Detective Comics #858

Finally got my hands on this issue since it had been sold out at my shop. Lemme tell ya, to cut to the quick, even though I'm reading this issue two weeks late, I'm still not happy about having to wait (only) two more weeks to read part two. The overall production of this series is fantastic. This feels like the highest quality book on the shelf. Maybe it's not the "best" or the deepest or whatever, but when you hold a copy of Detective Comics in your hands these days, you feel like you're holding the comic book equivalent of a Rolls Royce or a Bentley or whatever.

Of course a lot of that has to do with the art. The further switching up of styles in this issue was a great call on Williams' part. I think an issue or two ago I made a comment about how Williams' art on this has been so good that it almost runs the risk of desensitizing the viewer after a while: When all you can say about something is "Yup, fantastic, more of the same", you aren't really AS excited about it as you could/should be. I think we can all agree that Williams' best style so far as been the dark, black & red, painterly style he uses in the Batwoman scenes. The brighter, slightly more conventional, "cleaner" style used in the Kate Kane scenes during the first arc definitely helped the reader appreciate Williams' talent all the more: you're almost shocked by the transition, then you begin to appreciate the cleaner style for what it is, then--wowowowow--whenever Williams' would take it back to the darker style for the Batwoman scenes, you would appreciate them again like you were seeing them for the first time. But after four issues, Williams has decided to add a third style to his repertoire: the almost Mazzucchelli-like simpler flashback style, and as a reader I'm even more impressed. Just when you thought his talent couldn't get any more diverse.

There might be a fourth style as well. I think the style used in the double-page military scene early on was not the same style as the regular "childhood" flashbacks. I've heard others argue that it is the same flashback style. I don't think it quite is. Either way, the military scene is beautiful as well.

The page layouts for all the styles continue to be unanimously beautiful, too.

Ahem, now I'm going to ease into my criticism of Rucka's writing very gently. Up front, in his favor I'll say that I think the plotting, pacing and scene transitions of this issue are spot on. They're why I give the writing a 3/5: I think it's "good", overall, because the plotting, pacing and scene transitions are all "excellent". (They bring the average up and compensate for the awful dialogue--but I'm getting ahead of myself.) I think we might be giving Williams a bit too much credit for what we call his layouts. It's ostensibly Rucka who tells Williams what goes on what page, and how much of the story unfolds on one page. In this issue, with all the frequent scene/time transitions, it's easy to evaluate Rucka's story-to-page distribution: it's excellent. The story unfolds at an excellent pace. None of the scene/time transitions seem jumpy. Rucka totally knows the right time to leave a scene, and whenever we enter a scene it's always at an interesting moment. A lot of people have been in the habit of just stepping back and looking at pages of Detective Comics without the words so they can better appreciate the art--But try just doing that in order to appreciate how great Rucka is at deciding what amount of his story should be placed on an individual page, and deciding the order to show you what scenes from what periods of time. It makes for an excellent, elegant ride. The previous arc had a bunch of music motifs for its title and subtitles, and though this current arc is just titled "GO", I think that this issue was almost "musical" in the way it unfolded.

(So I DO like a great deal of Rucka's creativity, okay?)

That said, the dialogue is often pretty godawful. I don't know how you guys stand reading stuff like this sometimes without putting up a bit of a complaint, because there are so many cliches here: "thick as thieves", "tough as nails"--No professional writer should use trite phrases such as these, unless he wants his speaker to seem boring and unoriginal. When Kate's father brushes off his injury by saying "It's nothing. I've given myself worse shaving", I rolled my eyes. Many people in real life often--sadly--can't help but use readymade phrases and shopworn, overused expressions; fictional people should be a writer's chance to show us personalities that are more original and unique. Fictional people should not be an excuse to lazily replay tired expressions that have been used so many times that only have the semblance of meaning. When Kate's mom inquired about her husband's injury, Rucka may as well have just had the guy say "MEH".

Even worse was when Beth told Kate "We'll ALWAYS be TOGETHER"--totally trite, unnatural thing to say. Rucka does not need to try THIS GODDAMN HARD to make us realize that these sisters love each other. Cliche, overblown lines like this one totally break the suspension of disbelief; they ONLY occur in fiction, and at very convenient, routine, boring instances at that. Think about it: to say nothing of Beth, would ANY sister ever actually say "We'll ALWAYS be TOGETHER" to her twin? That's the stuff of fairy tales. It doesn't happen. Even as a kid, you think about someday having a separate house from your siblings. Siblings say things like, "You won't be allowed to do that in MY house when we're older!" In a moment of tenderness, they might say they'll always be with their parent(s), but kids wouldn't say something so creepy as "We'll ALWAYS be TOGETHER" to their siblings. Except in poorly written fictional dialogue.

Similar was Kate's father's call to her through the intercom: "Katherine Rebecca Kane! You OPEN this door right now--" How many times have you heard fictional parents saying that to fictional children? This is the call of every parent to every child on every television show ever. I've encountered it too many times for it NOT to take me out of the story and remind me that there's a writer writing this...and he's relying on very cliche motifs. Granted, it was a nice scene transition to Kate's mother, in the past, saying the same thing, but the motif of "[full name with middle name] open this door right now" didn't need to be used. If Rucka just had Kate's dad say something like "Open up! C'mon Kate, don't act this way!" it wouldn't have felt so unoriginal. (And it wouldn't have me, as a reader, still questioning who Kate is: Is she really as immature as she was when she was a child? I'm not sure if this was Rucka's intention or not, but at this point I don't think there needs to me any more moments where the reader thinks, "I don't really know who Kate is or what she's really like." We SHOULD be getting past that by now.)

The dialogue was also really unoriginal between the two twin sisters in the first few pages. It'd take a very goddamn nerdy girl (and Kate is not nerdy) to call out someone saying "past" instead of "pass" during a soccer game, but nowhere else is Kate portrayed as a stickler for proper speech. Forget that, though: because at root it's totally unbelievable to me that any kid would say "past" instead of "pass" to begin with! That's just ridiculous. THAT'S the best excuse Rucka could think of for introducing a bit of childish in-fighting between the twins? That's a horrible idea. "Pass" is a shorter word than "past"--there's no way someone would misspeak by going beyond "pass" and forming the word "past". It's not natural at all. And on the next page, the way the twins complete each other's sentences isn't natural, either. This motif can be done well--the motif in itself isn't bad or out of character for the twins--but the way Rucka breaks up the speech is totally awkward; in their dialogue here, the points at which transitions between speakers occur...are not natural breaking points.

Later on, I found the following whine of Kate's to be strange and out of place as well: "You KNOW what I MEAN! You ALWAYS know what I MEAN, Beth!" As with Beth's "We'll ALWAYS be TOGETHER", I have to say that children just don't talk this way except in poorly written passages of fiction. This is just Rucka's way of FORCING Kate to seem close to Beth; it results in super laughably bad, overblown dialogue. In the context of the scene, it doesn't work either: at this very moment Kate is worried about her family moving again, which she has just learned about; at such an instance, no believable personality would take the time to protest this much to her sister or offer the out-of-the-blue claim that her sister "ALWAYS" understands her. "You KNOW what I MEAN" on its own would have been enough to get the point across. "You ALWAYS know what I MEAN, Beth!" is too much, too random, and too unbelievable. Rucka doesn't need to work so hard to set us up for the fact that of course Kate will miss her sister later; it's her twin sister, duh, and throughout the issue we see scenes of them sharing their young lives together--of course Kate will miss her. In general, I actually think the childhood scenes between the sisters were GREAT: their setups, what they talked about, their interactions with their parents. But it's just a shame there were so many instances of the worst sorts of dialogue scattered throughout them.

Briefly, the military scene was problematic as well--great as the art was, and I'm glad Rucka thought it up so that Williams could draw it. The dialogue is full of nonsensical military jargon. I don't need to quote any. If you're fooled by this jargon, you're lucky. Because if you know anything about this stuff, you can't help but realize that the writer is completely ignorant about it. He's aping conventions he's heard in bad movies--it's sad to read. The scene doesn't even work logically. Two soldiers have to shoot a man in a turban, then sight a distant target in their binoculars...so that a long-range missile can destroy the target? Uh, it works the other way around, actually, unless we're in Bizarro Land or whatever. There's no reason for you to secure a target and make sure there aren't any hostile threats BEFORE you bomb it. You actually use your long range weapons (with their longER range binoculars) first, THEN you move in the soldiers, who first use their binoculars and THEN shoot whatever hostile threats are left. You actually don't need to know much about military procedure to realize this--it's just fucking logic. But I guess Rucka just wanted to end the scene with an explosion. (Sort of reminds me of several old rap songs that end with an explosion or gunfire...for no other reason than it sounds cool, I guess.)

Final critique: We'll see how the rest of the origin arc pays off, but I'm still very unconvinced that we had to wade through the first storyline before actually finding out much about who Kate is or what drives her. If the entire point of putting the origin on hold was so we could find out that "Alice" was Kate's sister...that strikes me as a very poor, skimpy reason, since we didn't even know anything about Kates sister until this arc. And Kate thinks her sister died with her mom. So wouldn't it've been a bigger reveal for the reader to learn about Kate's sister first, before meeting Alice? Y'know, because it's a shock when you find out a villain is really a good person come back from the dead? Instead Rucka: 1) showed us a weird villain, 2) then told us the villain was Kate's sister, 3) THEN introduced us to Kate's sister, 4) THEN told us that Kate thought her sister died. That's out of order. That's just not the best way to pull it off.

LGBT corner: Can't wait for the next issue, because if Kate really does get expelled from the military because of "don't ask/don't tell", that should make for some very interesting character-building stuff. Finally.

Overall: Williams' art continues to impress--in NEW ways, even. But I care a lot about writing, specifically dialogue, and when I encounter this many cliches or trite motifs, it makes me sad. That said, this was the best-written issue of the series so far, and there are definitely qualities of Rucka's writing that I think are stellar (e.g., pacing within issues). Despite the plethora of tiny minuses I give Detective Comics because of certain habits of Rucka's--lazy writing, I call it--the best compliment I can give him is that, if this keeps going, I'll probably read the series even when Williams takes a break for a few issues. I've never heard of this "Jock" person, but by the time his arc is coming out, Rucka will PROBABLY have made me enjoy (and like, and know) Kate Kane enough to care about her even when someone besides JH Williams III draws her.