Like any good cop drama, Gotham Central serves to illustrate one overwhelming truth: The lives of cops are pretty shitty, especially the detectives and investigators who devote themselves to actually solving crimes and catching criminals.
Renee Montoya gets entangled in an ugly encounter with Two-Face that outs her as a lesbian, destroying her relationship with her family and marking her as an object of ridicule by her peers. Driver’s partner gets frozen by Mr. Freeze in the first pages of issue one. Overall, cops die regularly on the streets of Gotham, which is probably a dark glimpse of how a “realistic” superhero universe would function on the street level—lots of death, lots of destruction, lots of fear.
For years, the big truth of Batman’s life has been his War on Crime, and how that functions as an obsession that destroys any hope for a separate identity for “Bruce Wayne.” Lots of writers have played with that idea, coming down at points all across the spectrum between the ugly grim & gritty Batman to the centered, relatively stable (except for the cape and cowl) Batman.
I’m starting to see how these two disparate forces for justice overlap; both of them have little to no personal lives, and it’s their choice of profession/vocation that destroys those lives. To keep the lives of Gothamites as safe as can be expected in a city like that requires constant vigilance, and the ones paying the price aren’t just the flamboyant mavericks like Batman and Robin and their ilk, but the everyday people at the GCPD, working cases and chasing clues and taking statements day in and day out while kids, lovers, friends and family suffer their absence and their daily endangerment.
Great series.
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