The Secret of the Wednesday’s Haul

What a long, strange trip?

Ed Brubaker and Greg Rucka’s Gotham Central seems so long ago now and actually a part of simpler times, before Infinite or Final Crisises, before 52 and Countdown.  Back then, Crispus Allen and Renee Montoya were just cops and detectives, working the night shift in Gotham.  Gotham Central was a fantastic police procedural comic planted firmly in the heart of a superhero world.  The characters were solid, real and natural but had to deal with freaks like the Joker, Mister Freeze and Batman all the time.

And now the cops have become the freaks.

Thanks to the turmoil of the last couple of years, two of DC’s more grounded, normal and frankly interesting characters have become super heroes.  The two arguable lead characters in Gotham Central are now the Spectre and the Question, exchanging badges for costumes and capes.  The overall change to these characters have been huge and somewhat abrupt as a street level detective suddenly became the Spirit of Vengeance in Infinite Crisis.  Montoya’s transformation into the Question is a bit more subtle and gradual but it’s still quite a change for her.

With the two of them reteaming in the new Final Crisis: Revelations, it’s a reminder of how far those characters have come in the last few years.  They’re almost unrecognizable in their current forms and I’ve been thinking about this as it relates to Greg Rucka’s writing.  In most of his writing, comics as well as novels, his characters undergo transformations.  They grow, they change; they develop and sometimes not for the better.  The changes to Montoya and Allen aren’t that much different than the changes to Rucka’s Tara Chase from Queen and Country or Atticus Kodiak from Rucka’s novels.

Over the span of 5 or 6 novels, Kodiak has gone from a semi-competent bodyguard to a highly trained and potential killer.  In the last novel, Kodiak wasn’t that far removed from the movie version of Jason Bourne.  Over the course of the novels (as Rucka would probably say, “over the course of a lifetime”,) characters change, they develop and events may transpire to make them unrecognizable.  He’s done the same thing with Queen & Country’s Tara Chase, a self-destructive secret agent at the beginning and someone almost completely different by the end.

Within the span of Rucka’s work, Montoya and Allen’s development of characters doesn’t really stand out even if it does amid the usually staid approach of DC right now where everything old is new again.  In a age where Hal Jordan and Barry Allen are back, you’ve almost got to wonder how long until we see Jim Corrigan and Vic Sage among the living.