Cleaning Up The Streets: Streets of Gotham: Hush Money HC Reviewed
Batman: Streets of Gotham is an interesting excuse to show us the crimes of Batman's city. It's there to show us that in the aftermath of Bruce Wayne's death, it wasn't just Dick and Damian who were left to pick up the pieces. Streets took it down to the street level, to show what was going on with Gotham as an organism. It highlighted the police force, members of the criminal underbelly, and all the gray figures in between. But if there's anything the first volume, collected yesterday, was intent to show, it was that the title intended to be an (over-)extension of the Heart of Hush story.
Collecting Detective Comics #852 and Batman #685 with the first four issues of SoG, the reader ends up with a concentrated stare at Tommy Elliot, the childhood friend of Bruce Wayne, turned into villain Hush, who underwent facial surgery to impersonate Gotham's son and act as his surrogate in the absence of the real thing. Still with us? It get wackier, because the stories within the hardcover are less about his masquerade, and more about his obsession with money. One could make a case that the book is about Black Mask's payroll played against Elliot's taxing presence on the Wayne fortune, but Dini seems to be trying to write a crime graphic novel here. And while there is a fair amount of crime depicted in the panels, there's only the singular solution of calling in Batman and Robin. Then we get a look at the financial underpinnings of it all, and the plot moves on. At the end of the day, four issues of Streets isn't enough to tell a cohesive story. The street vigilante Abuse makes a few cameos with no elaboration, and Zsasz's crime spree is only getting started before the book cuts out.
By including the "Faces of Evil" arc, we effectively get a "Heart of Hush" followup, telling us all about Tommy Elliot's exploits after his skirmish with Catwoman's heart. The two issues were an early display of a reformed Hush spending Bruce Wayne's money, which is what he continues to do well into the Streets title, with little more purpose than just that. The problem is that Elliot isn't the same interesting, cold-blooded strategist he was with Jeff Loeb, here he's a jealous kid getting revenge on Bruce, who asks about his rivals' whereabouts but never investigates, someone content to literally be the lampshade for his disappearance.
I didn't mind Dustin Nguyen's angular pencil-work in single installments, but after six issues, his people began to look the same, and the general feel isn't as versatile as the story calls for. The Vietnamese junglescape is still made by the same lines that shape Gotham later in Elliot's story. It spares on detail too often, and muddles a panel with arbitrary jagged marks when it doesn't. I found myself glad for the title's dark premise, which gives the colorist license to black out large sections of the page at a time. Needless to say, I was fairly disappointed by this first collection, though it's odd, given how much I enjoyed the title in smaller doses. Not a title for the trade-waiters.
Rubber Justice
Posted to Review on 20 May 2010
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