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After the visual feast of their first four issues, Greg Rucka and J.H. Williams III slow down to give us Kate Kane’s story. 

Greg Rucka is not a showy or bombastic writer.  Maybe that is why during his and J.H. Williams III first four issues of Detective Comics, most of the discussion was about Williams’ luscious artwork.  Williams brought the same storytelling sensibilities he developed for Alan Moore’s Promethea to Rucka’s Batwoman story.  Each page is so much more than just sequential images strung together for a narrative flow.  Williams’ approach to the page, to the layouts and even to the style he uses tell the story as much as Rucka’s words do.  For those first four issues, J.H. Williams was undeniably the star of the creative team.

With Detective Comics #858, Williams gets out of the way and lets Rucka do what he does best; tell a quiet story about real people.  In this latest issue, Rucka finally gets to explore Kate Kane’s past a bit.  We know bits and pieces about the new Batwoman but there’s no Crime Alley moment for her so far, no lighting striking a strange mixture of chemicals or rockets sent away from exploding planets.  Until now, that is.  Rucka reveals Kate’s past as a military brat; both her mother and father look to be career army.  Her mother serves Kate and her twin sister Beth dinner even as she is still wearing her basic army combat uniform.  It’s a military family through and through, down to a father who is often away in combat and constant moving from base to base.  The latest move is to Brussels, where her father is posted to be involved in Nato.  In Brussels, Kate has her Crime Alley moment, a horrible act against her and her family that no child should have to go through.

Rucka’s writing here shares more in common with his novels or his Oni series Queen & Country than with his Action Comics or even with his previous run on Detective Comics.  It is slowly but deliberately paced.  Rucka works best when he allows a story to slowly build because it gives him the space to really work on the characters, to develop their voices and give them a real identity.  In this issue, Rucka gives us a glimpse into Kate’s life that we haven’t seen before.  Did we know that she was a twin before this?  Rucka also begins revealing the background of what he wrote about in the first four issues as well as the cryptic last line that Alice, the new leader of the crime religion, said in Detective Comics #857, “you have our father’s eyes.”

Detective Comics #858 isn’t all about twins and military brats.  If Rucka is using his quiet voice for a large chunk of this story, he punctuates it with a loud explosion at the end as Kate’s world is violently and horribly turned upside down.  The amazing thing that Rucka and Williams pull off is barely showing us what is actually happening at the end.  Borrowing from the best television and film, they put us in Kate’s place, seeing the events unfolding from her eyes where, at best, we catch only glimpses and hints of what’s going on.  Is that a body?  Is that a bullet hole in the head?  Who’s under that blanket on the floor?  The last few pages are quick, scary and as shocking for the reader as they are for Kate who had to live through it.

J.H. Williams III is a chameleon when it comes to his artwork.  For Kate’s childhood, Williams adapts a style very reminiscent of David Mazzuchelli’s Batman: Year One artwork.  It seems like an obvious choice if you’re going to be telling the origins of the new Batwoman to make it look like Batman’s origin but there’s more than mere copying going on here.  As we’ve seen already during this run on Detective (and elsewhere like Promethea and Seven Soldiers,) Williams uses his artwork to invoke memories and sensations in the readers.  The way he adapts styles is more than simply aping another artists look; it’s a deliberate choice by Williams to make his artwork suggestive and more in tune with the story.  By mimicking Mazzuchelli’s simpler, more immediate style, Williams grounds Kate’s background more in reality.  They hyper-intense style he uses when Kate’s Batwoman wouldn’t work here.  Through his artwork, Williams is separating the world of Kate Kane and Batwoman.  It will be interesting to see if the varying styles collide anywhere down the line.

The Question co-feature briskly wraps up its first storyline.  Rucka, here joined by Cully Hamner on the art, has been spending the past 10 years developing Renee Montoya so there’s not a lot of that going on here.  This is a pure Question story as she deals with human trafficers.  After so long of watching Renee suffer and grow in both Gotham Central and 52, it’s nice to see her actually doing something constructive and real.  Placing Renee in a situation where she has to deal with real issues works better than having her go against the crime religion in The Crime Bible or having her deal with all of the end-of-the-world stuff in Final Crisis: Revelations.

Detective Comics #858
“Go 1”
Written by: Greg Rucka
Drawn by: J.H. Williams III
Colored by: Dave Stewart
Lettered by: Todd Klein

“The Question: Pipeline Chapter One/Part Five”
Written by: Greg Rucka
Drawn by: Cully Hamner
Colored by: Dave McCaig
Lettered by: Jared K. Fletcher

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