Now here's a figure I never thought we'd see - not that Supergirl's Kandor arc, where she and Power Girl disguised themselves as Flamebird and Nightwing (not the Robin one), was bad (well, the first two issues weren't), but it hardly set the world on fire, and there weren't legions of fans clamouring for figures of the girls' armoured forms. But I guess if you discount the heroes who wear armour as a matter of course, like Steel, the list of applicable figures for the DC Armory range isn't very large. Nightwing - okay, look, Superman and Jimmy Olsen used to go to Kandor disguised as 'Flamebird' and 'Nightwing' way before Dick Grayson adopted the name, that's why - is a fairly striking figure, though on closer inspection she's not really terrific in some ways. Her glossy black bodysuit and mask with bright red trim stands out in a crowd, and the nicely painted wings draw attention to her, but the mask, though it has a bit of a goth-y cool look, is also kind of goofy, and the limbs are really quite thin. Since PG was wearing this suit for disguise, rather than protection, that's kind of understandable, but it does make her look a bit awkward, especially when she's got her mask off. Though the physical proportions are more or less in keeping with Ed Benes's art (he only really has one way of drawing women, regardless of which character it is), the re-use of the Power Girl head from DC Direct's Infinite Crisis line invites comparison between this figure and that, and it's a difficult match - PG's generally pretty solid, going to outright muscular in some titles (including her home ground JSA), and the Infinite Crisis Power Girl just would not fit inside the Nightwing armour, with its thin arms and legs, narrow waist, and (for her) restrictive chest. This figure ends up being one of those situations where you just have to accept that superheroes aren't always physically realistic. Paintwise things are adequate, though unremarkable. The glossy black is good - in the comic both Nightwing and Flamebird had an identical dark blue steel sheen to their armour, but the use of black here, and dark steel on Flamebird, sets them apart nicely (which is handy, since they share the majority of their sculpt). The highlight details are applied fairly well - the only area where there's some careless work is the rows of red lights running down the torso, and luckily the reflections from the glossy black paint hide the bit of slop that's happened on the edges of them. The shading from medium red to dark red on the wings is very nice, but there's no other paintwork to give extra definition to the shallow sculpt of the segments in the wings. The paint on her head is quite nice, with a healthy glow to her skin and hair that contrasts well with the dark armour, and clean, clear facial features. Articulation is the standard DC Direct lot - ball joint neck and shoulders, peg elbows, hips and knees - plus ball joints for the wings. Their range of motion is good, but it's sabotaged by the design of the figure - she's sporting a typically unrealistic comic book look-at-my-rack posture, with a highly arched back, which means the ball joints fit into sockets on her back that are angles downwards. Consequently the wings won't move upwards very far - in fact, it's only really at their 'highest' point that they look decent - so that's a bit of a waste. That aside, the articulation isn't good for much besides fine-tuning - you can tweak her appearance, especially with the ball joint neck to give her little tilts of her head, but she can't do much overtly besides just stand around looking heroic. Nightwing comes with a standard 'DC Armory' base (American spelling, of course), with a single peg for her right foot - the base isn't quite big enough, so no matter what you do she'll have her left foot out on its edge. What with her narrow feet and top-heavy design, she needs it to stand up, so you're stuck with it. There's also the alternate heads - masked or unmasked - and while the mask looks quite nice, and being swappable rather than covering the unmasked head avoids the trap of ending up too large, I'm leaving her unmasked. I guess you could count the wings as accessories, since they're detachable, and she looks decent without them - though the thin body seems more obvious that way - but they are part of the point of this figure, so you'd probably keep them on. Bottom line, she's a decent figure, though not a great one. If you collect comic book figures (especially heroines) she's worth a look, but if you're more discerning (unlike me) you can probably find better ones. It is refreshing, though, to see a figure like this, of a character in an unusual guise, so I guess from that point of view the Armory concept is welcome.