An Exclusive Preview on the Finale of “The Bleeding Edge” / Nightwing #47 Review

Writer: Benjamin Percy / Artist: Chris Mooneyham / DC Comics The Dark Web Strikes! The finale to The Bleeding Edge continues to showcase how brilliant it was to set Dick Grasyon/Nightwing up against a technological tour de force. Nightwing is a street level hero who is more than capable of using all of the fancy Bat-tech, but at his core, he’d much rather use two escrima sticks, his charm, and his lantern law of justice of a chin to defeat the enemies of Blüdhaven, even when it’s difficult to tell exactly who the enemies are with Mirage in town. Nightwing’s opening monologue to the issue sets a chilling tone where Percy forces us to question the very nature of our perception. As a line text in the panels indicate VR Mode: ON and VR Mode: OFF, we are treated to a spectacle of Mooneyham’s bizarre technological specters. These abnormally featured behemoths are peak uncanny valley and the rapid flickering of the reality and the perception is wonderfully unnerving.

Percy continues to perfectly captures the fed-up, back talking Nightwing as he performs some much-needed concussive therapy on some machines that have been giving him a hard time. Yet Percy gives Barbara plenty to do on the street both as a tech goddess and as Batgirl. And we get to see how Willem Cloke, Grayon’s current personal trainee, fits into the grand scheme of Mirage and the Dark Web.

Yet what makes Nightwing #47 so effective is how Percy evokes the same thematic we see in real world headlines and injects equa…