It’s 2006. Saddam Hussein is executed for crimes against humanity, Nintendo releases the Wii, Twitter is created, and Pluto is declassified as a planet. People are listening to “SexyBack,” watching Borat and reading Daredevil.
Read MoreBy 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.
Read MoreBy Bruno Savill De Jong — While Half a Life is Gotham Central’s famous storyline that examines the weight of Gotham upon a single cop, Soft Targets is another popular plotline that examines a single case’s impact upon the whole city. Over Christmas, Gotham is gripped by a supervillain’s terrorist threat. Now, that might sound like a typical superhero set-up. Indeed, Tom King did exactly this in The War of Jokes and Riddle (Batman Vol. 3, #25-32) a few years ago. But while I like that storyline, Gotham Central, well, centralizes Gotham in a way mainstream Batman titles cannot
Read MoreBy Bruno Savill De Jong — During her morning jog, Renee Montoya is approached by a stranger. Moving from her familiar neighborhood where she lives into an isolated park, Renee is asked to identify herself. Identity and recognition are core concepts of Gotham Central, a series about what it means to ‘be a cop’ in Gotham, especially when your efforts are overshadowed by symbolically masked vigilantes. Detective Driver, our de facto protagonist for the preceding issues, is so desperate for the efforts of the GCPD to simply be ‘seen’. Now whether she likes it or not, Montoya is dragged into the spotlight, as Gotham Central strays from procedural casework into an interpersonal storyline, where Renee herself is at the centre of the investigation.
Read MoreBy Bruno Savill De Jong — “The problem with motiveless crime is that there’s always a motive”, Detective Marcus Driver tells his temporarily assigned partner Romy Chandler, “we just can’t see it. ‘Cause no one kills someone with no reason”.
Read MoreBy Bruno Savill De Jong — “Could we leave the Bat out of this for now?” Detective Marcus Driver mutters these words to Renee Montoya and Crispus Allen as the three discuss the death of his partner, Charlie Fields, at the hands of Mr. Freeze. It’s a phrase which hangs over all of Gotham Central, like the Bat-Signal perched atop the police headquarters, or the squadroom’s clearance-board which Fields wrote “the Bat” onto, wishing to incentivize the department into action.
Read MoreBy Taylor Pechter — Ed Brubaker is one of the most acclaimed writers of crime comics in the entire industry, with a long line of lucrative and award-winning books to his name. But today, I want to look back at one of his earlier works — Scene of the Crime, which saw Brubaker collaborating with artist Michael Lark, inker Sean Phillips (who would go on to become Brubaker’s most-frequent collaborator), colorist James Sinclair, and letterer John Costanza. Scene of the Crime — publisher by Vertigo back in the summer of 1999 — is the story of Maggie Jordan and the private investigator examining the circumstances of her mysterious death, Jack Herriman.
Read More