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Dick Grayson and Huntress team-up for some ex-Spyral action in Nightwing #27. This arc revisits Dick’s days as a spy from the Grayson series.

***SPOILERS LIE AHEAD***

A welcomed change in scenery, moving away from Bludhaven and the relationship drama with Shawn. Only it’s not, and she is still lingering around. I get that Seeley wants there to be closure on their romance, but I don’t think anyone would mind if we moved on quickly.

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Nightwing started off as one of the best Rebirth titles. It’s been solid throughout, but for some reason the Bludhaven cast isn’t striking any major chords. The city still doesn’t really feel like it belongs to Nightwing yet either, more like a summer home to Gotham.

Tim Seeley has such a great handle on Nightwing, the problem is there are too many less interesting characters eating up his face time. This has slowly become more noticeable in recent issues, this time being very obvious.

If you haven’t read the Grayson series (which is a solid run by Tom King), you’re going to have a hard time with this issue. There’s nothing wrong with calling back to that era of Dick’s life, but this issue assumes that everyone is well read on his days at Spyral. That being said, there isn’t really much spy action in this issue.

The art takes a bit of a dip once we get to the casino bar. Suddenly the color and quick detail that was working really well just disappears in an effort to give this subpar lighting effect. Some of the action is a bit clunky, the invisible helicopter didn’t pay off like it could have. The digital effects also don’t do the art any favors, they’re very noticeable.

One thing that Javier Fernandez excels at, especially this issue, is faces. Character expressions and even masks are a major highlight of this issue. There’s also a beautiful splash page towards the end depicting the infiltration of a Spyral facility.

This is by no means a worthless comic book, it just doesn’t hit all the notes it needs to for this to sing. It’s also not an easy read for anyone who started reading Nightwing comics with this series.