Reading Comics #76 "Nightwing and the Color Red"

When Nightwing launched as an ongoing series in 1996 under the auspices of Chuck Dixon, it was immediately defined as much by the title character as the city of Bludhaven, which continued to define both until the latter became a smoking crater in 2006 thanks to the events of Infinite Crisis.  Dick Grayson's life in this more corrupt neighbor of Gotham City was defined by the many colorful characters around him.

I enjoyed reading the series for years until it came time to leave comics behind in 1999.  Some years later I came across a trade collection that more or less picked up where I'd left off, The Search for Oracle, in which Barbara Gordon and her Birds of Prey colleagues share time with the original Boy Wonder.  A few months ago I coincidentally stumbled across the next volume in the collection, Big Guns, collecting issues originally published in 1999-2000: Nightwing #s 47-50, Nightwing 80-Page Giant, and material from Nightwing Secret Files & Origins.

From the beginning, Bludhaven's corruption was almost best understood in its police department.  Chief Redhorn was no Commissioner Gordon.  Inspector Dudley Soames got his head twisted around by Blockbuster and became the psychopath Torque.  In this collection, Redhorn's on the lam and Torque is on the loose.  Redhorn's successor is a fairly harmless man, but the new inspector, Mac Arnot, is classic scum.  Unfortunately for both of them, Nightwing's biggest threats in this collection are nothing but bad news.

Let's talk about those threats for a minute.  One of them is Sylph, the woman in red polymer scarves (which act in much the fashion of the cape in the short-lived TV series The Cape, highly adaptable for business).  She's a woman trying to get revenge on the businessmen who drove her father to suicide.  The other threat is Hella, a former cop trying to get revenge on the corrupt cops responsible for the death of her entire family.  She has notable red hair.

In the New 52 comics, Dick's costume has red on it where there was once blue.  This decision was recently described as making more sense to the color scheme of his Robin origins.  Yet Dick Grayson's connection to the color red runs deeper.  Donna Troy wore a red costume while they served in the Teen Titans together.  Starfire of course has red hair, and to some fans she's still Dick's most famous romantic conquest (though their attempt at marriage was even more disastrous than the frog wedding in Lois & Clark).  And of course, Barbara Gordon has red hair.  (So does Batwoman, who was notably introduced opposite Nightwing in the pages of 52.)

Babs is still around in these pages, operating as Oracle, the source of all information in DC at the time.  This was also the time in which Dick and Babs came closest to having a real romantic relationship.  It was a giant tease that lasted for years but has mostly been forgotten since.

Dixon was a writer who could really get inside the heads of his characters, and know how to build a world around them.  He proved it in Nightwing and Robin (and earlier this year in the Cobra annual; he currently writes IDW's ongoing G.I. Joe comic, but I spend my IDW time with Cobra, written by Mike Costa, who has managed to streamline Dixon's approach).  With the introduction of Blockbuster as Nightwing's chief adversary, there were a lot of fans who drew parallels with Daredevil, defined by his adversarial relationship with Kingpin.  In these pages Blockbuster is mostly a nonentity, recovering from a heart transplant (being a big guy has certain disadvantages), but he still manages to loom over the proceedings.

Another of the brilliant things Dixon did was make Dick Grayson a cop.  This was an ambition that began well before the stories in this collection, but Big Guns sees his first official action operating from the other side of the law.  Any further need to distinguish between Dick Grayson and Bruce Wayne was certainly accomplished with this move.  True, as eager as Dick is to function with a badge rather than his fists, he often abandons one for the other in order to get results.

In a lot of ways, that's just one of the reasons why Dixon's Nightwing was the original Gotham Central.  Aside from the focus that had already been put on the police department, inserting Dick into the mix gives that much more of a look into some more ordinary law enforcement than is typical in a superhero comic.

Aside from the color scheme shared by Sylph and Hella, the fact that they're both female is another signature element of Dixon's run (shared by his successor Devin K. Grayson), to continue defining Nightwing by the women around him.  This is atypical in comics.  The closest, naturally, would be Daredevil, whose relationship with Elektra became legendary under the auspices of Frank Miller.  A lot of Nightwing's foes were women, so it's no surprise that both of the ones in this collection are, too.

As I'd hoped, Big Guns serves as a wonderful reminder how excellent Chuck Dixon's Nightwing was.