Nightwing #138: Suffering in the Forest

Blüdhaven’s super highway is a portal to darkness. Or at least that’s what it seems like. The giant highway interchange first seen in Nightwing #136 has acted for three issues as a crossroads between what is good and what is bad. Watters has played in that darkness for three issues now, delivering stand alone stories connected only by the presence of the highway. Nightwing #138 delivers the strangest yet as Nightwing fights an alien.

Nightwing #138 starts out as a simple monster story. Something is killing livestock on farms near the new super highway. Dick, concerned with all things super highway, investigates. After one encounter, he discovers that the monster is in fact an alien known as a Psion. These aliens imprisoned and tortured Starfire, so Dick gives her a head’s up. Starfire arrives and suddenly the issue turns into a rumination on suffering.

Dick has been torturing himself about the multicar pileup he was involved in in Nightwing #136. Kori doesn’t understand the human tendency to revisit troubling incidents over and over again. She uses herself as an example of a better way–what happened with the Psions happened, and there’s no point in her dwelling on it. Kori’s subsequent actions with respect to the Psion on Earth demonstrate that while she may not dwell on past events, she isn’t necessarily over them.

Suffering is arguably a throughline for the three issues touching on Blüdhaven’s super highway. By the end of Nightwing #138, it’s clear that the alien was also suffering in a way. Watters ultimately merges Starfire and Dick’s points of view. Dick doesn’t pretend he has moved on from painful events, but he does take action in a way that he might put aside his constant suffering for it.

Cowan finds greater success in delivering emotive characters here, but it comes almost entirely in closeups on Dick and Starfire. When the view gets wider off their faces, sometimes just wide enough that both appear in panel, they tend to lose any sense of depth. Facial features diminish to the point of nonexistence. As has been the case in the past, Dick’s face at times is nearly identical at a number of points in the issue. This overall lack of dimension on Dick and Kori’s faces is problematic in this issue because of the emotional nature of the story and the connection between the two characters.

Action sequences are more successful. Cowan doesn’t necessarily deliver high energy poses–that is to say, poses that suggest a constant state of movement. But he does capture a sense of power in stand offs and melee impacts.

Segala’s overall muted coloring works well for the current batch of issues. A darkness has hung over the series since Nightwing #136. Even scenes set during the day have  a faded quality to them. Starfire’s presence in Nighting #138 pushes against that a bit. Segala sets her first appearance in the issue against a field of bright yellow and orange. Her powers are also much brighter than the issue’s overall color scheme. It gives Starfire a kind of special presence in the issue and sets her apart from the pall that hangs over Blüdhaven.

Abbott does the logical thing and keeps the caption boxes for Nightwing’s off panel dialogue and inner monologue the same blue as his costume. Unfortunately this frequently has the effect of making the boxes fade to the background. They’re never lost or hard to read, but because of Segala’s overall coloring scheme, they frequently don’t stand out except during day time sequences (which are by far the exception in Nightwing #138).