Detective Comics #855

Can you imagine how gorgeous this is going to be in oversized hardcover? In the last twenty-four hours have you gone to amazon.com and dccomics.com and hunted for some evidence of WHEN and HOW this is going to be collected? Are you holding your breath in fear/anticipation to learn whether JH Williams will be doing the second arc too? And, in a way, will you be a bit sad if he IS doing the second arc, since that will probably mean that you'll have to wait a bit longer for the oversized collected edition, since in that case DC will probably wait to collect the first two arcs together?

Those are the thoughts that go through my mind when I think about Detective Comics these days. I don't care about what's happening in the book, but I sure as hell care an awful lot about the art.

I could say that there's a dichotomy going on here, that I believe there's lackluster writing here that brings the experience down...but it really doesn't. I'm loving this. Below I'm going to go into detail about what's wrong with the writing, but from this point on you should know that the writing doesn't even matter to me, even though I'm usually more partial to writing than visual art. The experience of Detective Comics these days is a great one, pure and simple. This isn't just "cool art", it's thoughtful innovative art. This isn't the same thing as picking up a McFarlane book twenty years ago, or a Loeb-penned McGuinness-drawn book today. This isn't just pretty art; it's downright masterful and new. It's Fine Art, with capitals.

(There might have been one or two issues of Promethea that had better JHW art. If any of you new converts are interested, I really recommend Promethea, which JHW did with Alan Moore, and the more recent Batman work that he did with Grant Morrison as well. I'd say that Batman project was better than this Detective Comics story so far, but that's only because of the writing; Williams' art is way better here.)

Let's move on to the writing, even though critiquing the writing here is almost beside the point.

When Kate screams out "WHY, dammit?! WHY DO I MATTER TO YOU PEOPLE?!?" she may as well be addressing her readers, and maybe her writer too. We the viewers--er, readers--like her because she's pretty and sexy, because she has an awesome costume and she kicks ass and provides her artist with a great subject to illustrate. Is that sexist? I don't think so. She's just awesome looking. Even the ass-shot on page 17: that's not "cheesecake", that's beautiful art. But, uh, does she have any--whatta you call it?--personality?

It's hard to see what's so special about this character as a CHARACTER. All Rucka does is have her mouth a series of typical and/or cliche statements. Particularly stereotypical are the following:

"Wrong. Answer." (How many times have I heard action-characters say those exact words after attempting to question someone?)

"Didn't anyone give you the memo?" (Ugh. UGH! I am so tired of hearing that line. How can any writer type that phrase anymore without feeling horribly lazy?)

Kate also mentions "Alice Pleasance Liddell". Yeah, she mentions the FULL NAME of the girl who inspired Alice in Wonderland--complete with the middle name--while in the course of accusing this issue's villain of being an Alice in Wonderland fanatic. That's awful characterization. Imagine if you were wearing a Spider-Man t-shirt in the mall, and someone came up to you and accused you of being a comic nerd by saying the following: "Spider-Man? I feel bad for people who idolize a creation spawned from Amazing Fantasy #15." See how ridiculous that is? The point is, Kate herself would have to be an Alice fanatic to know Alice Liddell's middle name. And it's just so unnatural and clunky for her to say "Alice Pleasance Liddell" in that situation.

As far as the villain herself goes, her dialogue is also fairly bad. She only talks in quotes from Lewis Carroll, which gets really tedious really quickly. But if the character is ONLY going to talk in quotations, then wouldn't it be a lot creepier if she didn't talk so MUCH? A more silent villain would make the character seem smarter too--since there's obviously something going on with her underneath the surface. But with all the less-than-relevant quoting, I can't help but feel disbelief that this apparent airhead/nutcase is the LEADER of a Crime cult, a leader that fairly rational non-gimmick criminals would actually serve and worship, to the point of letting her kill them.

The Alice-talk also causes some disjointed exchanges. When her underlings tell her "Batwoman can't have gotten FAR", Alice responds with "I think that might HELP a little. Wouldn't it be MURDER to leave it behind...?" WTF is she referring to, exactly? For someone who's in the position of a leader, this villain seems like TOO much of a space cadet. I almost get the impression that she's just reciting random quotations regardless of whatever scene she's in.

The writing isn't universally bad, though. It's just mediocre. This is the level of writing that I expect goes on in most of the comics that I don't read. It's not like I walk around thinking that the writing in every comic that I don't read is probably terrible. I'm not that much of a pessimist. But I've never been a fan of Greg Rucka. This is the first series of his I've ever read. I have heard Rucka praised by a few people in the past (hey, every artist has their fans), but nothing I heard about his work ever seemed that interesting to me. So, the writing in Detective Comics is exactly what I'd expect it to be: mediocre. This story isn't that interesting--but thank God for JH Williams.

We do get some semblance of depth when Kate has a brief hallucination back to her childhood. Something regarding her lost mother. It's all really vague and slapdash. The point of this story is to uncover why the Crime cult is fascinated with Kate, and yet the reader is unable to care much about that since we don't even know who Kate IS yet. Sexuality is not characterization. Having lost a mother is not characterization. Fighting crime, with or without the help of your father, is not characterization. Characterization is the unique way that characters respond to the events they're placed in. So far I've yet to see Kate behave or speak in any way that makes her seem remotely unique, amongst the sea of other costumed heroes. I don't sense a personality here. I don't sense an individual. Hopefully that will change. Soon.

Being the most gorgeously drawn hero in comics today may not be "characterization" either, but.... But JH Williams. Wow. WOW. They should change the usual order of the credits, and put the artist's name first in this series.