Batman: City Legends #22 spotlights Nightwing’s first encounter with a modernized model of a as soon as foolish foe and makes them terrifying.
The next accommodates spoilers for the story “The Director” from Batman: City Legends #22, now on sale from DC Comics
The deep bench of Batman rogues has all the time been one of many character’s biggest strengths. There’s all the time a unique gimmick or underused villain who might be dusted off and reinvented — typically to nice impact. Probably the greatest examples was when the straight-forward Mister Freeze was reimagined as certainly one of Batman’s most tragic enemies.
The same effort appears to be in thoughts with Nightwing’s new enemy the Director in “The Director” from Batman: City Legends #22 (by Jamal Campbell, Adriano Lucas, and Lucas Gattoni) — who appears to be a contemporary tackle Batman and Catwoman’s outdated enemy Movie Freak. However on prime of sharing an identical felony theme of filmmaking, the Director appears to be a much more harmful and scary foe than Movie Freak ever was.
Why The Director May Be A Nice Nightwing Rogue
“The Director” focuses on Nightwing and Oracle’s makes an attempt to counter a mysterious new menace in Bludhaven. It seems somebody has been roughly stalking Batman’s unique protege, staging crimes and filming them from afar to submit on-line beneath the moniker of the Director. The villain is briefly glimpsed engaged on a script for his or her subsequent crime, with the employed henchmen finishing up the scene all the way down to the letter. However when Nightwing really captures one of many “actors” concerned within the crime, they’re shot down from afar. Following the one lead they will discover to the native Bludhaven information station, Nightwing arrives to seek out the management room stuffed with corpses together with a message from the Director promising that their subsequent undertaking will probably be “horror” themed.
It is a compelling flip from the largely unseen villain, who has shortly elevated themselves inside Nightwing’s thoughts. The Director’s gimmick of creating motion pictures out of crimes throughout the DC Universe is a enjoyable and simply adaptable facet of their felony identification, organising a doubtlessly very helpful villain from a storytelling perspective. The character’s antics might have been performed for laughs earlier within the story, however the rising brutality of the Director’s tales hints at a much more harmful factor. It is a enjoyable new addition to Nightwing’s private rogue’s gallery, because the menace appears particularly centered on bringing down Dick Grayson. It is also a enjoyable fashionable replace of a villain having filmmaking as a central gimmick, one thing they share with certainly one of Batman’s extra foolish fashionable villains.
How The Director Compares To Movie Freak
First launched as an idea in Batman #395 (by Doug Moench, Tom Mandrake, Adrienne Roy, John Costanza, and John Workman), there have been a number of variations of Movie Freak over time. Movie Freak has all the time felt like one thing of a throwback — a gimmicky supervillain reimagined for the extra grim and gritty period he debuted in. The primary Movie Freak was a former stuntman who used movie-themed deathtraps to focus on his victims, however was finally killed by Bane in the course of the occasions of the “Knightfall” storyline. The second Movie Freak was an obsessed Catwoman enemy, filming his murders and sometimes referencing motion pictures in his felony acts. The trendy Movie Freak was an identical character who ended up being one of many casualties on the A-Day Bloodbath.
Movie Freak was all the time a D-Listing villain, whose doubtlessly creepy parts had been all the time undone by his common weak spot as a menace and goofy villainous identification. Against this, the Director seemingly begins like that, with Nightwing initially unimpressed by the brand new villain. However the Director is seemingly much more devious than Movie Freak ever turned, really scoring a number of kills and horrifying Nightwing and Orcale with their newest bloodbath. The Director takes an identical idea as Movie Freak — a movie-themed Bat-Household rogue — and turns it into a much more scary prospect that might simply change into a fixture in Nightwing’s private rogue’s gallery.