Greg Rucka

When you want street-level heroes just trying to tough it out and make their way through a sometimes brutal world, it's more common that you want Marvel Comics, where humanizing heroes has been a central tenet of the Marvel way since Stan Lee first put finger to typewriter.

Conversely, DC Comics is more often associated with wild and crazy sci-fi and/or fantasy storytelling. This is the place, after all, where the idea of parallel earths first came to be, and where a guy running really fast on a treadmill can actually move himself through time.

That dichotomy, oddly enough, is what makes Greg Rucka such an interesting mainstream comic book writer. He's had many fine works for other publishers, in both prose and comic form--the Atticus Kodiak series, Queen and Country, Whiteout, and even a run on Wolverine. But at the moment, he is DC exclusive, and known best for his pivotal role in the major DC events of the past few years, starting with his miniseries The OMAC Project and onward to his work on 52, Checkmate, and the Crime Bible miniseries.

Rucka is a master of street-level writing--perhaps his finest DC work, after all, was his time on Gotham Central, which looked at the darkest corner of DCU Earth, Gotham City, from the point-of-view of the beat cops working at the Gotham City Police Department. Yet DC's past few years especially have been characterized by ever-growing stakes and ever-expanding stories involving some pretty crazy stuff--worlds living, worlds dying, and nothing ever being the same. You know the drill.

It is revealing to have a great writer claiming the street-level "human" perspective in a fictional world like the DCU; it makes for great storytelling amid the event-driven din, and Rucka has risen to that challenge in all of his DC work since Identity Crisis. His creation of Sasha Bordeaux was a masterstroke, which he has parlayed into one of the more interesting characters in the DCU today; part cybernetic implants and part woman, she has moved from the pages of OMAC to Checkmate with ease. Rucka has also laid claim on the Question mythos, and has inserted one of his other great characters, Renee Montoya, into the role post-52, another intriguing move that has loads of story potential.

Basically, when things are getting wild and crazy out in space or the netherworld or in the skies above Metropolis, it's Rucka who's covering the down-to-earth, human character beats in his work. For that, we should all be thankful.