Weekly Comic Book Review

Batwoman by: Greg Rucka (writer), J.H. Williams III (artist), Dave Stewart (colors)
The Question by: Greg Rucka (writer), Cully Hamner (artist), Dave McCraig (colors)

The Story: For the lead story, this is the final issue of Batwoman’s origin and it pulls together the last three years of her life, from her moment of epiphany, to now. In the Question back-up feature, the Question and the Huntress talk about things and drive a Lamborghini.

What’s Good: Williams and Hamner are both effective artists for this book. William’s rough, scratchy lines in the flashbacks continue to contrast to the slick, textured realism of his present-day scenes. Both are great and they work to make clear the temporal divisions of the story. Hamner’s art is more cartoony, but does the job. On writing, Greg Rucka has become one of my favorite writers, and he caught a lot of emotion and character in the Batwoman story, especially in the way she and her father interact.

What’s Not So Good: You can tell from my summaries of the stories that neither was chock-full of events. While Batwoman was active and things happened, none of it was surprising enough to make this issue memorable. We already had our strong suspicions about Kate’s sister and we pretty much know from the last 6 issues that Kate’s dad is like her support staff and mentor. And on the Question story, pretty much nothing happened. Rucka was going for character work and if that’s your bag, then this is your issue, but he’d done so well at putting character and action together in the previous issues of Detective Comics that I was let down by this reading experience.

Conclusion: Pick up Detective Comics #860 if you’re a Batwoman fan. If you’re not, you should be, and you should tune in to Detective Comics next issue.

Grade: C

-DS Arsenault