WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Nightwing #81, by Tom Taylor, Bruno Redondo, Adriano Lucas and Wes Abbott, on sale now.
While Dick Grayson may have earned his superhero stripes while working with Batman to defend Gotham City as the first Robin, the original Boy Wonder has taken on the role to become the protector of Gotham's sister city Bludhaven for some time. Initially drawn to the city for an opportunity to emerge from the shadow of his mentor, Nightwing has helped the city come a long way as its own guardian knight.
And as Nightwing faces off against a new supervillain in Bludhaven, the city surprises him with a display of how far it has come. There may be hope for Bludhaven yet -- perhaps more so than Gotham.
As Nightwing returned to watch over Bludhaven at the start of the Infinite Frontier era, he confronted a new supervillain known simply as Heartless. True to the antagonist's moniker, Heartless targeted the most vulnerable people in the city, earning him the nickname the Man With No Heart. He made children into orphans while preying on those the city had largely written off as being beyond help. And as Heartless targets a group of children at Bludhaven's docks, Nightwing discovers that the people he has been defending now have his back as he stages a daring rescue mission.
As Nightwing fights against Heartless, Tim Drake attempts to lead a group of children menaced by the supervillain to safety. This plays right into Heartless's plan, however, as he triggers a bomb that traps Tim and the fleeing children on a burning dock with no apparent means to save them before they're engulfed by the flames. Just as all hope seems lost and Nightwing, Robin and Oracle look on in horror, a fleet of small, privately owned ships from Bludhaven locals arrive to rescue Tim and the children. As a sly wink to the reader, the names of the ships are many of the fan-favorite comic book creators that have worked on various Nightwing runs in the past.
When Nightwing first came to Bludhaven to investigate a murder mystery that was linked to Gotham years ago, he found the coastal town to be even more corrupt than Gotham was, informing his decision to relocate there in an effort to clean it up. Dick joined the police force in an effort to combat the rampant corruption and graft in the law enforcement agency, only to eventually resign when his partner learned his secret identity and he found the police force too compromised for him to fix. While Dick would return to Bludhaven during the DC Rebirth era, the city remained seemingly as corrupt as it ever was.
With Heartless represents how cruel and dismissive people can be over the life of the world's more underprivileged populations, Dick Grayson just received a reminder of how communities work better when they stand together. It's the people of Bludhaven that saved the day this time and have demonstrated that even one of the DC Universe's most corrupt cities has plenty of people worth fighting.