Overkill: Nightwing #16 Review

I now know where Walter White got all the cash he’s keeping in that storage unit in Breaking Bad: from The Joker. Because the only possible explanation for how Joker could not only take over and gin up Arkham Asylum the way he did in Batman #16, but set up the amusement park in the intricate way he did in Nightwing #16, is with a pile of azure crank so big it would make Tony Montana reconsider his life choices.

Nightwing #16 continues this month’s series of individual penultimate chapters of the Death of The Family event, which means that Joker is finally springing his trap against Nightwing. And, as in the beginning of this month of stories as established in Batman #16, Joker’s trap is so elaborate, hideous and wide-ranging that you will have a moment, while reading the story, where you say to yourself, “Um… Joker would have to have a team of trained engineers, including outsourced talent, to be able to pull this off. How does one find a demolitions engineer in another city? Do you go on Monster.com and search on ‘explosives,’ ‘9-11 hoax,’ and ‘Lyndon LaRouche’?”

So what writer Kyle Higgins has done here is to create a deathtrap so wide-ranging and intricate that it almost beggars belief. We have elements here that would require significant travel, transportation and varied expertise to pull off, not to mention days and days without sleep to do it in less than a few months. And on top of it, it almost requires Joker to know that Dick Grayson is Nightwing, so if DC decides to back off that plot point when the series is over, they’re gonna have a real problem unless someone along the line gives Joker some kind of meatball lobotomy, or maybe bring in Superman under the assumption that New 52 Supes has the same power set as Christopher Reeve in Superman II.

It’s almost an insurmountable challenge… but Higgins redeems himself by making Joker’s motivations and explanations for taking action against Nightwing somewhat compelling, even as the scope of what his motivations have led him to do simply beggar belief.

Well, he mostly redeems himself.

Nightwing is on the trail of Joker, who has killed his girlfriend and left a clue that leads Nightwing to an amusement park in Gotham… and seriously: why does Gotham suffer all these abandoned playing card factories, toy factories and amusement parks? When Joker comes to town, it’s not like he sets up shop in a Kinkos or some temporary office space in the financial district or anything; the first time you hear the guy cackle, just dynamite the fucking abandoned clown haunts and your problem’s solved before the first poisoned fish shows up! But I digress.

Anyway, Joker has booby trapped the entire amusement park, including Joker Gas bombs, explosive traps, with the bodies of all Nightwing’s buddies from the circus strung up all for decoration. This, as would be expected, drives Nightwing into a frenzy, with him apparently making the decision that Joker needs to die. But that’s easier said than done, as Joker has found all Nightwing’s living circus buddies, given them a dose of the Joker Gas,  and turned them loose…

The best part of the story is Joker’s taunting of Nightwing, and his twisted explanation over why he’s targeted Nightwing. The overall engine driving Death of The Family has been that Joker believes that the Batman Family makes Batman himself weaker, so to see Joker incensed that Nightwing was the one member of Batman’s crew who left, and then had the temerity to come back, actually makes a lot of sense. And when you combine that characterization with Nightwing’s, who has spent the event seeing not only his Batman Family, but his circus family, ruthlessly attacked if not killed by Joker, and there’s enough character horsepower under the hood to keep you going all the way through the story… even when the story stops making any realistic sense at all.

And “realistic sense” is the biggest problem with the book: this plan simply isn’t possible for anyone to actually complete. The Joker’s deathtrap for Nightwing involves taking over an amusement park, planting gas bombs and explosives, and painting the whole thing up so it looks like someone gave John Wayne Gacy mescaline and a crate of Rust-O-Leum. This is a big enough accomplishment, and I’m willing to accept it since this kind of setup is stock in trade for a Joker story… but then there’s the bodies used as decoration. Joker tells Nightwing that they are the bodies of everyone who’s died in Haly’s Circus, and if that’s the case, it means that Joker and / or his associates have been doing a ton of driving and digging to get the detritus from this traveling circus – “traveling” being the key word. But even if Joker’s lying and the bodies are just locals he grabbed from Potter’s Field, it’s still a lot of work… and then there’s the living members of the circus Joker turns loose on Nightwing. Those guys were sent away from Gotham at Nightwing’s behest… so how did Joker find them all and round them up? I grant that there’s a possibility that they are simply a hallucination on Nightwing’s part – there is a precedent for that in this very issue – but if they are, there is no specific indication of this in the writing or the art… and even I have never had a hallucination that knocked me unconscious with a fucking hammer.

The overall effect of all these devices and bodies and assailants is to make the Joker’s entire deathtrap so convoluted and unlikely it makes it almost impossible to achieve suspension of disbelief. There is just too much here to really be able to believe that any one guy could accomplish it, without billions of dollars, a team of experts and the entire police department in his pocket. And while I specifically made a mental effort to ignore the same issues in Batman #16, the fact of the matter is that, while Nightwing #16 is a decent enough Joker story, it just isn’t as compelling as that issue of Batman. This isn’t entirely Higgins’s fault – Joker versus anyone but Batman just isn’t going to carry the same emotional resonance as Joker versus Batman (and yes, I maintain that includes Joker versus Batgirl and Red Hood, regardless of his crimes against them personally), so you just need to try that much harder to achieve the same effect. Higgins does a good job of fleshing out Joker’s motivations… but not to the point where I believed the lengths to which he went to get Nightwing in this issue. Considering that historically, Joker simply shot Batgirl and crowbarred Jason Todd, the effort shown here by Joker just wasn’t justifiable, and therefore wasn’t believable.

Eddy Barrows’s pencils are solid enough for the story, if nothing really to write home about. He works in a fine line without being heavily stylized, and delivers realistic figures and expressive faces – in particular, his Joker gas-affected faces were extremely menacing and disturbing, as you’d hope for. He specifically captures Nightwing’s acrobatics well; my favorite visual part of the issue was the several pages of Nightwing moving across Gotham toward the amusement park, where Barrows used a variety of methods to make the movement dynamic and fluid. His storytelling is clear and easy to follow… with the exception of Nightwing’s gas-induced hallucinations. With one exception, Barrows depicts what I assume to be hallucinations in crystal-clear detail, with no indication whatsoever that what we’re seeing isn’t reality. It makes these sequences more confusing that they need to be – at one point, I was really confused as to whether I was witnessing a hallucination or some henchman in a costume basically acknowledging that Joker knew Nightwing was Dick Grayson – and it is very possible that the final attack by the circus folk was a hallucination, but as previously stated: I just can’t tell based on the art. On the whole, this is an example of good, detailed, workmanlike comic art… but I really would’ve liked a little more clarity on what Nightwing was actually seeing later in the book.

As a character-based story about Joker’s and Nightwing’s motivations, Nightwing #16 is a solid entry in the Death of The Family crossover. The problem is in the story’s scope; I just don’t believe the sheer level of what Joker has put into place to take out Nightwing, a character that the entire story requires Joker to think is someone who is weaker than Batman. As in Batman #16, it helps if you can read the story without thinking too hard about what Joker has put together here… but unlike that issue, it’s just harder to make that suspension of disbelief. It’s worth reading, but nowhere near as satisfying as what’s been happening in the main story.

And seriously: someone give some thought to blowing up those abandoned amusement parks. You can take out Joker and put a dent in Gotham’s meth trade, all in one shot.