Nightwing: The Hunt for Oracle/Chuck Dixon

Nightwing: The Hunt for Oracle by Chuck Dixon, et al.; graphic novel; 192 pages

This summer, I'm going to forgo my annual Batman read-a-thon in favor of visiting another corner of the DC Universe: Birds of Prey. I know, this isn't technically a Birds of Prey title, but it came up on every list of important collections I checked, so I'm reading it. Even though I've read Dixon's work on this series before, and couldn't stand it. I'm just that dedicated.

So this story arc finds a young Dick Grayson setting up shop as his own vigilante in Bludhaven, the next town over from Gotham. He's just graduated from the police academy, but isn't corrupt enough to make it into the Bludhaven PD, so right now his crime fighting is confined to his alter ego. Meanwhile, one of the crime bosses of Bludhaved has decided he's fed up with Oracle raiding his offshore accounts whenever she feels like it, and sics a team of hackers on her to track her location. The most notable thing that happens in this book was the first face-to-face meeting for Oracle and Black Canary. The story ends on a cliffhanger, with Black Canary captured and the bad guys thinking she's Oracle. Unfortunately, I think this is one of those cases where the concluding issues have not been collected. So I'm just going to assume that Dinah escapes and everything's cool. Because she is, after all, in the rest of the series.

I wasn't too impressed by this book, and there were two things that kept me from getting into the story: the art, while good, simply isn't to my taste, and I found myself getting confused by the exaggerated porportions; also, the book was littered with typos (the most annoying was characters repeatedly referring to Oracle as a "she" when they've just given a long speech about how they don't know if Oracle is a man, woman, group, or computer program). This is what editors are for, guys. Especially in reprinted collections.