Detective Comics #858:

Wow. What is it with Gotham City that all its heroes have such messed up, violent childhoods? This is yet another way in which Batwoman perfectly conforms to the Batman myth but has her own story to tell. I love that the relationship between Kate and her twin sister - and their interactions with the adults around them - are so incredibly cute and creepy at the same time. I also like that Rucka cuts the reader zero slack. I realized halfway through that more often than not I had no idea which sister was which and that's important to transmitting the dynamic that some identical twins seem to have and that is so important to Batwoman's origins story.

I also found it remarkable that Williams could draw people's faces such that the reader can see the resemblance to Kate's parents in her own face and yet they are distinctly different people. That seems to be where a lot of the focus of the art is in issue 858 - on people, on a much smaller scale and focused more on the dreamy indefiniteness of recollection rather than the stark, exaggerated sharpness of Batwoman's violent present life. I can see why they would do that but I felt a little deprived when there were only two or three of the massive spreads of Batwoman's Gotham, the view one gets from her elevated level as she lurks along roofs and behind chimneys. That said, the one massive frame drawn from the perspective of ground-level, in which Batwoman - in the background - has turned to make an escape while the police discuss their search of the harbor? Yowza. Without a single blur line Williams manages to convey motion and rapidity. Nice.

As for the conclusion, in which Kate's mother and sister have been shot and she sees it despite her father's repeated pleas that she not look, I found it simply heartbreaking. Then I saw the look in young Kate Kane's eyes and it was chilling, not tragic. Childhood dies a suffocated death in those eyes. Horrifying and tragic but in a way completely different from Batman's own sad tale.

Detective Comics #859:

This issue surprised me in a lot of ways. Rucka goes straight into demonstrating the ill effects of Don't Ask Don't Tell and its effect on soldiers and on the military to which they belong. It isn't just that Kate's life path and tireless work gets flushed for no good damned reason, it's also about the way that policy forces corruption and lies on people who would normally find them counter to their purpose and oaths and, more subtly, about the fact that when Kate Kane lost her career in the military, the military also loses something. The story of Kate's separation from the army for refusing to lie about her sexuality makes many valuable points at once while still being more about the character of the character than about making a policy statement.

And yet, when reading that, I kind of assumed that she would be so sickened by the hypocrisy and arbitrary bigotry she's just experienced that she would go right out and start kicking ass but no, we get to see Batwoman as a dissolute, jobless dropout with a fat bank account, a fast car and zero self-control. Again, Rucka has constructed a backstory that mirrors Bruce Wayne, who is so effectively portrayed as using the image of wreckless playboy to his advantage in so many different iterations, but lets it still be about Kate Kane rather than Batman. (We also get a moment in the course of Kate and Renee Montoya's relationship that demonstrates why their hero identities are so different from one another, which is a nice touch.)

And again, I kind of figured I'd have to sit through a scene of her hitting bottom in some way and being lifted up out of it by, I don't know, something very sweet, I'm sure; instead she beats up a mugger who comes at her with a pipe and at the end, when it's pretty clear she's already won, in swoops Batman who watches the perp run for it, helps Kate stand and then is off again with his grappling hook. I don't think Batman says a word through the whole brief cameo he makes but his appearance and disappearance are like some sort of close encounter, a visitation by a force, not a person. The texture of the art for Batman is different from that of the texture of the artwork for everything else in that scene. He is like something from another place or world and I think that's absolutely necessary. The entire point of all the stories that involve Batman's legacy, the Bats-shaped hole left in Gotham City right now, is that it is both necessary and impossible to replace Batman. Detective Comics #859 acknowledges and portrays that by having him be like someone from another world and the story isn't about how awesome Batman was, it's about the impression he leaves on Kate Kane in those few seconds, years before she's become Batwoman.

Issue 859 does acknowledge the current storyline in Detective Comics but honestly it seemed to punt more than anything. The one serious advance is that we get to see Batwoman threaten the lives of the shapeshifting mutant heretics from the Church of Crime and that's definitely a little more extreme than one is used to seeing out of Bruce Wayne.

I also didn't feel that the art in #859 was uniformly as fantastic as I've come to expect from Williams. It's never bad but he emphasizes different styles and different looks for different times in Kate's life, different types of encounters she has, and while they're all uniform within a given style they're different enough from one another that I didn't feel the book had a unifying artistic theme that tied them together. That isn't to say that there isn't tremendous skill on display, though. The one montage frame that runs through what must be months, maybe years of Kate's young adulthood and indicates the passage of time almost solely by the length of her hair was pretty freaking cool.

That said, I didn't find myself gasping at anything until Batman was leaving on his grappling hook and Williams shows us the look on Kate's face when he's gone: wonder and terror and admiration and bafflement, all the things members of the Batpeople legion know make such powerful weapons when wielded the right way. Again we are left with a moment in which the look on Kate Kane's face reveals a shift in her understanding of the world, of what she knows to be possible, without having anyone give that understanding to us on a silver platter. These are comics that demand some work from the reader to be fully appreciated and I'll take that over most any other book on most any other day.

My Crazy Position:

DC should let Batman stay dead.

The books about a world in which Batman is dead are more interesting than anything that's been written about his life in a long time. Batwoman as the star of Detective Comics is more entertaining than any other book out there right now. Grant Morrison's Batman & Robin and his study of persons trying to create identities while drowning in a sea of archetypes is easily his best work since Seven Soldiers and, in fact, better than that series ever was. Morrison is writing what is probably the smartest comic on the shelf.

I love Batman too much to let him screw with the best comics I've read in years.

I know it won't happen, but a boy can dream.