Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Nightwing (Vol. 4), Issue #3 – “Better Than Batman (Part 3)”! In the previous installment, Nightwing and Raptor slowly become good butt buddies and now Nightwing wants to work for the Parliament of Owls a little bit instead of against them for some reason. Probably because Raptor is very dashing and persuasive.

So expect another issue of Nightwing slipping further into the dark side, only to come back up for air by Issue #4. See? You don’t need to read this shit, I’ve got it all taken care of for you.

Nightwing (Vol. 4), Issue #3 [October, 2016]
Written by: Tim Seeley
“Better Than Batman (Part 3)”

Get a good look at the cover, boys and girls. Don’t you want to just take a bite out of that delicious taint?

The issue sets up some intrigue right away! A corpse lies bloodied on the floor. Raptor’s spiky-fingered gauntlet is slick with blood. Batgirl and Nightwing look on in horror. An innocent man has died!

Anyway, what led up to this hilarious moment? Well, Nightwing and Raptor are traipsing around Norway. Raptor has the good sense to wear an actual coat while Nightwing wears his spandex. He makes a face like “Fuck you, cold. You’re my bitch.”

“That’s the place, Nightwing,” Raptor says, showing him a twisty turny manor. “Ruud er Galehuset. ‘Ruud’s Madhouse’.”

“The home of Knute Ruud, the world’s most acclaimed designer of mazes,” Nightwing says happily. You’ve now lost me. Let’s go back to killing innocent men.

Here’s the story with ol Knutso. He got his fortune told by a tarot reader once. It was foretold that an assassin would come to his house and kill him, so he made a labyrinth of a house. And now it’s time for Nightwing and Raptor to infiltrate and hopefully find this guy in two minutes. And then the kitchen to get some lunchmeat out of the fridge.

Is Nightwing ready? Pah! “While other teenagers were doing their paper routes, I was navigating the secret lairs of jokers, pranksters, puzzlers, and riddlers!” he says haughtily. I’m about to give this nerd a wedgie when someone jumps out from the darkness!

Raptor, with lightning speed, punches in the direction of the assailant, but the assailant is ready! Raptor’s arm is grabbed, and he’s flipped over onto his face. The assailant calls him a jerk. It’s Batgirl. Batgirl is prowling around Norway now.

Raptor takes this in stride. “Hey, don’t any of you Bat-kids stay in Gotham anymore?” he says with the laugh-track blaring. Batgirl doesn’t know who this asshole is, so Nightwing asks for a minute so he can catch his GIRLFRIEND up on the news.

I’m fine, and you will treat my dominatrix with some respect.

“I had to leave Japan and track you by my phone because you stood me up, Dick,” says Batgirl. I love that Nightwing’s name is Dick. It makes conversations more hostile. “You never called me back. I was worried you were dead…”

He’s dead, all right. Dead tired of getting stalked by Batgirls. But we’re not done here, yet, Dicky. You stood up ol’ Babs because of Raptor? Oh wait, this is some Parliament of Owls shit? Never mind, that’s some serious business. I’ll go back to Japan now. *swings on rope*

Batgirl doesn’t understand what she’s hearing, though. Raptor is a Bad Dude and Nightwing is helping the Parliament of Owls with him? Have you lost your dadgum mind?

“The owls, Dick? Don’t you remember what they did to us – to our family, back in Gotham? You of all people should know what they’re capable of.”

“I do know. Too well.” Nightwing grimaces like he’s pushing out a pointy turd. “That’s why this is so important. And I’m so close, Babs.”

He gets right up to her ear. Really close. And whispers very sexually harassing things. Also, he’s going to steal a blueprint of Owl HQ from Knute Ruud. The Owls want it destroyed, but he’s going to go to FedEx Office and make 1,000,000 copies. “They’re hiding something at their base, in Crete. Something that can put their evil, rich asses in a prison cell. And it’ll be their ‘chosen one’ to throw away the key.” Nightwing grips into a fist of determination!

Batgirl looks worried. Then she palms Nightwing’s titties and tells him to be careful. Nightwing assures Batgirl that he can trust Raptor even though he has the opposite moral code of Batman. Raptor starts getting impatient with this yap yap yapping and tells Nightwing to hoof it.

There’s no way Batgirl is leaving Nightwing to get his anus skewered, so she’s tagging along too. And a few minutes later, they’re in the house. The wall closes behind them, trapping them in. Batgirl steps on a tile and almost falls through the floor. It’s like a fun video game, except with less extra lives and more shish-kebab’d buttholes.

Raptor, you look for the Triforce. Batgirl, you look for Princess Peach. Nightwing, you can fight Dr. Robotnik. Annnnnd, break!

As the trio weaves through rooms and avoids obstacles, Nightwing talks about being in the circus again and how he didn’t have any entertainment except one book he read over and over again: The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood. When he wasn’t hollowing it out to store his weed, Nightwing read it over and over. He really connected with the character. And when he met Batman, it was like, whoa, man. Vigilantism. Far out. And when Nightwing asked why they don’t fight poverty instead of crime, Barbara Gordon pointed out that stealing from the rich and giving to the poor would make you a criminal.

Really makes you think, huh? (no)

50 rooms later, they face a giant slide puzzle where they have to recreate Ruud’s tarot reading. Being from the circus, Nightwing knows right away how tarot works and puts the puzzle together in like 15 seconds. Then the lights turn off. Then Nightwing gets shoved and the lights turn back on. Raptor has disappeared into the next room.

Batgirl has a nagging feeling that Raptor wants to fulfill the whole “assassin” part of the tarot reading. Nightwing is like “NO!” and now they have another mission to stop this jerk. Batgirl does a lot of “told ya so”s while Nightwing makes more constipated faces.

Suddenly, the constipation turns into a torrent of diarrhea.

I didn’t bring any fresh underwear!

Raptor has killed an innocent man! We’re right back where we started, and I feel that this is anticlimactic as hell! Why couldn’t the innocent man be Batman or Commissioner Gordon?? Can I get an lol for that idea?

Nightwing gets so mad that he leaps at Raptor and punches half the blood out of his face. Meanwhile, Mr. Main Owl Man in Crete, who apparently has security cameras set up in Ruud’s house, watches the fight on the big screen. “How delicious. Batgirl was there to witness Nightwing’s fall. His precious Bat-family will abandon him for his moral failing. And they will believe his judgment is compromised should he try to reveal the threat to the Robin child.

The brothers and sisters of the Parliament of Owls are satisfied with this outcome! Huzzah!

Through the special teleconference screen that the Owls have apparently set up in Ruud’s house, the Owls thank Raptor for completing his mission. Then Nightwing slams Raptor’s face into the screen, destroying it and all contact by the Owls.

“That’s enough,” Raptor says. Suddenly, the “dead” man starts talking in his nasally fucking nerd voice that he obviously has based on the way he looks. “Was I good? I tried hard not to breathe.”

The blood came from a secret stash in Raptor’s gauntlet. It was all a setup! The not-quite-so-villainous man helps the little dork up off the floor. “So, Knute, here’s the deal, you Norwegian loon. The Parliament of Owls thinks you’re dead. We saved your life. So how about you thank us with a copy of that blueprint?”

Later, Batgirl is furious. Nightwing compromised his morals and resorted to playing sick pranks and stealing instead of just inspiring fear in his enemies’ hearts! Bug off, sir. Don’t contact Batgirl again until you get your fat head on straight.

Trapeze metaphors! Really hitting him where it hurts!

Batgirl rides away, and Nightwing is left with his thoughts and Raptor admiring the blueprint. Why didn’t Raptor tell the lad that he, too, wanted to help dismantle the Parliament? “Because trust earned by action is always better than words,” Raptor says sagely. Sounds like the opposite of Batman, who would just be like “YAMMER YAMMER BLAH BLAH BLAH”.

“I told you when you we met, everything Batman taught you was wrong. Because he told you to go against your instincts. To change who you are. Now you’re finding out who you are… beneath all those layers of Batman.”

Nightwing doesn’t argue. He hops into Raptor’s flying drone-like craft and they make a quick stop near Istanbul at Casa de Raptor.

“What’s inside that labyrinth is what we need. And what I have is what the Owls fear. See, a hundred years ago, Gotham’s Court of Owls needed a way to keep track of who gave what to their coffer. Their ‘brand’ is the idea that ‘affluence equals influence,’ and that needed to be upheld across the board. So they hired a mad inventor to make the Book of Wisdom. Untraceable. Unreadable but to a select few. In the age of hackers and cybercrime divisions, it’s a tradition the Parliament has upheld.”

Raptor invites Nightwing into what looks like his fuckin’ garage. There’s a man in a cage against one of the walls.

“The Parliament is what ails us. Dr. Leviticus is the cure.”

Final Thoughts

Remember Dr. Leviticus? I barely do! He’s who the graverobbers at the beginning of Issue #1 were trying to find of some reason! Well, Raptor has him and now he’s everyone’s sex slave. Have fun, Nightwing. We’ll see you in the morning!