Gotham Central Vol 2: Half A Life: White chocolate filled with caramel.

A couple of weeks ago, I was at Cost Plus World Market buying a seagrass doormat and a 12 oz. bottle of Cholula, as one is wont to do from time to time. At the register, they had a bowl of wrapped candies, merely labeled by the brand name of Lindt. I picked up one as an impulse buy, choosing the one with yellow on the label, because that held the promise of caramel. Into the bag it went, until when I was sorting the mail this evening I noticed it on the kitchen counter. As I unwrapped the candy, I was dismayed to find out that it was white chocolate, one of the nastiest substances on the planet. (Seriously, do people who enjoy white chocolate eat raw butter too? Because that’s what it tastes like to me.) I ate it anyway, enjoyed the caramel filling and moved on.

Of course, if it wasn’t the perfect treat, I only have myself to blame, as the label was clearly yellow and white and I should have known what to expect. In the same way, I should have known that no matter how excellent the Officer Montoya arc in Gotham Central Vol 2: Half A Life was going to be, it would be in a dissatisfying shell of a mediocre genre story.

But let’s talk about the caramel first. Detective Renee Montoya is a hard working cop in the crime-ridden city of Gotham, a big city with big crime. Not making anything easier for the forces of law are a vigilante and “his” rogue gallery of homicidal maniacs. The odds are tough; no one sympathizes with the cops. It’s enough to crush anyone’s spirit, but Montoya has to live with a secret that makes things much harder for her.

Greg Rucka is not a writer I associate with great characterization, but he clearly “gets” Montoya and her voice in these pages is clear and unique. When Montoya’s secret is revealed in her precinct, reactions are mixed: there are those who shun her and there are those who sympathize with her. What does a proud and scared person Montoya do at that point? She rejects them all angrily and withdraws. Everyone may feel a little sorry for her, but her life has just changed irrevocably, and that doesn’t go away easily.

It was smart that Rucka began the main story (“Half A Life”) with the secret coming out, because the real drama in this story is Montoya coming to grips with other people knowing what she has hidden from them her whole life. Throughout the story, the emotional scenes where we see how Montoya is adapting to her new situation verge on heartbreaking. Additionally, Montoya’s proud and arrogant partner Cris Allen plays off her extremely well, and when Montoya is incapacitated, substitute detective Josie MacDonald plays off of Allen just as well.

The heart-wrenching final scene, in which Montoya has to pay the ultimate price for her deception, is one of the most powerful scenes that I have read in while. Scenes like this show how this story won the 2004 Eisner Award for best serialized story. But then when I flip through the book a second time, all I can taste is white chocolate.

To begin with, this collection is hampered by the two prequel stories that lead off the book, stories that are not part of the Eisner Award consideration. In these lead-off stories, a mutual respect between Montoya and Two-Face is established. In the first story, Montoya and Two-Face work together to save their fellow citizens in post-earthquake Gotham. In the second, Montoya suffers through a lonely birthday and only an imprisoned Two-Face sends her flowers. Rucka hasn’t found Montoya’s voice yet, but he does establish her loneliness, a key aspect of Montoya’s hard choices later in the book. The problem with these stories, and the rest of the book, is Two-Face.

Rucka’s Two-Face is a nondescript gangster. Even ignoring that Two-Face may possibly be the most fascinating and complex character in the colorful Gotham City world, the fact that Rucka’s antagonist in this story is a boring cipher is a waste of Montoya’s character arc. Much of “Half A Life” is spent on Two-Face’s convoluted plot to force Montoya into his arms, and it just doesn’t work. With no depth of character, Two-Face’s scenes are slow and tedious, and by extension so is the framework of this story. Two-Face’s plan may seem complex, but the story gets bogged down by a repetitious refrain of Montoya's deteriorating life that poorly frames the real conflict within Montoya's head.

In the end, what really hurts this book is the contrast between Montoya’s powerful emotional turmoil and the overwhelming blandness of the main plot. In most other books, a generic framework is par for the course. However, in this case, since Montoya’s character scenes are so powerful and compelling, the fact that the remainder of this book is anemic and bland makes for a deeply unsatisfying experience.