Review: Nightwing Vol. 3: The Cirque du Sin hardcover/paperback (DC Comics)

With the third volume, Dan Watters Nightwing settles into something more straightforward, less genre-bending than the previous volume. That’s perhaps necessary for Nightwing Vol. 3: The Cirque du Sin as the third book in the “Cirque” trilogy, less focused on build-up and more focused on denouement.

This book does have some high moments, but it also lacks the last volume’s artistic star power. All told I’m not sorry if the next book launches in a new direction, as I think it might.

[Review contains spoilers]

It bears mentioning that both series artist Dexter Soy and guest V Ken Marion deliver some terrifying art here; Cirque isn’t quite consistent enough to rise to the level of “horror comic,” but you can see how the team is trying. Soy absolutely nails the book’s most crucial piece, living up to how unsettling we’ve been told villains Olivia Pearce’s true face is (gorier, even, that I might have expected in a mainstream DCU book). Though I have qualms about Marion’s art elsewhere in the book, his Cirque ghosts are effective, scary puppet children and jesters with rows of gnashing teeth.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

Cirque is devoutly superheroic, starting with the Justice League cameo at the beginning and continuing through to Nightwing’s dreamscape battle at the end. As I’ve discussed before, that’s not necessarily what I want from the Nightwing title, though I don’t discount that it is a legitimate use of Nightwing, the Bat-family member who also fought demons with the Titans.

Yet it is different than Watters' Nightwing Vol. 2: Death Traps, which shifted between art by Soy and art by Francesco Francavilla(!), delineating wild sci-fi and detailed crime noir respectively. The cards are on the table now, everyone knows Pearce and the supernatural Zanni are up to no good, and so it all collapses rather naturally into hero versus ectoplasmic bad guy, but I still felt we’d lost what differentiated this book last time — now it seems rather typical superheroics.

Still, again, some good jump scares. I thought maybe the scale of destruction Watters suggests for Bludhaven here was far-fetched — that the League could just fix that kind of catastrophe and the city could go on — but the sequence where a game of Tin Can Alley meant the decimation of the city was nicely intense. And though “Nightwing mentors a young parter” has been done to death, I thought some of the Nightwing-Prime scenes were moving, especially Prime’s message to Nightwing from beyond the “grave.”

At the same time, I rather felt Watters was doing better with Soy as artist and less well with Marion. There’s a lot in that statement, given I’ve never been quite sure Soy was right for this title either, and also to indicate how one artist on a writer can reveal flaws in the writing that another artist might not.

The B-plot in Watters and Marion’s two issues is Oracle interacting with the Martian Manhunter, and Watters conception of J’onn — plodding, loquacious, situationally unaware — didn’t ring true to me. Nor indeed Watters' Oracle, who barks at J’onn’s suggestion that the Cirque wants Nightwing to lead it as if J’onn were advocating the idea himself.¹ Marion draws Oracle so buxom she’s stretching her shirt to the limits, and between that and her irrational anger, whatever Watters was trying to do in this scene is lost.

Among the most interesting parts of Death Traps was Watters suggestion that Pearce started as a crazed comics fan, overeager for blood and guts, which led her to the Zanni. Through that reading, comics takes another blow in Cirque when it’s further revealed that Pearce put herself in a death trap, believing through comic book logic that Robin would save her, instead suffering grievous injury. Still I felt the final equation came out positive, Nightwing-Prime affirming that “superheroes are a way cooler idea than the circus.”

But I also noted that Watters has the Zanni echo a question that a police officer also asks in the last volume, the question essentially of “What even is a Nightwing?” It’s part syntactic, that a “Night-wing” is not a “Dead-Man” or a “Wonder(ous) Woman,” but I’m also interested whether that’s the question Watters is trying to answer with his run. “What’s Dick Grayson’s role in the DCU” is pretty well already answered, and some sort of literal parsing — “Nightwing is the wing that shields you at night” — would be reductive, but I’m curious what nut Watters is trying to crack and where he ends up with it.

(Other guess is that, like Dick’s constant use of “Holy something” in this run, the “What even is a Nightwing” bit is a recurring gag, not meant to be answered, but rather a fourth-wall poke at Nightwing having a great name that means nothing.)

Nightwing Vol. 3: The Cirque du Sin ends with a new mob boss mayor in charge of Bludhaven, and Dan Watters is joined by Denys Cowan, whose art is more realistic and mature than most of the artists on Watters run so far. Nightwing up against yet another Blockbuster-type figure would be exactly what we’ve seen many times on a Nightwing title before, but after all the swings of the last three volumes, maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.

[Includes original and variant covers]

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1. It’s maybe too much to expect Dan Watters to be familiar with Barbara and J’onn’s friendship way back in JLA, but then again maybe not.  ↩︎

Rating 2.25