Broken Frontier

There’s a new detective in town and she is one bad mother – shut your mouth.

It’s been roughly two years since DC shook things up creating not one, but two lesbian superheroes. One was the legacy Question taking over for Vic Sage. She has been regulated to the back up story here in the new Second Feature program of DC. An idea that will pair up similarly themed concepts. Here there is maybe a bit too much similarity but we’ll get to that in a bit.

The main attraction here is the new Batwoman. Well, that’s not quite true. The real attraction here is the art of J.H. Williams III, that auteur of comic art. The guy who makes Promethea Absolute worthy, the guy who made Desolation Jones one of the most missed comics, and the guy who made even Morrison’s run on Batman crystal clear, if only for a story arc.

Here, the artist is in top form. The cape and cowl sequences are some of the most dynamic panel work ever produced. They literally push the comic forward, catching the chaos of street fights. Even more impressive, they seem to be framed by the actual design of the new caped crusader’s costume! Kicks fly and motorcycles zip. On top of this, Williams is using a not quite photo realism that makes the art pop all the more. Stewart’s colors add a sheen to the black leather and make the pale whites stand out in the dark, neon lighted world of Gotham.

In contrast to this, Kate’s mundane secret identity is rendered in a completely different fashion. Gone are the jagged panels and realistic finish. All this is replaced with a layout that is reminiscent of Chris Ware and Seth Fisher all while standing out as something new. Stewart follows right along bringing a more traditional comics palette to the scene. It is an amazing bit of artistic license that shows that our new Bats lives in two entirely different worlds.

The writing shows that she might be living in three. There is the safety of home with her Colonel father and partner in the vigilante business. He appears to be Bruce’s Alfred and Frank Castle’s Micro rolled into one General Lane type package. The ultimate good guy’s dad. To contrast this is her love life, with a blow up with her current interest, Anna, who not knowing how Kate really spends her nights assumes there must be some impropriety in her main squeeze’s after hours life. Then there is the night life. Where she is definitely feared by some baddies, oddly fixated on by some criminal elements and the subject of a fragile, but needed alliance with the Dark Knight.

The story moves along at a nice pace and this is a decent introduction to the character, but Rucka is relying heavily on events that happened in his Crime Bible and Final Crisis: Revelations series for the set up. This may hurt the book in new readers' eyes as they are less than aware of what is going on. Hopefully, he can move past this rather quickly and get to matching the breathtaking art that has been paired with his story.

The parallels between Kate and Bruce Wayne are a nice touch, as is the final frame that harkens back to the first few appearances of Batman in Detective, a darker more violent period for Gotham’s vigilante of fear.

Unfortunately, the parallels become too obvious when we get to Renee Montoya’s story. Again we are met with a character with an alternate lifestyle, an elderly companion who operates the tech side of things and a mystery being hunted down by a masked hero. It’s a nice enough story, but when it follows a story that is similar in every aspect, it becomes tedious. Thankfully this has not been the norm with the Second Feature program to date, but it mars the monthly ongoing debut of the legacy character that probably needs more attention than most. It is often forgotten that until Denny O’Neil revived the character, the Question had been in only a handful of comics and had really been left to squander in obscurity. If the stories follow this roughly parallel course for too long, Renee may be put in the war chest before her time.

It is left to Cully Hamner and Laura Martin to distinguish the back up from the main feature. They do the job of making it stand apart from the other and reenforcing the Latin feel that Renee’s ethnicity should bring to the short tale. Rucka does an admirable job with the brackets and the names, but the art drives it home.

Two stories with above average to great art are marred by average writing from Mr. Rucka. Given that he is the scribe behind such lauded comics as Checkmate and Queen & Country, this reader hopes that when the set up has had time to settle down, the stories and characters will take a life of their own, because these two women are going to need it.