Nightwing and a prayer

I don’t think it’s out of line to say that Nightwing is by far the worst of the One Year Later titles. It just isn’t very good. She-Nightwing, a villain that eats people and then craps them out in a cocoon, and albino mob twins, topped off with a steaming dollop of bad characterization of the former Boy Wonder. Those were just a few of the bad ideas that detracted from what could have been a cool Dick Grayson vs. Jason Todd storyline. What makes it all the more worse is the fact that I really, really like Nightwing the character, and I really, really wanted to like the series. Hell, Nightwing was the very first DC monthly title I ever started collecting. But Nightwing OYL was just bad. Very bad. Horribly bad. Reggie Hudlin bad.

Thankfully, that could all change in October. Bruce Jones gets the boot in favor of the man that (kinda sorta) created the character two decades ago, Marv Wolfman. I haven’t read much from Wolfman, basically just the stuff he did recently with Infinite Crisis and the original Crisis mini-series, but I’ve got great hopes. New Teen Titans is considered one of the very best DC comics from the 80s, right? So he must be good, right? Please tell me he’s good. Please.

It certainly won’t hurt that Dan Jurgens is on art. Well, as long as they get him a decent inker. That seems to be the deciding factor between good Jurgens art and okay Jurgens art moreso than for any other penciller out there. But who knows if Norm Rapmund is going to mesh well with him?

So we have a writer with a good reputation whose stuff I’ve never read before and a penciller whose art quality rests squarely on the shoulders of the inker he’s working with whose work I’ve never seen before. Not exactly a recipe for success, but hopefully it’ll all work out to put Nightwing back on a level that it deserves to be.

Of course, it’d be pretty difficult to get any worse.