Lost within a ring of snow and ice - the second circle of the labyrinth formed out of Gotham City - our heroes find themselves contending with a twisted version of Mr. Freeze and an army of frost giants! Thankfully, Nightwing has arrived on the scene to join the search for Batman, but he faces his own inner-conflict regarding the menace they face. Meanwhile, The Teen Titans meet up with The Suicide Squad, forming a reluctant alliance to get into the maze themselves...
The unfortunate thing about comic-book crossovers is that new readers, attracted by the linking story line, may find themselves turned away from a single chapter due to unexplained references to the book's regular story. This problem plagues
Nightwing #29 which makes repeated mention of a villain called Dr. Hurt and Dick Grayson's connection to The Court of Owls. While I am vaguely familiar with this plot-line from Scott Snyder's
Batman, Tim Seely doesn't do a very good job of explaining it and it's largely incidental to the action of the issue in any case. Even that much might be confusing for those readers who haven't already read
Batman: The Red Death #1, which is more efficient in explaining the basic idea of The Dark Multiverse.
Thankfully, this issue's script makes up for this shortcoming in other ways. Seely's grasp of the characters, for instance, is top-notch. I was particularly gratified to see Killer Croc as being written as something other than a complete idiot, though Damian Wayne is back to being a spoiled brat. Your mileage may vary on if this is an accurate assessment of his character, but it doesn't jibe with what we saw in
Teen Titans last week. But whatever - I can forgive a lot simply for the revelation that Harley Quinn and Green Arrow are both pen-and-paper RPG players.
The artwork is a similarly mixed bag. Paul Pelleiter is a good artist but his detail-driven style suffers in the small panels that the story requires. This frequently causes the panels to be cluttered and only the fact that Andrew Hennessy applies his inks so sparingly saves the issue. Even then, the fine details are often lost in the more heavily-shaded panels with a higher saturation of darker colors.
The Final Analysis: 6 out of 10. Decent enough but it could have been so much better.
