Dick meets his natural nemesis....
One of my frequent complaints about the Dixon Nightwing run was the absence of decent villains for our former Boy Wonder.
For a kid who'd grown up fighting Joker, Two-Face, Scarecrow and Mad Hatter with Batman, and the likes of the Fearsome Five, The Brotherhood of Evil, Trigon and many others with the Titans, there were mighty slim pickings in Bludhaven.
It wasn't until Nightwing 48 that Dick finally got a supervillain of her very own And given Dick's history as the worlds most tied up superhero, wanna guess what Sylph's power was? :)
To elaborate, villainwise, Blockbuster was little more than the Kingpin redux, operating behind the scenes, and as for his gang of no-hoper lieutenants... well they included Stallion (a steroid case with a bum knee), Brutale (throws knives... not terribly well it would seem) and Lady Vic (An English mercenary, her accent being most of her schtick, and a murderess who calls herself "Lady Victim" is just bizarre (There was an explanation, but I'd say that if your codename requires an explanation, you probably need a new codename)).
Also note, Blockbuster aside, not a single metahuman between them, though one has to be careful about such things, as more than one person has noted, all it would take is one moderately gifted telekinetic to decide to pursue a life of crime and Batman and Robin would be street pizza next time they jumped off a fifty storey building.
We got Scarecrow making a two issue appearance having been hired by Blockbuster, but that was it! It was approaching the embarassing, and Dick deserved better than that IMHO. We could have had Phobia or Plasmus show up to try and deal with him without his usual Titans backup.
Yup... The art is by Greg Land, which probably has foxhack's hackles rising already, but I think this is prior to his worst tracing problems... and that seems to be one of the saddest aspects of Land's tracing, he's actually a good artist when he can be bothered to be.
At any rate, back to the story....Dick's on patrol..
He see's a man falling from a penthouse, too far to do anything to catch him... but then someone else leaps after the leaper, and he stands a chance of catching her...
He realises that something is up when some of the material wrapped around her catches hold of various building parts, behave like the Bat-clans ubiquitous de-cel cables and lower her gently to the ground...
And since she followed the first leaper down, that means that she must have pushed him, which that means i
"It was MURDER!" (Which I ALWAYS hear in the voice of Lionel Stander (The gravel-voicesd Max from "Hart to Hart") for some reason)
Dick takes some of the material home with him (And I should note that it's nice that he's doing his own forensics and research rather than relying on Oracle) The post-it's on his computer read "Book for Alfred" and "Call Tim back"
He finds that the dead guy, Aaron Shue, was a multimillionaire textiles manufacturer, who was in partnership witha guy named Nelson DeSantis... the late Nelson DeSantis..
In this next page bear in mind that the woman, who we assume is known as "Sylph" because that's the name of this two part story, is talking to the body on the floor she's just killed. She is NOT a well lady...
Her powers make her sort of a cross between Spawn, Doctor Octopus and Gypsy Moth.
Sylphs's powers have a GREAT visual style... Oddly, the original versions of the covers showed Sylph wearing white rather than red... perhaps it made her appearance seem to be too close to other characters like Ghost. Personally, I think it's a bit of a shame they changed it as I think white would suit someone named after a wind sprite, and been a better contrast to her surroundings and actions.
And now we see why this woman was BORN to be Dick's nemesis.
Yeah, you haven't, and you probably wouldn't if she hadn't decided to cut your decel- line at JUST that moment.
Gotta love a villain whose entire power is based on binding and gagging the hero... well I do, but I freely admit to being a perv.
He manages to cut an arm free....
Cue almost inevitable 18 wheeler bearing down on him for the cliffhanger...
He manages to roll out of the way, and survive strands of the fabric catching on the trucks axle.
Nice little sequence showing why how good an acrobat Dick is...Even half mummified, he can still out-manouver anyone else on earth.
He survives, and looks good doing it naturally. He decides to call in the big guns on researching the background of this fabric. And it's not who you'd automatically think.... Since this is a business matter rather than heroic, he calls on Lucius Fox, on the pretext that Bruce wants him to take a more active role in his investments (Which is a nice cover)
This is during Dick's becoming a policeman arc, and I love Lucius' reaction (Though he clearly didn't know that Dick had been a bartender from some months, and it seems a little odd that he wasn't aware of Dick taking on a high risk profession). Luckily that occupise much of the rest of the issue, so the page coount if less tricky than is often the case.
We see Office Grayson meeting Amy, his sergeant, who takes him on a stakeout. Dick faking naivete about such things is quite cute.
Love Dick's closet, though one can perhaps see why Bruce would later chastise him for not hiding his secret identity better. You'd certainly want to make sure you've pulled the right shirt out of the closet getting dressed in the dark.
I think that's a typo, they should be Krocky Crunchies... unless Dick is eating generic low grade cereals, which would just be sad.
Also not, again, the greeenscreen monitor look, which went out of fashion in the 1980's..
So thanks to Lucius, Dick discovers that there was a third investor in the fabric, Leon Drexel, who now owns all rights to the patent for the cloth. So he pops out to visit him... His estate is VERY well guarded, but of course that means nothing to a Bat-clan member.
She's an obsessed killer, but she's not cruel. She doesn't kill the guards or the guard dogs, but gift wraps them. The poor little doggies look almost cute.
She makes a big entrance and is surprised to see Nightwing still alive, he apologises for that, saying that he's "difficult that way")
I also like his style in dealing with her...
This really does highlight Dick's acrobatic style no? :)
Again like the subtle reference to Dick's motivations for becoming a hero in the first place, and that she's pursuing a path he might have taken himself had Bruce not been there for him.
And this, frustratingly, is where we get to the downside of Dixon's run. The story is derailed by the next crossover event, and despite the fact that in the next issue, the police investigating Slyph's suicide leap discover that the body is actually not present within the fabric, which simply unravels to emptiness, meaning that she IS alive at the end of this, we never see her again... We never even find out how she can do the things she can with the fabric.
Oh, she made a very brief cameo in the background of Phil Jimenez's "all heroine all villainess" storyline (but then, who didn't), but other than that, bupkiss. So Dick's one and only new metahuman foe remained precisely that, a one and only situation.... Still she was fun whilst she lasted.
And just because covers don't count, I include the other cover of this arc.
For a kid who'd grown up fighting Joker, Two-Face, Scarecrow and Mad Hatter with Batman, and the likes of the Fearsome Five, The Brotherhood of Evil, Trigon and many others with the Titans, there were mighty slim pickings in Bludhaven.
It wasn't until Nightwing 48 that Dick finally got a supervillain of her very own And given Dick's history as the worlds most tied up superhero, wanna guess what Sylph's power was? :)
To elaborate, villainwise, Blockbuster was little more than the Kingpin redux, operating behind the scenes, and as for his gang of no-hoper lieutenants... well they included Stallion (a steroid case with a bum knee), Brutale (throws knives... not terribly well it would seem) and Lady Vic (An English mercenary, her accent being most of her schtick, and a murderess who calls herself "Lady Victim" is just bizarre (There was an explanation, but I'd say that if your codename requires an explanation, you probably need a new codename)).
Also note, Blockbuster aside, not a single metahuman between them, though one has to be careful about such things, as more than one person has noted, all it would take is one moderately gifted telekinetic to decide to pursue a life of crime and Batman and Robin would be street pizza next time they jumped off a fifty storey building.
We got Scarecrow making a two issue appearance having been hired by Blockbuster, but that was it! It was approaching the embarassing, and Dick deserved better than that IMHO. We could have had Phobia or Plasmus show up to try and deal with him without his usual Titans backup.
Yup... The art is by Greg Land, which probably has foxhack's hackles rising already, but I think this is prior to his worst tracing problems... and that seems to be one of the saddest aspects of Land's tracing, he's actually a good artist when he can be bothered to be.
At any rate, back to the story....Dick's on patrol..
He see's a man falling from a penthouse, too far to do anything to catch him... but then someone else leaps after the leaper, and he stands a chance of catching her...
He realises that something is up when some of the material wrapped around her catches hold of various building parts, behave like the Bat-clans ubiquitous de-cel cables and lower her gently to the ground...
And since she followed the first leaper down, that means that she must have pushed him, which that means i
"It was MURDER!" (Which I ALWAYS hear in the voice of Lionel Stander (The gravel-voicesd Max from "Hart to Hart") for some reason)
Dick takes some of the material home with him (And I should note that it's nice that he's doing his own forensics and research rather than relying on Oracle) The post-it's on his computer read "Book for Alfred" and "Call Tim back"
He finds that the dead guy, Aaron Shue, was a multimillionaire textiles manufacturer, who was in partnership witha guy named Nelson DeSantis... the late Nelson DeSantis..
In this next page bear in mind that the woman, who we assume is known as "Sylph" because that's the name of this two part story, is talking to the body on the floor she's just killed. She is NOT a well lady...
Her powers make her sort of a cross between Spawn, Doctor Octopus and Gypsy Moth.
Sylphs's powers have a GREAT visual style... Oddly, the original versions of the covers showed Sylph wearing white rather than red... perhaps it made her appearance seem to be too close to other characters like Ghost. Personally, I think it's a bit of a shame they changed it as I think white would suit someone named after a wind sprite, and been a better contrast to her surroundings and actions.
And now we see why this woman was BORN to be Dick's nemesis.
Yeah, you haven't, and you probably wouldn't if she hadn't decided to cut your decel- line at JUST that moment.
Gotta love a villain whose entire power is based on binding and gagging the hero... well I do, but I freely admit to being a perv.
He manages to cut an arm free....
Cue almost inevitable 18 wheeler bearing down on him for the cliffhanger...
He manages to roll out of the way, and survive strands of the fabric catching on the trucks axle.
Nice little sequence showing why how good an acrobat Dick is...Even half mummified, he can still out-manouver anyone else on earth.
He survives, and looks good doing it naturally. He decides to call in the big guns on researching the background of this fabric. And it's not who you'd automatically think.... Since this is a business matter rather than heroic, he calls on Lucius Fox, on the pretext that Bruce wants him to take a more active role in his investments (Which is a nice cover)
This is during Dick's becoming a policeman arc, and I love Lucius' reaction (Though he clearly didn't know that Dick had been a bartender from some months, and it seems a little odd that he wasn't aware of Dick taking on a high risk profession). Luckily that occupise much of the rest of the issue, so the page coount if less tricky than is often the case.
We see Office Grayson meeting Amy, his sergeant, who takes him on a stakeout. Dick faking naivete about such things is quite cute.
Love Dick's closet, though one can perhaps see why Bruce would later chastise him for not hiding his secret identity better. You'd certainly want to make sure you've pulled the right shirt out of the closet getting dressed in the dark.
I think that's a typo, they should be Krocky Crunchies... unless Dick is eating generic low grade cereals, which would just be sad.
Also not, again, the greeenscreen monitor look, which went out of fashion in the 1980's..
So thanks to Lucius, Dick discovers that there was a third investor in the fabric, Leon Drexel, who now owns all rights to the patent for the cloth. So he pops out to visit him... His estate is VERY well guarded, but of course that means nothing to a Bat-clan member.
She's an obsessed killer, but she's not cruel. She doesn't kill the guards or the guard dogs, but gift wraps them. The poor little doggies look almost cute.
She makes a big entrance and is surprised to see Nightwing still alive, he apologises for that, saying that he's "difficult that way")
I also like his style in dealing with her...
This really does highlight Dick's acrobatic style no? :)
Again like the subtle reference to Dick's motivations for becoming a hero in the first place, and that she's pursuing a path he might have taken himself had Bruce not been there for him.
And this, frustratingly, is where we get to the downside of Dixon's run. The story is derailed by the next crossover event, and despite the fact that in the next issue, the police investigating Slyph's suicide leap discover that the body is actually not present within the fabric, which simply unravels to emptiness, meaning that she IS alive at the end of this, we never see her again... We never even find out how she can do the things she can with the fabric.
Oh, she made a very brief cameo in the background of Phil Jimenez's "all heroine all villainess" storyline (but then, who didn't), but other than that, bupkiss. So Dick's one and only new metahuman foe remained precisely that, a one and only situation.... Still she was fun whilst she lasted.
And just because covers don't count, I include the other cover of this arc.