Alright, once more into the breech. This time the "breech" is my going right at all the stories that really defined Ed Bubaker's and Greg Rucka's tenures in the Batman Universe in the early 2000's and the stuff I kept saying over and over again last piece that needed special addressing in a future column. Well that time is now and the stories I'm talking about are the "Officer Down" and the "Bruce Wayne: Murderer/Fugitive" storylines, as well as the showstopper series, GOTHAM CENTRAL. For better or for worse or for "arguably on of the best comic books ever written" when it comes to GC (to bury the lede on my discussion of that series) those were the stories that really emphasized what these two scribes were going for when it putting a stamp on this branch of the DC Universe.
This smaller, one-month crossover between the Bat books in 2001 was really an eye opener for me when it came to comic books. It was a very personal tale with Jim Gordon as both the lynchpin of the story and showing how much of one he was to the Batmanverse, wherein this tale Gordon takes a bullet in the back and his survival rate is low. All aspects of every part of Gotham mobilize immediately and take drastic action on finding out who did such a spineless act on one of Gotham's most beloved citizens and it just shows what the character means to so many characters in that city and in the echelon of comic books in general as one of the best supporting characters ever created. To Batman and Nightwing he's a father figure, obviously to former Batgirl Barbara Gordon he is an actual one, and to a whole swath of some of the best developed tertiary characters in comic books like Harvey Bullock and Renee Montoya, he's the mentor of all mentors. The emotional turmoil and how that resonates through the pages of all these Batman centric titles is palpable, especially when you get to the really dire material of Batman himself being so distraught that his stoic "always have a plan" facade drops and all he wants to do is revert back to that child in that alley thirty years ago who lost his biological father. That kind of material really hits hard because this is a character that always tries so hard to force people away when you know he really wants people in his circle to know how much they mean to him but he is afraid to attach like that; it really puts a pin on how broken Batman is at his core despite his whole mystique being that of the person who always is on top of everything.
And honestly it's a roller coaster ride of a tale. Between all the emotion above broiling around the idea that we might lose one of the most important B-characters in all of comic book history, it's just a good thrill ride for a handful of issues. Catwoman gets caught at the scene of the crime so there's a race on to find her and see what role she played in the crime, there's the ER type drama of Gordon facing multiple surgeries in a short span of time to stay alive, and then when the prime suspect comes to light you get the dichotomy of a bunch of characters who dress up in costume and solve most crime with their fists being at the mercy of a couple detectives working the suspect in an interrogation box trying to get him to blurt out his guilt because the evidence on him is shoddy at best. Watching characters who stand toe-to-toe with literal gods sometimes be at the mercy of criminal procedure is actually one of the most thrilling and harrowing things to happen in a Batman comic ever because of the stakes in play and the character that is Jim Gordon. And the absolute shock of the prime suspect actually walking away from everything and the ramifications of that conclusion and how they play out over the next couple years in the remainder of this Brubaker/Rucka era is just *Chef's kiss* good and tragic. I hate crossovers most of the time but between the raw emotion, the brevity of the story, and the impact and consequences it had for years to come, "Officer Down" is easily one of the best crossover stories I've ever read in comic books.
Next up, though, are a couple of events that kind of pull some of the better traits "Officer Down" brandished, but also some of the worst ones that make event comics relatively despite in my nerd eyes.
Yes, we're talking the "Fugitive/Murderer" sage of the Batverse; a story line that teases to be "the end of the Bat Family as we know it (!!!)" and sends Bruce Wayne to the slammer when the body of sort of girlfriend Vesper Fairchild is found in his mansion and he is the primary suspect. On it's face this is a cool and interesting story to tell. The "World's Greatest Detective" gets caught in a frame job that threatens everything in his life and the family he's built around him and we, as the readers, get to wonder who could do such a thing and actually pull it of and how? Who actually knows the secret of the Bat and is able to take advantage of all the chaos in his life to sneak into his mansion and set things up in such a way that just as he's getting back from one of his "night excursions" he can be caught literally "red handed?" And on top of it all, Rucka and Brubaker, playing off the emotional distancing that they have committed the Batman to in the wake of Commissioner Gordon's near death experience and subsequent retirement, do well to play up the idea that, well, maybe Bruce finally went over the edge? Obviously that's never going to really be the case, but the .000001% chance that it's an actual possibility due to his mental state and how there is no actual alibi for him because he was home by himself, in an Alfredless mansion for a handful of minutes before Sasha joins him from patrol is enough to make you go hrmmmm. At the least, it plays up the tension of the family dynamic that it sows just enough doubt in them to permeate some of it into our brains as we go along for the ride. The rest of that ride, though, is where I get a little hand-wringy about this pair of events.
The "Murderer/Fugitive" trade paperbacks, when you put them side-by-side, are two pretty beefy boys, as you can imagine given how many Bat-titles there were in the early 2000's. As you can also imagine, if you have partook in any comic book "event" in the past handful of decades, most of those parts have nothing to really do with pushing the actual narrative of this murder mystery forward; they are just freebies to slap a shiny crossover label on because they have place in the Batverse and to score some sales they would not usually get in a month because of coimpletionism tendencies from the fanbase. And, man, there are some EGREGIOUS examples of this during the "Mur/Fug" story (sorry, tired of typing out those words out so much). There are some GOTHAM KNIGHTS issues in these volumes that barely even try to be related to the overarching story as they're just a one-off tale here and there telling generic detective stories while characters like Alfred are commenting at an escaped-jail-after-Bruce-Wayne-was-denied-bail Batman "shouldn't you be figuring out who set you up?" to grumpy "I've got work to do" retorts. Chuck Dixon, writing ROBIN, NIGHTWING, and BIRDS OF PREY at the time, obviously had a big case of the "hey, I'm already doing my own shit here's" because for every crossover issue he wrote that had substantial interaction with finding the murderer or confronting Bruce, there was an issue where the contribution was a page where we see, like, Oracle get an analysis of something and yell "it was a frame!" The amount of padding in this story overall just screamed "drive them sales" in a way that was a far cry from all the tertiary world building stories being told while the "No Man's Land" was in full effect, which is why they are especially frustrating here.
And even the main books under the hand of Brubaker and Rucka were dedicated to either finishing up what they were doing before they initiated this storyline, like Batman having to deal with a mutated Triad gang leader in the wake of what Ra's al Ghul lackey, Whisper, was pulling in Gotham before the trial, and Brubaker has some random two-parter where some guy named Nicodemus goes on a revenge spree that culminates in kidnapping the mayor and sure. Batman has decided he doesn't need Bruce Wayne and is just going to be Batman. I get it, except I don't. "MurFug" DOMINATED these books for something like eight months and half of the pages printed about it couldn't be arsed to discuss it outside of Bat-family characters occasionally yelling at Batman to get his head out of his ass or a couple panels an issue of someone in the Fam finding a slight tidbit to help the case. Honestly, the best material in all of these issues probably came from Rucka putting a spotlight on Sasha Bordeaux as she is left behind in prison to fend for herself in all this and shows a greater dedication to preserving Bruce's name than he does (and also builds up her eventually revealed romantic feelings for him) and then sets her up for bigger things in the DCU as she gets recruited and sequestered away by the clandestine group Checkmate while Batman is off clashing with his own ego. Also, Cassandra Can as the new Batgirl gets a lot of props as she never gives up on Batman and her dedication to him helps win him back over plus her tenacity and physical skills really help "break the case" so to speak and find some pivotal evidence Bruce is innocent and needs help. Also, the grand reveal of (twenty year old spoilers!!) her father, world-class assassin David Cain being the man who almost destroyed the Batman "raises the stock" of the family line and what they are capable of, her being such a prodigy a his now being pushed as top tier threat.
Overall, though, "MurFug" tries again to tell a pretty interpersonal BatFamily tale and reaches mild success. If it were as tight as "Officer Down" was in conveying how important the relationships these people beyond their crimefighting bonds or the greater struggle of banding together in the face of cataclysmic adversity like "No Man's Land" was, then it could have completed the cycle of the Batverse being three-for-three on meaningful event-level stories. Instead this is just so much bloated storytelling, with a lot of the emotion being driven by an overwrought need to be moody for the sake of tension and conflict. Some characters shine and move on to bigger and better things, but for the most part this failed in most aspects except to be an okay murder mystery once it decided to be one about forty issues into the whole ordeal. And the real shame of it all is that this is essentially how both these writers ended this collaborative era of theirs on the Batbooks proper. But, as much as this was a letdown for the immediate BatFamily, the dynamic duo was simultaneously producing simply one of the best comic book series' ever created, GOTHAM CENTRAL.
Look up the Michal Fassbender "Perfection" meme lifted from "X-Men: First Class" and this should slot right into it. I'd make one myself except I'm nearing 40 and never used a meme generator in my life and don't plan on starting now because I have better thing to do like slowly die while lamenting my life choices. But building off the success that was "Officer Down" where it was shown just how impactful the secondary characters running around in a Gotham dominated by Batman and the psychopaths he fights, GOTHAM CENTRAL is an amazing picture of life on the street's of Gotham and just how insane it is that this is a commonality that it's denizens have accepted in their lives. Of course, this is extra nuts for the cops caught in between the Bat and the super-powered crackpots that it's debatable exist because of him, not in spite of him. The forty-ish issues that comprise this run are some of the most character-centric, interpersonal, and human stories told the pages of a "Big Two" comic, and they don't skimp on the super heroics either. As they say, "not all heroes wear capes" and GOTHAM CENTRAL showcasing the adventures of the badges at the GCPD is a prime example.
What is the actual "best" about how GC works on the lives of the officers is that it isn't always just a case of such-and-such running amok and they have to stop them because it's their duty, but Rucka and Brubaker just weave these little tales about the messed up circles these villains draw around them and eventually normal people get pulled into their gravitational well and get crushed by it in some way. The opening two-parter, "In the Line of Duty," kind of epitomizes this presentation. We get introduce to a lot of new faces that we'll become familiar with as the series moves on, but in particular here we start off with a Detective Driver who, while pursuing leads with his partner about a kidnapping case, ends up staring down the barrel of Mr. Freeze's cold gun and watching that particular device turn his turn said partner into a popsicle and then shattered into a dozen pieces. As that harrowing experience plays out, we find out that while this was a horrible case of "wrong place, wrong time" for Driver, there were machinations afoot as Freeze was building to basically cryo-bomb an award ceremony honoring now retired Commissioner Gordon, but still. This wasn't some giant blow out fight in the middle of the city where Batman and his family are knuckle-dusting Freeze and a dozen goons dressed up like Eskimos and the GCPD badges got caught in the shrapnel, this was just officers chasing leads and all of a sudden one of them is gone in a horrific manner than can only happen in a work of fiction.
For the vast majority of it's three-plus year run, Brubaker and Rucka were just executing a master class of building these little lives of these characters with one of the most harrowing and entertaining backdrops in all of comic books. It's just a fantastic cop drama in an absolutely engaging world that also plays that world out in ways that defy norms. Take the "Soft Targets" story arc, the Joker-centric storyline you just knew would happen and be one of the most devious things ever and was, but it was executed in a manner so simplistic it was more horrifying than anything you could have imagined. It wasn't the Clown Prince of Crime holding the city ransom with another nerve toxic or some maniacal kidnapping or any of that jazz, it was literally just the Joker popping people off with a sniper rifle. Of all the possibilities that was it. The Joker at several hundred feet and cackling with the fear he was instilling in a city, and that city was right to be terrified despite seeing the Joker perform larger-scale atrocities in his time.
Again, though, the main attraction of this book is the characters that have to deal with the chaos, particularly Renee Montoya, who is arguably the closest thing this series has to a main protagonist and was an obvious pet project for Greg Rucka. Watching the worst thing to happen to Montoya in a world where she's watching coworkers become popsicles and getting EMT brain chunks on her from a Joker sniper shot be her outing as a lesbian and the fallout of that as her parents disown here is the ultimate "oh hell" defining moment of this series. How Rucka and Brubaker navigate that kind of storytelling in this still very superhero-influenced backdrop and in the time period it did when we as a society were just starting to become a little bit normalized to homosexuality in our pop culture like that is a master class. It, again, showed that there were greater stakes to be played at in the pages of GOTHAM CENTRAL, even though any issue could feature some being with the ability to liquify a city block crashing down on its pages at any time. Writing like that was definitely very prescient in and of its time and has ramifications in the medium even to this day.
One of the few downsides to rereading this series, though, also has a lot to do with time-framing and hindsight because, woo-boy, in a modern era of watching militarized police forces beating on protestors like they were pinatas, seeing some pretty shady police procedures go on and be justified by the circumstances these folks went through is kind of cringey. Renee has no problem with regular beatdowns on everyone from shitty paparazzi to uncooperative store-owners and so on. Yes, these officers are dealing with the worst of the worst on a day-to-day basis and that's part of the story for sure is how your level of morality being keepers of it can be pushed in such extreme circumstances, but it gets to the point in this book where it feels like standard police procedure is to knock on a door to ask a few questions and then immediately toss the person around by their collar. "Grey area" is a bit of an understatement.
But, that aside, this comic book is about as perfect as it gets from how it handles these characters, how it gets you invested in them, how it pushes them to their limits and regularly leaves you mouth agape at how often justice being served is just not a thing that happens in Gotham City. The plots and cases that play out are fantastic, the art between the likes of Michael Lark, Stefano Guadiano and Kano throughout the series is the stuff that Noir dreams are made of, and in general the book is a (mostly) timeless, character-centric read that plays at a different set of daily stakes than you usually see in a comic book that takes place in one of the two biggest universes in the medium. Everything in those aspects that Brubaker and Rucka tried and failed to play at in the "Murderer/Fugitive" saga looks especially pale in comparison to how well they achieve it here in GOTHAM CENTRAL. In some ways that's probably not a fair statement to make, a proper Batman story has more editorial restrictions than a book like this that was obvious a passion project, but Brubaker and Rucka obviously wanted it all to play together even if GC felt a little insulated and at the end of the day you can help but hold these stories up side-by-side. And this one dwarves the other; hell it dwarves everything Brubaker and Rucka did in the entire era even though there was a lot of good material in there. This is just an all time great series, period, no need to even draw comparisons.
Aaaaaand that's another one of these down. Yay. I like these. I'm going to keep doing these. But they'll also probably keep coming about once every few weeks because I'm trying to prioritize things like Streaming and, y'know, finding a new occupation a liiiiittle bit more than writing them and, as important, reading more stuff to fuel them. Next up will be the Jason Aaron Thor era because, well, that's amazing, and I'm working on a reread of James Robinson's STARMAN run because I want to know what it's like to feel joy again so, yeah. Those will be the next two of these for the couple dozen of you who actually check these out. Thanks again for reading! Cheers...
