Broken Frontier

Despite the departure of Ed Brubaker and Michael Lark, Gotham Central remains one of the market’s very best books.

When two children run into an abandoned building, two policemen follow to save them. After a sudden and mysterious chemical explosion, total chaos breaks loose and one of the policemen is badly wounded. To complicate matters, all of this action goes down in Detective Renee Montoya’s old neighborhood. When Montoya and her partner Crispus Allen go to investigate, the pair comes to a horrible realization about the identity of the man behind the deadly explosion.

Greg Rucka is usually at his best on Gotham Central when he centers on Renee Montoya. Although some readers may complain that Rucka only writes stories about Montoya, his incredible work with the character generally makes up for that perceived flaw. In this particular issue, Rucka spends a lot of time setting up the situation and it works nicely. While it smells a bit of decompressed writing, the resulting atmosphere will make you forget all about the slightly slow pacing. Once the plot truly gets going, Rucka combines several interesting story aspects, including returning to Montoya’s troubled relationship with her family. Rucka’s choice of a villain is a tad surprising, but the possibilities for the next installment of this story are now virtually limitless. As always, Gotham Central has an intelligent and gripping plot.

While Rucka does an excellent job of creating and building a new character in the young man named Miguel, his work with Montoya is not up to his usual standards. While we do get a fairly in-depth look into the character, nothing new is truly revealed. Rucka’s dialogue, however, remains at a very high level. Further, this story arc clearly has its excellent plot as the main attraction, making the lack of development in Montoya’s character a flaw that can be overlooked.

Much discussion has centered on the identity of the artist to follow the irreplaceable Michael Lark. It turns out that the perfect solution was right under our noses all along in the form of series inker Stefano Gaudiano, who does absolutely incredible work on this issue. Gaudiano’s style is extremely similar to Lark’s, with a slightly more realistic touch. Gaudiano impressively matches Lark’s work pencil stroke for pencil stroke and should be every reader’s choice as the full-time successor to Lark, as Gaudiano provided stunning, beautiful work.

Readers wondered if Gotham Central could replace Michael Lark. Readers wondered if the book would ever be the same without Ed Brubaker. This issue provides the answer. For a book that has just lost two of the very best mainstream creators, Gotham Central shows incredible resilience by maintaining a high quality.

- Eliot Johnson