The best ideas are the most obvious ones; the ones that torture other creators because they didn’t think of them. The foundation of Gotham Central is one of those ideas, a simple, obvious premise that was right in front of everybody’s faces and still unseen: a police procedural set in the world of Gotham City. Batman plus "Law & Order" equals every other pro spitting a quiet 'dammit' behind pursed lips. Yes, imaginary comic creator, you should have thought of that, but you didn’t. That honor belongs to Greg Rucka and Ed Brubaker. While working together on an older Batman crossover event called "Officer Down", Greg and Ed apparently recognized a kinship: a predilection and talent for hard-hitting crime fiction in the noir tradition, a willingness to push envelopes, and a strong commitment to technical accuracy. Just, you know, with superheroes. After planning and waiting nearly a year for the brilliant illustrator Michael Lark to free up his schedule, they hit the ground at top speed and launched Gotham Central.
The immediacy of GC arrests you with the first panels. When comics aspired toward reality in the eighties, they did so with masks and capes. Though there are some great examples of “real world” books, they’re all still focused on a ridiculous premise. With Gotham Central, the focus is GCPD’s Major Crimes Unit: cops. Real people. Not super-powered cops, not living weapons like Batman. Just vulnerable, soft pink flesh with drinking problems. By rooting its characters in a much closer relationship to the actual real world, Gotham Central brings the reader much nearer to the story than any superhero book could.
You’re there, with the MCU on ride-alongs and stakeouts and in the mundane routines of being a real police officer. You’re there when reality suddenly turns upside-down and some freak with an ice-ray cuts a man down. The natural dialogue and serious adherence to actual police life won’t let you go anywhere else as the scratchy realism of Michael Lark immerses you in the narrative. All the characters look like someone you’ve met, and move and react like real people do. You can tell when a room smells wet, or when the Crown Vic you’re riding in shakes a little.
With Rucka writing the MCU’s day shift and Brubaker taking the night shift, they established a large ensemble of some of the most fully-realized characters in comics: a rich cast of characters that rival any in TV drama. Police already make interesting character studies, and, when thrown into the dark world of Gotham City, they become men and women who talk like real cops and have problems like real people clashing with the un-reality of their own world (also known as Gotham).
What would a real cop think about Batman? How would a modern police force actually deal with threats like Two-Face, the Joker, or the occasional Crisis? If the police had a Bat-signal, wouldn’t its use condone vigilantism? The imposition of human fragility and actual police procedure in the DC universe yielded fantastic results. The lushness of little details made everything seem just a little bit closer to possible. Plots shocked and twined and unwound between legal thrillers, murder mysteries and hard noir. Stories navigated the grim waters of crime and tragedy and heartbreak with a power that transcended superhero fiction while forever keeping one foot in the boat.
In one of the most fascinating story-lines, “Dead Robins” from the Corrigan collection, literal dead Robins start popping up around Gotham as teenage boys dressed up as the Boy Wonder, dropped from buildings like confetti. Of course, super villains are the prime suspects: either Two-Face back for more attention from Renee Montoya or the Joker still giddy after a stint as sniper in the brilliant “Soft Targets” story. It turns out, though, that the killer is just an average human being, a normal man enchanted by the light show of superheroics that constantly surround him in Gotham; a regular guy who desperately wants entrance into the world of heroes and villains and the lives of supermen.
Similar to the villain, comic readers are much the same way (hopefully not to the point where they torture and murder a gaggle of pubescent gymnasts), always looking for cracks in fiction’s barrier, escape tunnels into the Valhalla of possibility that lives in every superhero story. Age, intelligence, and maturity mean absolutely nothing when it comes to this. We can all admit it: we want this world to be real. And the depiction of that other world never truly seemed as real as it did in "Gotham Central."
Like all other sleeper hits, "Gotham Central" had all the critical respect in the world without even approaching commercial success. Despite the love of seemingly every professional and reviewer extolling its quality, the series limped along in the sales charts for the entirety of its forty-issue run. It probably would have been canceled much sooner if not beloved by DC staffers. Regardless, whether GC was canceled because of numbers or creative loyalty (probably both), it doesn’t really matter. Everyone should check out this incredible story of the brave men and women that make it their mission to fight the villains of Gotham City.
