Ed Brubaker

A solid compilation of the first third of the "Fugitive" arc, wherein Bruce Wayne is wanted for a murder he might or might not have committed, and Batman having decided to shed the Bruce Wayne identity entirely instead of getting his mission bogged down by this attack on his public persona. The various stories being intercut are fairly well put together, with the one caveat that the Birds of Prey story should clearly have been placed a touch later in the collection, as its conclusion doesn't show more jive with Barbara Gordon's attitude in the beginning of the next scene we see her in. But it's a nitcpick. I vastly prefer these compilations from the early 2000s that make an effort to sew various books with related stories together into a holistic reading experience to the modern approach of simply putting the entire issues as they are in the collections, with story order barely being given a thought and unrelated scenes being left in. (It's obviously a much superior approach for collectors, who don't end up missing pages of this and that if they don't re-buy the same issues in other collections, but for the casual reader of any individual volume, it's a considerable detriment.)

Anyway, back to this book. Considering it is only the first third of the story and a little scattered by nature of the multiple storylines and protagonists involved, I'm quite engrossed, and the way the Bat-family refuses to give up on Bruce even as Batman himself has done so is very touching. The Brubaker story that ends the volume is what brings it together to an emotional throughline, though, with the surprisingly touching moment of (spoiler alert) Batman deciding to re-open the investigation into his own framing and identifying himself on "Bruce" on the call to Oracle, much to the latter's astonishment. show less

After some of the lackluster stories of the previous volumes, Gotham Central goes out on the top of its game. Unfortunately, writer Ed Brubaker leaves early in the volume, and longtime artist Michael Lark isn't here at all, but that doesn't dampen these excellent stories. The first is one of those Batman's-relationship-with-the-police tales I love so much, "Dead Robin." The G.C.P.D. finds a corpse wearing a Robin outfit-- but he couldn't be the Robin, could he? They're forced to confront show more just how little they know about the Batman and his "family," and their already sour relationship is further tested when Romy Chandler shoots the Batman, still on edge after the death of her partner in the previous volume. There's even an appearance by the Teen Titans, which is fun if a bit dissonant, and Robin himself puts in his only appearances in the series, with some nice scenes between him and Stacy, the Major Crime Unit's temp. And the climax of the mystery was just great; Kano and Gaudiano draw an amazingly frightening Batman.

The story I wasn't expecting to like here was "Sunday Bloody Sunday," which tells what effect the Infinite Crisis had on Gotham. Though I know that things like that have to affect the city, it just seemed like the multiverse being remade would be so tonally inconsistent with this series. To my surprise, it wasn't-- the whole story is told first-person from the perspective of Crispus Allen, and he doesn't understand what's going on one tiny bit, but he still knows he has to do his duty getting Montoya to safety and finding his family, even if he did just run into Captain Marvel and the Spectre. It's the story of Allen's faith, as he begins by ruminating on how he doesn't believe in God anymore... and ends by praying with his family. I don't think the story of the Infinite Crisis could have been told in Gotham better than this.

The last story is "Corrigan 2," and it follows up on the events of the Corrigan story of the previous volume. The focus of the story is again on Renee Montoya and Crispus Allen, as Allen tries to stem Montoya's descent into anger and violence, with disastrous consequences for them both. This is completely a traditional cop story, with no Batman elements at all, but it really works here, with many of the character elements seeded throughout the series coming into play. The story is riveting and moving, a fantastic end to what had been a strong concept.

My only complaint is that there are some character threads from earlier volumes we'll never get to see now, not unless Sarge gets a larger part in your average Batman comic than I suspect he actually does. It's a real shame this series came to an end. But this was a great way to go out-- though I preferred "Soft Targets" in Jokers and Madmen, this is the most consistently strong of all the installments.

Gotham Central: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence » show less

One of the neat things about the setup of Gotham Central is that the cast is divided up into a day shift and a night shift. Greg Rucka writes the stories about the day shift, and Ed Brubkaer writes the ones about the night folks. They cowrite the stories that are so big both shifts get involved. In the first two GC collections I read, nine of the twelve stories were Rucka day-shift ones, whereas just five were Brubaker night-shift ones, so it was nice to get Jokers and Madmen, where show more Brubaker's characters seem to dominate. Mind you, the writing the two do is so well-integrated that if it wasn't for the character thing, I wouldn't've known who was writing at any given point.

The first story, Brubaker's "Daydreams and Believers," is a one-off about Stacy, the temp who operates the Bat-Signal. She's a bit of an outside in the G.C.P.D for obvious reasons, and the story nicely capitalizes on that to show her perspective on the various other people who work in the Major Crimes Unit-- not to mention the Batman himself. There's a hilarious two-page sequence featuring Batman here that I didn't see coming. Brian Hurtt's detailed art doesn't really fit the Gotham Central style, but it works for this one tale.

The next story, "Soft Targets," is co-written by Brubaker and Rucka, and it seems to have been the basis for the recent Batman film The Dark Knight, as it sees the Joker terrorizing Gotham City solely as a way to get at Batman. (Okay, this probably happens a lot, but the political assassinations and the scene with the Joker in the interrogation room really made it seem Dark Knight-esque to me.) This is the single most successful story in all of Gotham Central, I think, seeing the cops scrambling to stop the Joker when really the Joker just sees them as ways to aggravate the Batman. All of the characters here are just caught in the struggle between these two figures, and the story is all the more intense for it. From the second page, I was gripped, and like "In the Line of Duty" in the first volume, it really manages to merge the considerations of a police story with a Batman one, as the characters have to negotiate city politics and the media as they try to do their jobs and take down the Joker before he blows the city to kingdom come. The story's set at Christmas, which helps too, as the art (which sees Stefano Gaudiano taking over for Michael Lark and doing just as good a job) can be all snowy and moody. This story actually has the cops figuring it out before Batman, which is nice. But in the end, as far as they can tell, they're just pawns in his insane game with the Joker.

After this is "Life is Full of Disappointments," a story which has an interesting form, as it take the form of a case that keeps on getting bumped from detective to detective, meaning each of its three different parts focuses on a different pair. This lets the series focus on some people who haven't had much page time thus far, like Sarge Davies, who is one of my favorites. Some of the tales are kinda trite, though, like the one about the mother whose son plays in the Orchestra. Greg Scott's frankly weird art, which struggles to ape Lark's style unsuccessfully, doesn't help, either. I did like the one about the cop who knew the Huntress, though. The mystery here is so-so, but it's of minimal importance in a decent character exercise.

The last story in the book is Brubaker's "Unresolved," which has Driver and Josie Mac investigating a long-closed case that Harvey Bullock-- longtime member of the G.C.P.D. forced into retirement after killing a suspect-- was never able to figure out. The best part of this story is again the character work, especially Bullock's. A cop's cop, he can't deal with being off the force, and it's killing him. The scene between him and his old partner Montoya is particularly good. It's not really a Batman story, nor even a peripheral-to-Batman story, but it works all the same on the strength of the characters. Lark and Gaudiano work together on the art for this one, and it looks great, too.

Overall, the stories I find most fascinating in the series are the ones that really feel like peripheral Batman stories; the ones like that could be told in any cop story live and die on the characters, and though most of these characters are fine, there's too many of them to be effective, and not all of them are Renee Montoyas, Crispus Allens, or Marcus Drivers. Or even Josie Macs. Of those, some work, and some are kinda dull. It doesn't help that I can't always tell the characters apart, even with the handy (if inaccurate) guide in the front of the book. The book also has an overreliance on cop-killing to make things dramatic. It might be accurate to the way these things are shown in a Batman book, but here it sometimes feels like a gimmick to prove the situation is serious-- this department has a ridiculous rate of attrition. But this volume is definitely the series' finest hour, really showing what it's like to be an ordinary person caught in the middle of a Batman story.

Gotham Central: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence » show less

Life is just a bunch of lines, thin ones, connecting people and places.

The introductory author's note includes apologetic qualifiers: he changed a lot over the years he wrote these stories, Bukowski and Kerouac are no longer his favorite writers, critics don't understand autobiographical work, etc. Didn't exactly inspire confidence going in...

The early stories are juvenile antics: mindless destruction, stealing, taking drugs, robbing to get more drugs...flat on the page, no insight. Much show more later it gets better, Brubaker goes deeper into what is going on around him, with him, between him and others, friends and lovers. His disconnects, alienation, round peg in square-holedness, it takes shape from shadow, delineates what the earlier panels did not make explicit.

Thread of one lost lover is tugged across and into other stories. "Mondo Lowlife" and "The Other Shoe" were my favorites. The back cover includes quotes mentioning slackerhood, Generation X lifestyle, Richard Linklater. These comix were written in the 90s (1991-1996), the height of GenX mania. Critics always seem to want to fasten a label on modern day ennui, like a fancy bandage to hold in the blood and pus of life leaking out all over our numb bodies. To name it makes it less horrifying, I guess. Shove it in a jar and put in on that dusty shelf in the back room so we don't have to stare at our own failures to engage, to find meaning in this confusing tangle of memories, fleeting moments of contentment, desires, failures, deficiencies, doubts, anxieties, despondencies, high points, low points, staring at the clouds, scratching with our pens, pointless jobs, scrabbling about to achieve daily existence. Yes, it is all of that and more, sometimes less, but it is not as simple as calling it "slackerhood."

I thought about giving this 3 stars, but the collection as a whole felt too uneven. Many of the stories had no effect on me, but I kept reading because the book is not that long and Brubaker's intro made me consider the possibility of later improvement. So, I'd give 3 or even 4 stars to the later stories I mentioned. show less