I really liked Dan Watters' Arkham City: The Order of the World, with art by Dani, a book you should go pick up if you haven’t already. Subsequent works I’ve read by Watters have been hit or miss, but I remain hopeful for another book by Watters with the horror-infused superheroics of Arkham City.

No doubt it’s a tough thing to follow the Eisner-winning Tom Taylor and Bruno Redondo on Nightwing; Watters and artist Dexter Soy start a foot behind in Nightwing Vol. 1: On With the Show simply by not being who preceded them. In my final total, I do think Watters delivers something passable; it is not Taylor nor Arkham City, but neither did I think Watters did much harm, which may be the most you can hope for in this kind of situation.¹

However, knowing as I do how standout art has more than once bolstered standard storytelling, I do wonder what Dani or Redondo would have done on this book. I have liked Soy’s art previously on Green Lantern and elsewhere, and I appreciate that he draws this entire book; Soy also employs a painterly style for certain scenes toward the end that are very affecting. But overall Soy’s art makes Nightwing look like a standard superhero action comic, muddy and melodramatic, and fails to give Watters' weirder elements the pizazz they need to win over the audience. This is one that I sense that, with stronger art, I might’ve rated the writing better, too.

[Review contains spoilers]

As I’ve said before, I tend to like my Batman “realistic”; Batman, or Nightwing, Robin, etc., battling a demon is less interesting to me than the Bat-family uncovering the plot of a supervillain. So when Watters' Show begins with ghostly puppeteer poring over marionettes of Dick Grayson, Robin, and Nightwing, and that scene ends with the “Zanni” peeling back the comic book page and looking omnisciently in on events, I was already unsure if this book would be for me.

As yet Show still seems to have that supernatural base, but it is both diffuse enough and tied so well into Nightwing himself that I’ll say, so far, so good. The weapons dealer Olivia Pearce wreaking havoc on Bludhaven is secretly a disciple of the Cirque du Sin, led by the Zanni, and further Nightwing has met her and encountered the Zanni before during his tenure as Robin. So if we’re going to need an exorcism, at least it’s not simply that a ghost came to Bludhaven one day, but rather Watters makes this a problem that’s been dogging Dick Grayson for some time.

What Show also has going for it is that in broad strokes, it’s a story of Bludhaven’s disparate gangs going to war with one another, so even if there’s a poltergeist looming in the background, largely the focus is on Nightwing trying to keep the peace. The whole of Nightwing essentially adopting a gang of teenagers in rejected Five Nights at Freddy’s gear feels authentic to this title and character. I only wish Watters demonstrated more awareness in the story of the events of Taylor’s book; Nightwing sets up the Teddies on his new boat-headquarters without any mention of the kid-friendly Haven neighborhood that philanthropist Dick Grayson recently funded.

But page to page, Show doesn’t work as well. To differentiate itself, Show needs its big visual elements — the Spheric company’s giant robots and armored soldiers, the Teddies and the insectoid Flyboiz, even the Bludhaven cityscape where bombs keep going off. All of this under Soy is very basic — the “flies” mostly green-colored people or typical musclebound figures, the robots plain circles, etc. At the point in which Watters' script begins to be Nightwing flitting between fisticuffs among the three groups, Soy needs to elevate the proceedings, and that just doesn’t happen. (The sole exception is Soy’s painterly flashback and scenes of the Zanni, where we finally get some menace and spirit.)

Taylor made so many things go right for Dick Grayson that I wondered when at some point things would go wrong. As it turns out, Taylor kept that happy aesthetic through Nightwing Vol. 7: Fallen Grayson, but the other answer of course is that another writer would come along to bust things up. I don’t think Watters is wrong necessarily — I like, for instance, the honest conflict between Dick Grayson, keeping people safe on one hand as Nightwing, and his sister, Bludhaven mayor Melinda Grayson-Lin, who sees super-arming the police as her responsibility on the other hand.

But there’s strangeness, for instance, in Watters' writing of a mopey Nightwing after the Titans leave Bludhaven. I recognize some of this may be Watters having to integrate the plans of Titans writer John Layman, but still, it’s odd when Watters writes Nightwing packing up and looking for a “new place” outside Titans Tower, as if it hasn’t been established Dick Grayson is a gazillionaire and has his own apartment(!). Nightwing talking about how maybe Bludhaven “doesn’t want to be saved” seems uncharacteristically defeatist for someone who was just a few issues ago honored with the key to the city.

I did find interesting that Watters makes a major plot point out of Bludhaven having once been destroyed by having the behemoth Chemo dropped on it … an event that took place circa 2006, a couple continuities and almost 20 years ago, in Infinite Crisis #4(!!). Even insofar as a lot of pre-Flashpoint DC continuity is back on the books, so much of the Nightwing/Bludhaven history has been written and rewritten — Blockbuster dead and alive and in jail and free and dead again; Dick Grayson having been a police officer, a gym teacher, a casino dealer, a cab driver; the various iterations of characters like Bridget Clancy — that something that suggests Nightwing not being relatively new to Bludhaven is surprising. I’ll be curious to see if Watters resurrects anything else from that era as this story continues.

Given everything against Nightwing Vol. 1: On With the Show — what it followed, Nightwing fighting a phantom, art that’s not quite up to the task — the fact that Dan Watters makes it work is an accomplishment. Best case scenario, something brews here that maintains this book’s high reputation; worst case, let’s hope the book can at least deliver no less than how it did here.

[Includes original covers, variant cover gallery, character designs]