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To be, or not to be, that is the Question? or Oh Gotham Central, what's become of you?

When contemplating all the diverse satellite publications that have spun off and/or attached themselves to the main Final Crisis miniseries, it seems that judging them on their individual merits is like taking a section off of Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights and trying to draw a conclusion of some sort- you can focus on the people that have dressed the pig like a nun in the lower right hand corner of the third panel of the tryptich, and suppose that it may be a comment on religious pride or something; even note at how well the figures are arranged or how amusing the pig may be. But making a judgment on the series as a whole is almost a sucker’s game- the events of Rogues’ Revenge, say, or (as I suspect) Requiem may be very important to the main narrative, but then again it may be irrelevant. Still, all we can do is the best we can with what we have on hand.

And what I have at hand is Final Crisis- Revelations, one of several ancillary series that have spun off the original Morrison/Jones source. This one’s not by Grant; it’s by Greg Rucka- and that’s a good thing, considering that Rucka, along with Ed Brubaker, was the braintrust behind the criminally under-rated Gotham Central, one of the best mainstream DCU books of this decade if you ask me…and I say good thing since two of the principal players here are GC‘s Renee Montoya, now shoehorned into the persona of the Question, and Crispus Allen, DC’s current Spectre. I’m at a bit of a disadvantage when it comes to fully getting the plot threads that Rucka’s advancing here; I pretty much ignored both 52 and Countdown, even though I did buy the Spectre-led Tales of the Unexpected, but that was because of the outstanding co-feature, Doctor Thirteen: Architecture and Morality. I found the Spectre lead mostly repulsive, an early-Image style (all sketchily-rendered flash and no substance) exercise in unpleasantness which at least laid the groundwork for the current incarnation of the Discarnate Detective (that’s what Gardner Fox used to call him…), and established his plight. He was a great part of an ensemble cast in Gotham Central; as the Spectre he’s an uncomfortable fit no matter how tragic they make his circumstances. In the first issue of this series, we saw him dispatch a couple of B-list DC badguy in that patented Spectre way, including the unctuous Dr. Light, who certainly had it coming. Also established was the fact that he couldn’t harm Final Crisis badguy ringleader Libra. His bookmate this time out is Renee Montoya, Gotham Central’s conflicted lesbian police detective; at some point in the interval since Central was axed, she has assumed the mantle of the Question (I’m assuming Vic Sage has met his maker) and is doing battle with a murderous cult who is after the DC all-purpose Spectre killer, the Spear of Destiny. This cult believes that Montoya, the “Faceless One”, is their leader (why, I really don’t know)- which gets her into Dutch with the Spectre, who comes after her for vengeance for the people the cult has killed. Here, we get the first point at which this becomes interesting, because Allen and Montoya used to be best of friends and partners in the GCPD, and now he’s hell (or heaven, as the case may be) bent to destroy her. They indulge in a bit of the theological philosophizing that was the bread-and-butter of John Ostrander version, but Rucka nips it in the bud before he gets going by introducing (well, I’ve never seen her before) an mercy-oriented, angelic sort of character (a nun when de-glamoured) who’s plainly meant to be the vengeance-driven Spectre’s opposite number. Rucka also stacks the deck by bringing his notorious Batwoman back; being unfamiliar with her relationship with Montoya/Question, it didn’t really resonate with me although I was intrigued enough by the Gotham Central connections enough to be curious about where it’s going. Since this is a Final Crisis tie-in, after all, we also get the spreading menace of the Anti-Life Equation, which has been unleashed and is turning people into slaves of Darkseid…and if all this wasn’t enough, the Spear ends up in the hands of a long-time DC badguy, who looks like he’s going to take advantage of it.

Lots of things going on, no doubt, and it moves along smartly even though it’s very talky, which often threatens to grind everything down to a halt. Artists Philip Tan, Johnathan Glapion and Jeff de los Santos work very hard to keep it going; their style, as heavily Photoshopped as it is, reminds me a lot of Tom Mandrake’s work on the Ostrander Spectre run, itself inspired by Gene Colan. It’s a grubby-looking style, very fluid, and occasionally contorts itself into a vague sort of incoherence, but never for so long that the narrative gets lost. Their figure drawing tends to be very gawky, hypermuscled and loose; neither their Montoya or their Batwoman are even remotely attractive, which is probably the idea. Fair enough, I suppose.

This is far from the best Final Crisis tie-in I’ve read yet, but at the end of the day, it’s far from the worst. Rucka is a good writer, and he does his best with the material, whether he came up with it or not. He’s no John Ostrander when it comes to this sort of thing, but he acquits himself well. I suppose as long as the focus remains on the whole Allen/Montoya dynamic, I’ll stay interested…but if it gets too big for its ambitions and lapses into overblown cosmic debris, a distinct possibility given its status as FC tie-in, then it could collapse under the weight of its own pretensions. With three more installments yet to come, we will see what we will see!

Final Crisis: Revelations #2 (of 5)

“Final Crisis: Revelations part two”
Written by: Greg Rucka
Pencilled by: Philip Tan
Inked by: Jonathan Glapion and Jeff de los Santos
Colors: Nei Rufino w/ Ian Hannin
Lettered by: John J. Hill

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