Nightwing (Vol. 4), Issue #11 – “Blüdhaven (Part 2)”

* Part 3 of 7 of the Back to Blüdhaven storyline *

Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Nightwing (Vol. 4), Issue #11 – “Blüdhaven (Part 2)”! In the previous installment, getting the idea from Alternate Superman, who told Grayson that Alternate Nightwing made his home in Blüdhaven, Regular Nightwing sets up camp in Regular Blüdhaven. He gets bored fast trying to not be Nightwing, so after going out and being Nightwing for the first time, the Tourism Department Office catches wind and decides that Blüdhaven needs a superhero to bring in the masses.

Dick Grayson goes to the Community Center to volunteer helping Troubled Teens. His interviewer, Shawn Tsang, turns out to be Blüdhaven’s greatest ne’er-do-well! THE DEFACER!

What she does is spraypaint boners onto statues. I don’t think Nightwing will be able to handle this one.

Nightwing (Vol. 4), Issue #11 [February, 2017]
Written by: Tim Seeley
“Blüdhaven (Part 2)”

Let’s start with a flashback, shall we? Batman and Robin, accompanied by Lieutenant Jim Gordon, discover a warehouse full of defaced statues. “Gotham’s lost history,” proclaims Batman. And this brings their mission to a close.

A woman wearing stupid feathery wings calls the three of them “sheeple”. “You worship at the feet of patriarchal icons! The narrative you defend enslaves you!” She calls herself The Pigeon. She is the Defacer’s sidekick. Rewriting history by destroying its monuments to the past is the name of their game. So I’m guessing the Defacer spraypaints the statues and the Pigeon shits on them?

Anyway, Pigeon gets hauled out by the police. Robin wonders what will happen to Defacer, who is a minor. Some sort of justice will be served, that’s for damn sure. Like a paddling. Robin doesn’t think it’s very fair. “She just had the wrong mentor. Without Pigeon’s manipulations, her only crime is being angry.”

Flashfoward to the present where Shawn Tsang is yelling angrily at Nightwing for attempting to ruin everything. She tells him to get the fuck out of here. She tells him to go eat shit. All the things that I want to say to Nightwing, she says to him.

So much for going to Blüdhaven to get away from the superhero shtick. “You’ll ruin everything we’ve worked for if the Run-Offs see you,” Defacer yells shortly before a Run-Off pops into the room and elbows Nightwing in the back. Stallion is his name; a former pro football player who works for the Penguin. He wears a stinky cowboy hat. “I did four years in Blackgate cuz a’ you!”

Stallion is about to pound Nightwing into ground sirloin, but Defacer tells him to stay cool. He’s not the monster in the mirror, he’s the man on the inside! Stallion looks at a shard of mirror on the floor and frowns sadly. “Stupid stupid stupid! Why can’t I get it through my thick head?! Why am I so stupid?!”

She’s right. The world is lousy with superheroes and they’re all better off dead. That’s what she means, right?

The crying begins, and Defacer blames Nightwing for reducing the Stallion to a blubbering mess on the floor. It’s always fuckin’ Nightwing and Batman and all the rest of them! “They all came here to escape you,” Defacer yells, pointing a finger at him.

Dapper James Nice walks into the room with a small gaggle of costumed motherfuckers, telling everyone to just stay calm. I’m sorry, it’s Jimmy Nice. He looks like Conan O’Brien or something. Welcome to the support group for former Gotham supervillains! Thrill Devil. Mouse. Giz. They’re all here, and they’re all traumatized from Batman and Robin sending them to Arkham for their criminal crimes. “I should have known that hoping for simplicity would lead me into this tar pit snare trap of a situation,” Nightwing thinks.

Defacer grabs Nightwing’s arm with the intention of hauling him out of there, telling the group that he got lost on the way back to Gotham where he belongs. Mouse chimes in quietly about how much Nightwing could actually help with “the conspiracy”, but then she clams up and looks embarrassed. Nightwing looks around the room and sees just a pile of sad-sacky individuals with various emotional problems. “Okay. I’m leaving,” he says, defeated.

“Nightwing! Wait!” yells Jimmy Smits Nice as Nightwing exits the building. “Before you go… I know your reception up there wasn’t very welcoming, but I wanted to tell you… I’m here, because of you. You helped scare these people straight. That’s why we do need your help.”

Great. These are going to be the Troubled Teens, then? That’s more than Nightwing bargained for. Fuck that noise. He’s got other fish to fry. Peace.

Jimmy continues his sob story about how the Run-Offs saved him from a life of even more crime.

…

“Okay. I’ll help Grimm. But then I have to walk away, okay?”

Gorilla Grimm isn’t worth helping, but whatever. Waste your time.

I can’t! I have a casserole in the oven at home!

Jimmy tells Nightwing a bit of Grimm information, so to speak. He had been to Meadowdale Mall. “If you know anything about Blüdhaven… you know nothing good ever happens there.”

Ahhh, Meadowdale Mall. The illegal street market. Black market internal organs and hacked PS5s are the most popular items there! The cops tolerate it because they keep it out of the rest of the streets. And since Gorilla Grimm was a weapons dealer, maybe Nightwing can tie him to dead-as-a-doornail Paulie Paterno.

Nightwing slips a rather grumpy man a finsky for some Grimm details: if he wants to know about “the monkey”, he’s gotta go see “Jane”.

Nightwing goes to see “Jane”, a prostitute whom Grimm hired once a week for “King Kong” scenarios. It helped him stop menacing humans for real, so it was almost like community service, if getting an ape’s rocks off counts. And for an extra $25, Jane will show Nightwing where Grimm lives…

The Redhorn International Shipping building in the harbor. He’s not here now, but was he here when Paterno got shot? After setting aside some extra time to think about how much he wants to bone Shawn Tsang, Nightwing does cartwheels and flips into the building to try to hack into the security camera footage. After noting that a segment of the video is missing, he runs through the visitor check-in list. The very top name is smeared and illegible, and here’s the kicker: it’s smeared by a liquid that smells like a horse! Isn’t that some godawful stupid shit right there? “Like it or not, my instincts were right… Grimm was framed.”

OH NO, SOMEONE WANTS TO TAKE THE GORILLA OUT OF THE PICTURE? I SURE CAN’T WAIT TO FIND OUT WHO zzzzzzzzzz…

Back at the Blüdhaven Convention and Tourism Bureau, a man named Simon is snoozing at his desk until Cherry rousts him awake. She sucks down a 5-Hour Energy and gives him the skinny on what she came up with to save their pathetic city from tourism failures:

He looks like a twerpy little nerd, Cherry. We are so fired.

Nightwing returns to his shitty apartment at sunrise. “At least I was smart enough to realize that living above a home for the blind would be useful for when I decide to slip into my place at dawn, still in my night-tights,” he says. Yeah, how very fucking convenient, huh?

“What am I doing?” he asks himself. “I came to Blüdhaven to get to know myself without a mask and code name.” And what’s he doing instead? He’s masking and code-naming all over the place! Just jizzing gallons of masks and code names.

Grayson strips down to his sexy boxers and flops on his second-hand, stainy couch. Maybe it’s time that he accepts the fact that he needs to talk to someone. That he needs therapy. That he needs a boatload of Xanax.

Down at the Community Center, the former supervillains are in the middle of a restorative group therapy session. There’s a lot of emotional outpouring and friendly claps on the back. Thank you all for coming to the make-up session after last night’s unpleasantness from You-Know-Who. Everyone have a safe ride home! Don’t do crimes!

After everyone leaves, Nightwing slinks out of the shadows. Shawn sarcastically praises him on waiting until everyone’s gone to have his own personal therapy session. “I came here because I was having trouble trusting people. Because I wasn’t sure what the next step in my life was. I realize now, that makes me a lot more like the Run-Offs. It makes me a lot more like you.”

Stop, stop, you’re embarrassing yourself with all the blubbering! Nightwing continues spilling his guts unprompted before letting Shawn know that he knows Gorilla Grimm is innocent and that he’s going to help him with or without permission.

…

“You know,” Shawn says, “back in Gotham, all those years ago… when they were taking me away, you and I shared this curious little glance. I was so mad then that I couldn’t see it.” Basically, what if they met under normal circumstances? What if things were different? What if they leaned in for a kiss out of nowhere?

Get a room, children.

The cops roll in to break up the near-kiss. Shawn walks down the steps with her hands up. The cops, these pigs, they tell her that she’s a suspect in a murder and that she needs to come downtown with them. Nightwing’s all like “WHAT?!”, and then the cops tell the punk to back off. They don’t need “heroes” in this town, remember?

“You can just go back to Gotham, Nightwing,” the cop says, pointing to the Tourism Board’s newest billboard behind him. “This is a job for the police, not for ad campaigns.”

Later, the TV news reports on Blüdhaven’s newest sad-sack superhero as a suspect is taken into custody. A man turns off the TV and turns to his friends in the room. “Up until now, the Blüd’s been unexplored territory for superheroes. So we gotta make sure they know coming here can kill you. Lucky for us, the Whale Enders got you, Grace.”

A giant man-orca is revealed. He goes by “The Orca”. He looks like an orca. “Our very own sea monster,” the man says befuddingly.