by: Travis Moore
Variant cover by: Francesco Mattina
This review contains spoilers
Synopsis:
Many years ago, nine-year-old Destiny Alston was out at sea with her mother Nicole, on their way to Nicole’s promotion for a corporation called Ascendek, when the boat suddenly explodes. Destiny is blown out of the boat, and her mother is presumed dead. Drifting for three days before being rescued, she escaped the hospital and wound up at a homeless encampment for the next four years. After the encampment is shut down to make way for an Ascendek warehouse, Destiny hijacks one of their company yachts and sails to to the site where her mother died, before the ship is boarded by the Crew of the Crossed Keys.
For the next five years, Destiny would be trained under the wardship of the Captain, who plans to make her his heir over his son. Destiny tells him that she hacked the Ascendek laptop she found in the yacht, revealing that her mother was assassinated by someone called “Revenant”. Determined to return to Blüdhaven and solve who was behind her mother’s murder, she goes to a local club and fights her way through a group of mafia men who may be in contact with Revenant. When a woman called Carmen Navarro appears and defeats her in combat, she leaves behind a calling card for St. Hadrians – the finishing school which is a front for the Spy outfit known as Spyral.
In the years that follow, Destiny becomes one of Spyral’s top agents, earning the codename Siren. She’s partnered with Lian Shan and carries out a number of high-level missions – one of which takes her to procure a counterfeit ancient artifact in Moscow. This artifact was engineered to receive transmission for LA Agente Funebre – the hitman organization Nightwing, Oracle and The Flash dismantled back in Nightwing #91. There, Siren battles her rival Ice Suwannarat – an agent of Checkmate. During the fight Ice blurts out that her Destiny’s mother was actually a member of Checkmate, explaining in part why she was assassinated. Afterwards, Carmen assigns her to keep tracks on the recently amnesiac Dick Grayson. a.k.a. Agent 37 a.k.a. Nightwing – now known as Ric Grayson. Over the next several months, Siren takes on the alias of Bea Bennett, gets close with Ric and begins to fall for him. During that time she checks in less and less with Spyral, eventually falling in love with Ric and forming a relationship with him. One morning she wakes up with Ric to find out that several of the world’s intelligence agencies had been wiped out, with Spyral presumed destroyed. Destiny took this opportunity to leave her spying days behind and commit herself to Ric. Unfortunately this was shortly before the Joker War in which Ric’s memories were further messed with by Talon, before being fully restored back to his Dick Grayson/Nightwing persona. After the KGBeast attacked and Nightwing defeated him, Destiny confronts him at Blüdhaven’s local prison for killing her mother. The Beast reveals that he indeed carried out the hit but that he’s not Revenant, and that Nicole was actually a member of Spyral, not Checkmate. Influenced by Dick’s commitment to justice over vengeance, Destiny reneges on killing the Beast.
Later, when Dick began his humanitarian efforts to restore Blüdhaven, Destiny is approached by Ice who warns her that the hit on Dick is actually a front to assassinate her. She’s then shot by an assailant, who is revealed to be Carmen Navarro. Carmen claims that Nicole was her partner at Spyral and undercover at Checkmate. Navarro originally came from La Agente Funebre, which Nicole found out – prompting Carmen to assassinate her. After learning that Destiny survived the explosion, Carmen put her on the path that led her to Spyral. With Ice’s help, Destiny defeats Carmen in combat, resolving to leave her with the Crew of the Crossed Keys.
Soon after Destiny – now fully Bea Bennett – sees that Dick is in a relationship with Barbara Gordon, and resolves to move on her own. She returns to the Crew of the Crossed Keys as inheritance from the Quartermaster, but unbeknownst to her is being watched…by none other than her mother Nicole who is still alive!
Analysis:
This was a provocative read that challenged some presumptions going in, and ultimately had me falling down on the opinion that this was good but could’ve been much better.
We’ve got Travis Moore on scripting duties, although I’ve no doubt Tom Taylor would’ve had some story outline contributions. The whole issue feels like his idea, from bigging up Bea in giving her this fairly superheroic backstory to the humanitarian aspect of her not killing anyone or KGBeast especially. I find it hard to believe with her upbringing or lacktherof she didn’t kill anybody during her time at Spyral, so ensuring the reader that she didn’t feels a bit like Taylor’s making the characters too precious to be unsavory in any way.
But let’s talk about Bea. Right away her being revealed as this pirate captain was fairly polarizing for the readers back when it was first presented over a year ago. That she has this super-badass orphan/spy background is giving her quite a bit in the way of substance after the fact.
Now it’s important not to let racial or gender bias cloud the story here. Plenty of DC characters are shown to be uber-mega-badasses at the drop of a hat, and historically people have always had trouble when people of color or women are presented as adept and infallible as men or white men. So no matter how believable or unbelievable her history may seem on first rip, Bea can totally be a little girl who survived a boat explosion, escaped a hospital at age nine, hijacked a yacht at age thirteen, and become at a super-elite spy in her early twenties. That how genre fiction operates, people are simply as good as the story needs them to be. Speaking as a black reader, it’s always appreciable to see black characters written to be strong and smart on their own. At the same time, there is a lot of telling and not showing when backfilling Bea’s history. The fact that we were introduced to her as a normal person operated on two fronts: it made the world of Blüdhaven and Gotham and DC at large feel like normal people actually existed and it helped diversify a mostly white universe. That she’s since been revealed to have this crazy history isn’t unlikely, but on pure writing terms reads as somewhat problematic to my mind, because much of it is so expository that it moves too fast for us to sit with and reconcile. I’ve written before how Taylor writes Bea as completely different after the big pirate reveal than before, which I suppose works in her favor now since “Bea Bennett” was never real. However, I think I can speak to much of the readership in saying that the kind of character she was in the Ric era was fairly refreshing since these heroes hardly have any personal life to speak of these days. There’s a real “Oh…she’s a pirate now.” reaction to the Bea of today that just hasn’t been terrifically accommodated to, and this annual only further complicates things. We’re now asked to essentially erase our understanding that that character ever existed in favor of a much more traditional – and in my opinion, blander – character archetype.
But let’s be clear about this: Bea can totally be a super secret pirate spy all along. That in of itself is not verboten in the world of superhero fiction. I think the true problem is in the writing. There is so much exposition and reveals in this story, that every revelation feels tacked on and shallow. She’s not only an orphan, her mom exploded in a boat hit! And then she escaped from the hospital! Then she lived at a homeless encampment, where she tells us in a single caption that the people there were like her family. We don’t see a single panel of this (so we don’t care), but she says as much (so we’re meant to care). Then she – a thirteen year old girl – hijacks and commandeers a yacht belonging to the CEO of a corporation tied with the mafia. She’s found by pirates, and instead of being ransomed or killed, she’s adopted and made the heir of their leader. Then she’s invited to join a spy circuit where she quickly becomes one of their top agents. All this is because her mother was an gents for Spyral – NO! Her mom was working for Checkmate, no wait, was it Spyral and she was only undercover for Checkmate? Oh wait! Her mom is still alive!
Even for an annual, there is way too much page space for me to take all of this for granted and be invested in it. Telling and not showing is the best way to have someone not care when major events happen in a story. Because this is all her backstory, and not effectively written to be emotionally understood, it reads as hollow, powered by a “Wouldn’t it be cool if..?” approach instead of telling an emotional story. And the investment into her mother -whom we only see for a couple of panels before she’s presumed dead until the end – is put upon the reader to have instead of earned.
So ultimately this story reads more like a point of interest for the writers rather than an effort to engage the readers. I don’t really care about Bea, definitely less than I had before, because what is her purpose exactly? She seemingly avenged her mother’s death, but her Mom’s alive, so…who cares? And the cliffhanger of her Mom being alive is about her, and not Nightwing, so I can’t picture how this would be exciting for anyone unless the were charmed by this entire story.
To reiterate, the events in themselves aren’t bad for this kind of book. It’s just not convincingly rendered to be engaging. I wish I could care about Bea more than I can, but that’s not earned in the space of this annual.
Editor’s Note: DC Comics provided TBU with an advance copy of this comic for review purposes. You can find this comic and help support TBU in the process by purchasing this issue digitally on Amazon or a physical copy of the title through Things From Another World.
