#79 - Tarantula (Catalina Flores)
First Appearance: Nightwing #71 (Sep 2002)
"No killing? Where's the fun in that?" ~Tarantula
Tarantula is all sorts of fun, and more importantly, she was pretty much Nightwing's Talia al Ghul for the second half of his series. I love her slow descent from a vigilante to extreme vigilante to out-and-out villain. Her mental state as an FBI profiler is a stable one, but slowly in the series she becomes more and more hard-edged and a loose cannon, and she eventually reaches a point of no return. There comes a moment for a lot of vigilantes where it's a "**** or get off the pot" fork in the road, and for some, they can find that arc of redemption like Jean-Paul Valley, while for Catalina Flores, it went the opposite direction.
Catalina's primary role is as a foil to Nightwing that didn't yet exist. Catalina is weak; I mean that she isn't made of the same moral fiber and willpower that Nightwing is. I really love Dick Grayson because he can dig himself out of any hole; he's not trapped in the darkness that consumes Bruce Wayne, nor is he willing to give up fighting the good fight like some vigilantes. Catalina, on the other hand, has become consumed by her new, mentally-dangerous lifestyle. I've always loved how being a vigilante burns through people very quickly, and the Tarantula descends slowly into madness over the course of Nightwing. Interesting character who met a fate that only a writer like Gail Simone could provide.
Greatest Catalina Flores Story Ever Told: Nightwing #93 - This is my second-favorite story in the entire Nightwing sub-franchise, and Tarantula is a major piece in it. I really don't want to spoil any of this story, but I will say that Tarantula and Blockbuster are at odds with one another, and their combined agendas force Nightwing to make the most difficult and surprisingly heartbreaking decision he ever made. A truly excellent issue from the amazing follow-up run by Devin Grayson to Chuck Dixon's Nightwing. Dixon and Grayson worked together on the Bat-family for a long time, so the change in writers was a planned event and it feels like the comic is written by the same person. Fantastic stuff.
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