Nightwing #15 (HERE BE SPOILERS!)

All right, if we put aside the question of how Joker has kidnapped Alfred, Barbara's mother, and Damian, freed Raya from prison, murdered Isabel and Jimmy, and shanghaied the Penguin all in the span of a few hours, Higgins delivers a pretty decent issue.  It's not quite as good as "Batgirl" #15, but he does use Joker in some pretty obvious yet still impactful ways here.  After all, as Dick himself essentially acknowledges, Haly's Circus is pretty much one big red flag waved in the face of a returned Joker.

Unlike the main titles ("Batman," "Batman and Robin," and "Detective Comics"), Higgins and Simone have done the best in making Joker's attack on people close to Dick and Barbara seems coincidental and not necessarily a sign that he knows their identities.  For example, he kidnapped Barbara's mother because she's Commissioner Gordon's ex-wife; moreover, Barbara only stumbled upon the kidnapping because James directed her there.  Similarly, Joker goes after Jimmy the clown because of the posters showing a resemblance between the two of them.  Unfortunately, I'll say that the use of Raya is a little more difficult to justify, given that her story is pretty directly related to Dick and not Nightwing.  I mean, Saiko may have fought Nightwing (and Raya may have helped Saiko), but it all had to do with Bruce saving Dick from becoming a Talon, putting Saiko next in line for the "honor."  It had nothing really to do with Nightwing.  So, I'm only left to believe that Joker chose her because of her connection with Haly's Circus, but it makes you wonder why it had to be her.  Why not pick one of the many people who work for the circus?  Her connection to Dick seems a little too strong to be coincidental.

Higgins does manage to focus on something beyond "Death of the Family."  Dick and Sonia finally kiss and it goes pretty much how you'd expect it to go, with Dick being unable to think of her as anyone other than Tony Zucco's daughter.  After the interruptions caused by "Night of the Owls" and now "Death of the Family," I'm excited for us to eventually return to this plot and really start to get somewhere with it.  But, we have a while yet before we get there, unfortunately.  Again, Higgins did a better job here than I feel like Snyder is doing in the main title, in terms of keeping up the mystery, but it still felt forced.  We'll see how it goes.