This explores perhaps the most well developed gay character I've read in a comic book aside from Kate Kane. This focuses on Renee Montoya and I am so thankful for that. STORY/PLOTTING: B minus to B (for reasons above) ARTWORK PRESENTATION: B CHARACTERS/DIALOGUE: B WHEN READ: early June 2012 (bit revised review end of July 2012) OVERALL GRADE: B.Īnother great volume for Gotham Central. This series received great critical acclaim and a passionate fanbase but never did well commercially. Greg Rucka wrote this volume with artists doing different stories. Batman doesn't look terribly impressive though maybe that's intentional to add to the mundane setting. Yes, it's dark and gritty looking but sometimes it feels like only 80% of the normal details are there in the artwork. The artwork is colorful and almost “cartoony” (artists were Jason Pearson and Cam Smith) “Happy Birthday Two You” which flashes forward to Montoyo now as a detective who's having problems on her birthday (artists William Rosado and Steve Mitchell) and then “Half A Life” which is a total copy from volume one (artist Michael Lark). That said there are three tales within: “Two Down” focuses on Detective Montoyo before she was a detective on the beat as a cop and her first meeting of Two Face during a crisis. I am not sure why they “padded” this volume but that drops the overall grade for me. The biggest problem with this volume is that almost half of the pages are from the first book. It's a fresh and interesting approach with Batman showing up less than 5% of all the tales. In this series we focus almost exclusively upon the detectives (morning and night shifts) of Gotham who sometimes resent “The Bat” for solving their cases. There are many graphic novels about superheroes and their world and how important it is for them to save the regular mortals but rarely do we get a perspective of the mortals unless they're family or lovers.

Gotham Central, Vol. 2 by Greg Rucka