Review by Ian Keogh

Five volumes into Tom Taylor and Bruno Redondo’s award winning run on Nightwing (or six if you count Fear State), and the form is that anything by the primary creative team deserves the awards the series has won. However, the collections include the work of other creators and nowhere was it more apparent how they drag the quality down than The Leap.

Well, most of Time of the Titans is drawn by Travis Moore, and he’s an exception to the above rule. He doesn’t have Redondo’s exceptional visual imagination, but his pages are dynamic, solid, and attractive.

For the first time the title story acknowledges Nightwing’s appearances in Titans Academy, while also sparking a story from a small moment in the previous volume. Let it be a surprise why the demon Neron is gunning for Nightwing, but in theory he should be stratospherically out of Nightwing’s league. There’s a reason he has to exercise some caution, though, and that’s because even Neron doesn’t want to cross Trigon, and Nightwing’s Titans comrade Raven is Trigon’s daughter. That sets the scene for a Titans story delving into unconventional territory. Taylor goes with the classic Titans line-up, classic since the 1980s anyway, and ensures each of them has a part. Perhaps we’ve been spoiled by Taylor on Nightwing, because while this is entertaining, unpredictable and ends with a novel temptation of Nightwing, it never quite reaches the best of the series.

The very best was told exclusively via Redondo’s spreads with multiple images of Nightwing providing the title story for Get Grayson, and the final story looks to repeat the unusual art via a different gimmick. That’s an entire chapter of the world as literally seen through Nightwing’s eyes. Redondo begins by showing him awakening to the sight of Barbara Gordon alongside him and he’s only ever seen fully in reflective surfaces. The point of view art is spectacular, but would be window dressing without an inventive plot, and Taylor provides that via a desperate situation involving constantly shifting locations and methods of reaching one place from another. It’s not quite the visual treat of ‘Get Grayson’, but by any other standards it’s wonderful.

Consistency means this is a better collection than The Leap, and in summer 2025 it’s due to be collected in the Nightwing by Tom Taylor Omnibus.