Batman recently lost most of his money and resources, and a recent issue of Nightwing suggests he will no longer pursue crime outside America.
Warning: contains spoilers for Nightwing #77!
When it comes to any hero who's been in the comics for long enough, "power creep" begins to set in. Heroes who were once just strong can now push over buildings, and street-level heroes begin to chalk up huge wins they'd never have been capable of when they started out. Batman is the poster child for this process, going from a vigilante who stalked criminals at night to the hyper-prepared genius who is ready for anything. Lately, however, Batman took a huge hit to his resources, and Nightwing #77 just revealed that Dick Grayson now considers him an exclusively American hero.
In Nightwing #77, from Dan Jurgens and Ronan Cliquet, Batman and Nightwing split up to deal with two different crimes in the run-up to Christmas. While Batman goes to shut down a riot at Arkham Asylum, Nightwing is assigned to investigate a crime at the Dexiturn Technology Offices. The CEO is waiting for him there, irritated to find that it isn't Batman who has answered their call for help, and insisting that Nightwing call his "boss" to come address the issue.
Where things get odd is when Nightwing is told Dexiturn Technology are a global operation and responds, "If they're in a foreign country, that's out of our territory." As he leaves the building, Nightwing also opines, "Dexiturn is backed by a group that buys small companies, jacks them up, and then sells them for a massive profit. It's a take-no-prisoners style that makes cannon fodder out of its employees and suppliers. Legal, but hardly admirable. Still, the company was victimized." Nightwing eventually discovers Dexiturn is being blackmailed by a former employee whose work they stole, and Bruce Wayne is able to use his remaining fortune to help fix the situation, but it's Dick's attitude to the entire case that seems so strange.
Batman's recent Joker War robbed him of most of his resources, leaving him with a very new approach to crime-fighting, but Nightwing #77 seems to portray the team as they were in the Batman TV series starring Adam West and Burt Ward; more private detectives than the superheroes fans know from the comics. The story gives the impression Nightwing and Batman have been called on the Bat-Phone and summoned to an appointment, with Nightwing agreeing to spend the night helping out a villainous company over a crime he considers minor simply because it's against the law. While Dick asks why they don't just pay the pittance of a ransom, he still behaves as if he's been hired to solve the crime, attending to it rather than helping Batman quell a riot which includes Mr. Freeze, Clayface, Two-Face, the Penguin, and Killer Croc.
While Batman can definitely handle himself in such a situation - and his movements are constrained without the usual fleet of Bat-Vehicles - it's surprising to hear Nightwing state so definitively that the Dark Knight now considers anywhere beyond America outside his jurisdiction. Not long ago, Batman traveled to other planets to hunt down a villain who shot Nightwing, and he ends the issue by buying an apartment block for the "villain" and all her neighbors, so the idea that foreign travel is totally off the menu is hard to swallow. While Batman's new low-tech approach feels like an exciting reinvention of the character, hopefully Nightwing's assertions in this issue don't indicate the comics will be ditching Bruce's globe-trotting heroism only to adopt something more similar to the campy show.
