Nightwing #29

When did he fight a demon with a mechanical claw for a penis?

I don't have any time for all that small talk I usually do! I'm busy fucking drinking, okay? Here, just so you don't feel ignored. "How's the weather? Been good? Your mom still dream about sucking my cock?" Okay! Let's read Nightwing!

Oh! Quick recap! Nightwing's soon-to-be sidekick's parents were murdered by Zsasz which means she's now Nightwing's sidekick. I've decided she'll call herself Hummingbird! If she does, somebody owes me $10,000. I'm pretty sure that's the payout in Vegas for guessing the name of a sidekick before you're even entirely sure the character is going to become a sidekick.

Hummingbird purchased the Arkham City Nightwing Arsenal advertised on the back of the comic book and headed out to fight Zsasz herself. Fuck, I've never even liked Nightwing until The New 52 and I'm tempted to buy this shit!

Cue The Banana Splits Theme.

Hummingbird isn't quite as successful as Hit Girl. If Hit Girl's success was rated at 98%, Hummingbird probably comes in at nearly 1%. Nearly. At least she runs halfway across the room before she has the fuck slapped out of her. I'm sure she's not down yet though! Like a hummingbird, she's, um, fidgety? She'll get back up and dart around the room! And then when Zsasz least expects it, she'll jam her beak in the sugar hole!

Or she'll plan on Nightwing saving her. That's always a solid sidekick plan.

While Nightwing was on his way to save Hummingbird, he's been in some kind of an existentialist fog. It's a lot of whiny second guessing his decisions in life. Boo hoo! The only decision you should be second guessing is spending all of your money on Amusement Mile and forgetting to buy Joker Insurance.

After Nightwing saves Hummingbird and leaves Zsasz zip tied to the toilet, he goes up on a roof to tell Hummingbird his story. And that's what all the existentialist bullshit has been! He wasn't thinking it to himself. He's been telling it to Hummingbird all along! That's a trick writers use to trick their readers. You have to realize as a writer, you have an adverse relationship with your readers. You never want them thinking they know more than you or else they'll call you a shiteating hack. This trick is like pulling the bunny out of a hat. It's an old standby and it works well enough to tell a solid tale. I'm sure if I wasn't pounding back the sake, I'd have picked up on it and exposed it like an insert your own flasher metaphor here.

But getting back to the relationship between readers and Writers (with a capital "W"!), Writers hate readers. Readers are the enemy. Editors are just assholes Writers have to sometimes deal with but they mostly don't matter. They're dead weight in the story telling business. Readers are needed but they're hated. They always think they're smarter than the Writer. Even when they love a specific Writer, they're just standing by ready to call that Writer a sell-out if they write anything that becomes popular. Readers are assholes! They think they have a right to tell the Writer what to do! They think their pocketbooks are some kind of democratic vote and they often demand that they're going to stop supporting the Writer if the Writer veers from the readers expectations. I say fuck the reader! Especially the groupie reader. Stop it, genitalia! The brain is speaking here! Even without readers, a Writer is going to write! Do you think I expected anybody to be reading this shit? Fuck no! Do I care when somebody calls me out on a joke that's in poor taste or a poorly thought out opinion on a specific artist? Fuck no! You can't stop the signal!

Also, plagiarism is a fantastic tool at the Writer's disposal! And if anybody ever calls you on it, there's this other fabulous word to defend yourself: homage!

P.S. I love my readers! This was just an essay on theoretical possibilitums.

Oh my god oh my god oh my god...it has hummingbirds on it!

The chat Dick has with Jen is really touching although it probably wouldn't have made me tear up if I were sober.

And then Kyle Higgins finishes up his run with a nice batch of Dick Grayson thoughts that make me remember why Higgins caused me to like Nightwing so much in The New 52. It's brilliant. Seriously. Go spend $2.99 and find out what's so brilliant about Higgins final pages of Nightwing.

Nightwing #29 Rating: +3 Ranking. Loved this issue. There was so much to it that I didn't even touch on! This really can be considered a spoiler free review! Not because I was trying not to spoil! I was mostly trying not to spill. Mmmm, glug glug glug. Sake sake sake sake sake. Thanks for making me like Dick Grayson, Kyle Higgins! I'm going to go Drunk Tweet him now if he's on Twitter. Lastly, be on the lookout for Hummingbird! Remember to say "HOLY FUCK EEE! TESS ATE CHAI TEA WAS RIGHT!?" when she appears!

Nightwing #28

The issues begins with Batgirl choking Nightwing as they fall from a great height. The reader is left to ask, "Why is Batgirl throttling Dick so passionately?" and "What did Grayson say to piss Babs off?" and "Is he still fucking living in Chicago?" The reader is not left to ask, "Will they survive?" because super heroes are always falling from the tops of buildings, especially members of the Bat-family. And has one of them, just one of them, ever died from a fall? I don't know. I don't think so. I'm not really a scholar of comic book history.

I forgot to ask one of the most important comic books questions which turns out to be the question that should have been asked: "Is that really Batgirl?" Because it's some thief named Spinebender that Babs and Dick battled many, many issues ago. I think they fought him in a food court. I think Batgirl was jealous of Raya. There was some drama or something. I don't completely remember.

I don't feel so bad not being able to remember everything about every comic book when Nightwing can't even remember everything about Nightwing.

Turns out Spinebender is a little bit pissed that he's dying because of Nightwing's method of subdual. I think that falls under the Bat-family No Kill Technicality Statement under the section entitled "You Brought It On Yourself." The full proviso reads, "If in the act of a crime, whether felonious or petty, the perpetrator of that crime is injured in such a way by the Bat-hero that the years of his life are subsequently shortened, the perpetrator will take full responsibility of his actions and subsume the blame for any and all injuries not leading directly to death. Any wounds sustained by the perpetrator of said crime that are not mortal in and of themselves but eventually lead to the death of the perpetrator due to doctor error or infection setting in at a later time or internal hemorrhaging due to the perpetrator's slow response time in getting help, are entirely the fault of the perpetrator who should have known better than to engage in illegal activities."

Spinebender has probably never read any of the Bat-Family legal documents so it's understandable that he just wants to take out his anger on Nightwing while ignoring the fact that he got himself caught up in a fairly risky business when he decided to begin robbing people.

Spinebender tries to kill Nightwing along with himself by electrocution but Nightwing gets away and Spinebender explodes into thousands of shards of glass. I wonder if Nightwing will feel bad about this at all?

Meanwhile Sonia Zucco is wrapping up some loose ends so she can fuck Dick Grayson without him weeping uncontrollably about his parents while his dick goes soft.

Dick doesn't seem to worry about the guy that just killed himself trying to kill Nightwing because Nightwing turning the guy to glass in a previous encounter caused a change in his biology that was killing him. But he is concerned with how many innocent people were injured and how much property damage was caused because the guy was expressly after him. I guess the Bat-family No Kill Technicality Statement absolves the Bat-Hero of feeling any human emotion whatsoever in the face of a tragic criminal death. Who cares what the guy's life was like or what his mental state might have been or if he was suffering from the side-effects of his medication or if he were being mind-controlled by an even worse Super Villain! Ultimately it was his choice that led him to the grave. Unless the reason he did it was because of that mind control thing.

As Dick heads home to his apartment in a normal way like he should be doing instead of going through his bedroom window in full costume, he runs into his soon-to-be-sidekick, Hummingbird! Also known as Jen.

Oh yeah! Taxes. Says the orphan boy that was taken in as a ward by the richest man in Fuckingsuperrichville. Bruce probably fell into his fainting couch every night, fanning himself and proclaiming, "My God, Dick! The taxes! The taxes! How are we ever going to get by with this great burden upon us?!"

Later at Dick's job, Sonia comes to see him wearing her short Burberry Trench with nothing underneath. She apologizes to Dick and then leaves with her shoes squelching from the aftermath of her lust typhoon. Dick listened to her apology with a raging boner pressed against the inside of his Levis. Neither one of them knew that with just one word, they could have been fucking on the bathroom sink. Instead Dick goes back to work rubbing his throbbing member up against the inside of the coffee bar while thinking about the smell of Sonia's inner thighs.

When Dick gets home and before he can rush to the bedroom to remove his now crusty boxers, his roommate Joey stops him with some horrible news about Jen's parents.

Na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na HUMMINGBIRD! HUMMINGBIRD! HUMMINGBIRD!

Dick needs to console Jen since, you know, he's kind of been through this! And a guy that had also been through this helped him through this! It's a tradition! And since Jen knows Dick is Nightwing, she says, "Hey! You know how you got through this! Yeah, so I drew up these designs for a uniform and I'm ready for my therapy sessions!" And Dick is all, "Homina homina homina."

While Dick is off in the kitchen trying to calm his hominas, Jen takes off with his sticks because she told Dick she knows who killed her parents. That's when Dick also finds out who killed her parents because the description of the guy as a marked up tally sheet kind of only fits one guy.

Alan Grant Presents Mister Zsasz sponsored by Alan Grant's Comic Book Characters Created by Alan Grant.

Nightwing #28 Rating: +5 Ranking. I was really beginning to get bored with this book so thank Higgins and Dauterman for this issue. I think this is the first book I've read with Dauterman's art and I approve of it. I suppose I actually hated the change to Chicago less than the Prankster/Tony Zucco story. But I'm definitely ready for the Mature Audiences Issue when Sonia and Dick finally get together!