By Bruno Savill De Jong — Before now, Jim Corrigan has appeared in the background picking through crime scenes of Gotham Central, collecting evidence and providing forensic analysis as a C.S.U. of the GCPD. In “Corrigan” he comes to the foreground, with a Gotham Central storyline where numerous established themes start to coalesce. It is a half-way point that connects the previous issues to a thread crucial for the book’s ultimate ending. Here, the GCPD corruption creeping around the edges of Gotham Central shows its clearest form yet. The previous “Unresolved” arc brought a reminder of Harvey Bullock’s old-fashioned self-justified corruption. Now “Corrigan” shows this corruption as a still-present part of the system, a toxic element that hinders even the ‘righteous’ elements within the department.

The rot is especially egregious since Gotham Central has often shown the GCPD at its best. Not only with the noble intentions of Major Crimes Unit detectives, but how they are able to build genuine relationships in their sequestered, uncorrupted, section. “Corrigan” opens with Detectives Montoya and Allen sharing a late-night pizza and planning a Sunday breakfast between their two families, their relationship extending from professional partnership to external friendship. Of course, especially in Gotham, they are always ‘on duty’, making them track down a suspicious gang into an abandoned building. Amidst the aftermath of a shootout, Montoya and Allen are able to apprehend the gang-members inside. But there is somebody else. As Montoya investigates, she is ambushed by Black Spider. He shoots her several times in her bulletproof-vest, and aims for her head. Suddenly, Allen is able to shoot Black Spider several times, killing him.

Lethal force means Allen is put under investigation, which is the real plot of “Corrigan”. Despite the annoyance of the GCPD towards Internal Affairs, it seems “Corrigan” readdresses such conceptions that internal checks-and-balances are ‘bad’, presenting more that such (or any) systems can be exploited by bad actors. Montoya and Captain Sawyer are particularly hostile because they know Allen is ‘righteous’ in his use of force, and that Inspector Esperenza is the one who falsely arrested Montoya in “Half a Life”. But “Corrigan” somewhat redeems Esperenza by showing him as a genuine man doing his job. Even if he believes Allen’s righteousness, he still has to go through to process like everyone else. Internal Affairs is not the problem, and seems particularly necessary in Gotham. At the same time, Esperenza is shown demonstrating bureaucratic flexibility, getting Daria access to Montoya in the hospital. Esperenza bends the rules for other’s benefit, unlike Corrigan, who for personal profit has stolen a stray bullet from the Black Spider shoot-out to sell online.

The conception of selling supervillain memorabilia was established back in “Motive”, where both the Firebug suit and a stolen Batarang were sold around. Those instances showed the ever-present remnants of ‘freaks’ in Gotham. But this missing bullet is an absence, a hole in the forensic case which muddys Allen’s name. Without it, there is no evidence towards his version of events or towards the gang members’ version. Corrigan is not trying to frame Allen, it’s simply a by-product of his unthinking selfishness, feeding off the destitution of Gotham instead of healing it. As Commissioner Gordon told Stacy in “Daydreams and Believers”, he believes most criminals are not ‘evil’ so much as ‘ignorant’, they “just don’t think through the ramifications of their actions”. They are not invested in society. 

Most of the GCPD seem to know Corrigan is corrupt. Allen says of Gotham’s C.S.U. to Montoya, “these guys lift a clean print, we’re lucky. You honestly surprised that they missed a couple of bullets?”. Montoya’s case against a rapist in “Half a Life” was thrown out because “someone in evidence control lost the knife”. Just last arc in “Unresolved”, Sarge foreshadowed this very scenario, mentioning rumours of how Corrigan had “lost evidence in the past. Lost, as in, sold to private collectors on the black market”. Then, Josie Mac defended Corrigan, as she does again here. Interestingly while Josie was vindicated in “Unresolved” for her distrust of Bullock and distaste for Sarge’s “old boy loyalty network” protecting him, in “Corrigan” her own defense of Corrigan has been disproven. Perhaps any personal preferences stop people from intervening with, or even seeing, the corruption of their colleagues.

The M.C.U. was specifically created as a ‘safe haven’ from the typical GCPD corruption. Despite peeks at it in “Half a Life”, the full ugly portrait of the ‘average’ Gotham cop is shown through “Finnegan’s Bar”, Esperenza calling it “a cop bar, if we define ‘cop’ to mean that majority of GCPD who think carrying a badge is an excuse to line their own pockets”. Even though they are of the same department, when Montoya goes to Finnegan’s to confront Corrigan, she is walking into enemy territory. It is frontloaded with a barrage of speech-balloons describing abusive force and police corruption, before quieting down to mumble homophobic slurs against Montoya. In the bar, Montoya is able to challenge Corrigan to a street brawl, eventually managing to beat the information about the bullet’s buyer out of him.

Montoya uses violence in response to this violent and corruption system. In stories of police corruption, this is fairly common. Batman: Year One (whose grounded street-level tone obviously inspired Gotham Central) features a scene wherein Gordon attacks the corrupt Detective Flass to secure his own safety, narrating “you’ve shown me what it takes to be a cop in Gotham City”. Yet unlike this machismo attitude, Gotham Central does not glorify Montoya’s deference to violence. When the bloodied Montoya returns that night, Daria is concerned that “sometimes I think you like that it’s violent”. Montoya claims she “did what she had to do”, but the notion that this is how you ‘must’ act in Gotham, that you must embrace the violence and corruption swirling around the city, is a tragic one.

These questions are present in the inciting incident. At their Sunday breakfast, Allen’s wife Dore relates the difficulty of explaining the shooting to their children. “We’ve always raised the boys telling them violence isn’t a solution”, she tells Daria, but that in this case “there wasn’t any other choice”. Montoya and Allen both invoke inevitability in their violence, something which ‘had to be done’. But Gotham Central has always been about difficult choices in a hostile world, playing the cards you are dealt even if they’re rigged. It just means that for both Montoya and Allen their violence is a ‘choice’ toward saving each other (their life or their career). Which for them, is no choice at all.

Esperenza’s own decision to help Montoya with Corrigan is one that damages any investigation into him. Montoya’s assault means “it’s all fruit from the poison tree”. “Corrigan” is a story about corruption, how circumventing or abusing the system damages the whole mechanism. But maybe after Esperenza did his job ‘correctly’ in “Half a Life”, arresting Montoya due to false suspicion, he realizes his own system is already flawed. Saving a decent cop like Allen is a worthwhile trade. Jennifer Gordon-Hewitt is the collector of supervillain memorabilia who bought the bullet off Corrigan. She is reluctant to return it, before Montoya trades in one Black Spider shot at her. Often the Detectives in Gotham Central can feel like stray bullets, traded around and underappreciated in the crossfires of Gotham. But as “Corrigan” shows, each individual bullet matters and should be accounted for, despite the choices and transactions each one creates.

Gotham Central: Corrigan (#23 - #24)

Gotham Central: Corrigan
Writer: Greg Rucka
Artists: Michael Lark and Stefano Gaudiano
Colorists: Lee Loughride
Letterer: Clem Robins
Editors: Matt Idelson and Nachie Castro
A "War Games" tie-in arc begins here with "Corrigan" Part 1. As the city gangs break into all-out war, Crispus Allen and Renee Montoya stumble into the lair of the Black Spider. After a shooting occurs, Internal Affairs comes in to investigate, but a key piece of evidence goes missing!
Buy It Digitally: Gotham Central #23; or Gotham Central - Book Three

Read more entries in the Gotham Central Case by Case series!

Bruno Savill De Jong is a recent undergraduate of English and freelance writer on films and comics, living in London. His infrequent comics-blog is Panels are Windows and semi-frequent Twitter is BrunoSavillDeJo.