Nightwing #38

Set against a blazing red background strung with barbed wire and military helicopters, this December 1999 installment of Nightwing opens the "Ballistic Romance" arc in dramatically kinetic fashion. Scott McDaniel and Karl Story's cover captures Nightwing in freefall alongside a fierce young woman in a wheelchair — both figures tumbling past a shattered clock face amid what the "No Man's Land" banner makes clear is Gotham at its most desperate. Chuck Dixon's long run on the title is in full stride here, and this issue promises the kind of acrobatic action and street-level tension that made Nightwing one of DC's most compelling late-'90s reads.