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 equal amounts of adrenaline and the gravitas of the DC universe to create an eerily exacerbated version of our digitally rooted fears of privacy and control. Percy has kept true to the promises he made in an earlier interview and continues to keep us on edge the entire time, as wonderfully drawn by skilled Mooneyham who clearly has a blast showing off all the acrobatics our boy Grayson can do.
This arc has been a wonderful intersection of creative elements, anchored by Percy’s unique insight into the digital era. This is one of the strongest DC titles out on the stands, and I can’t wait to see where else Percy takes us next.
9.5 “Therapeutic Concussions” out of 10
Reading Nightwing?Find BNP’s other reviews of the series here.
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