Nightwing volume 1

So all the New 52 Teen Titans were checked out of my local library, so I grabbed this to continue dipping my toe into DC's experiment.

Nightwing and I go way back to my days reading The New Teen Titans, I read the issue where Dick unveiled his new identity something like 1.6 million times, and spent a lot of time following his solo title.

This was a different take on Dick's return to the circus home of his youth, revisiting his parents' death as well as other tragedies. Naturally, a costumed assassin comes after him and drops some bodies. Leading to Dick learning a lot more about the circus' present and past (changing the way he had to look at many things).

There were a couple of brief detours from the hunt for the assassin. One was a brief supernatural story in the midst of all of this – it felt pretty strange in the context, but it worked. The other was a quick team-up with Batgirl to take down a shapeshifting thief. I really liked that story and the relationship between Dick and Barbara there.

Barrows art was fine – sometimes really good. Some of the other stuff? Eh, not so much (some of it was really nice, though). I thought it was an interesting choice to make the Flying Graysons' costumes look like older versions of Nightwing's costume, I remembered them being more classic Robin-y, but this worked for me. I'm not crazy about the red instead of the blue on Nightwing's costume, but I can deal with it, I guess.

On the whole, there was nothing really “New” about this “New 52” Nightwing – Barbara as Bat-girl was nice, maybe some of the revelations in the last couple of pages – but basically this was a Nightwing story. Nothing wrong with that.