Hub_91 by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: mobi

Sarah Pinborough will be one of several guests at the British Fantasy Society Open Night at The George in Fleet Street, London from 7.30pm on Friday 3rd July. Sarah is there to launch her Torchwood novel, along with fellow novelists Mark Morris and Guy Adams. Admission is free.fin

REVIEWS

Detective Comics 854

reviewed by alasdair stuart ‘Elegy Agitato’ Part 1 of 4

Written by Greg Rucka

Art by JH Williams III and Cully Hamner

Colours by Dave Stewart and Laura Martin

Letters by Todd Klein and Jared K. Fletcher

In the wake of the ‘Batman RIP’ storyline, DC continue to ring in the changes in Gotham. However, whilst the new Batman and Robin and the launch of titles like Red Robin and Sirens of Gotham has got a fair amount of attention, arguably the most impressive book in this new line up is Detective Comics.

Greg Rucka remains one of DC’s best, and frequently, least well used writers and the constant delays on the Batwoman reboot he pioneered have become increasingly representative of that. One of the architects of DC’s first and to date most successful weekly comic, 52, Rucka is adept at dealing with street level characters, with people who are flawed and damaged and do the job anyway.

Which is why this four part story, focussing on the new Batwoman, Kate Kane, works as well as it does. Hitting the ground running, it follows Kane through a night trying to chase down the leader of the Religion of Crime, one of the most effective and unsettling elements of the new DC universe. She’s fiercely good at what she does and feels at home on the Gotham skyline, a lighter figure than Batman but no less competent, no less terrifying for that.

However, it’s in the transitions between the different parts of Kate’s life that both Rucka and Williams III excel. Kate’s nights swim in black and blue, a bruise coloured romance of crime fighting but her days are cold and stark, flooded with light and lacking in comfort. The failure of her social life and the profoundly unsettling, militaristic relationship she has with her father are laid out here with an economy and elegance of writing and art that’s all too rare in comics. Williams III floods the Batwoman pages with dynamic, slanting panels that show Kate in constant motion, always fighting, always searching, an idea too big to be constrained by the page whilst the daytime panels are plain, blocky, restricting. The conflict between civilian and superhero, secret identity and mundane reality is a touchstone of most superhero comics but it’s rarely been done better than it is here.

‘Pipeline’, the back up feature is equally impressive and deals with the other side of the super-heroic coin. Renee Montoya, former GCPD Homicide detective and inheritor of The Question superhero identity has re-located to California and set herself up as the super-heroic equivalent of a search engine, filtering questions asked through her website. Whilst most of them range from trivial (Where are my car keys?) to ridiculous (What happened to the Lindbergh baby?), one attracts her attention.

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