Nightwing #13 (HERE BE SPOILERS!)

After his run on "Superboy," I had seriously come to question whether Tom DeFalco had lost his touch.  However, I'm glad to say that I rather enjoyed his Nightwing.  He actually seemed to give Dick a focus that he's been lacking under Higgins, a drive that we haven't really seen him have in the DCnU.  DeFalco does a great job juggling a number of stories here, from Dick's pursuit of Lady Shiva to his confused relationship with Sophia Branch to his committed revival of Haly's Circus.

The Branch mystery seriously deepens, since it appears that Lady Shiva's arrival in town has something to do with her (given that Shiva kills the guy who we saw in the background when Branch called to cancel her dinner "meeting" with Dick).  One of my complaints of Bendis' portrayal of Victoria Hand in "New Avengers" is that he overplayed the mystery of whether Hand was working for Norman Osborn or the New Avengers.  It was clear that the answer was going to be one or the other, so it wasn't really all that interesting of a question in the first place.  But, Higgins and DeFalco have made Branch's motivations a lot more complicated.  She very well could be engaged in illegal activity, as DeFalco at least suggests here, but it's unlikely that it's as black-and-white as "good" or "evil."  It's that sort of mystery that keeps you reading a comic.

The only downside to this issue is the somewhat random portrayal of Barbara Gordon.  She seems to be some sort of crazed vigilante in this issue.  She not only implies that she's going to kill Joker, but Dick seems to think that she wouldn't understand if he died trying to save a murderer.  It's completely at odds with Simone's portrayal of Barbara or, in fact, any portrayal of Barbara ever.  I think that I'm just going to pretend that it didn't happen.