Probably higher average quality than the first book, but the outlier is a poor arc rather than a really great one, so it feels worse.
This is second of three hardcover volumes collecting the comic book series Gotham Central. (See also: Book One: In the Line of Duty) Gotham Central is a police procedural in Batman's town. The Major Crimes Unit (MCU) gets all the big cases, from murder to supervillains.
We open on a rather good breather issue from the perspective of Stacy, MCU's secretary. It is a break after the "Half a Life" arc, it re-establishes characters and relationships, and you just know horrible things are going to happen during or after the moment of light. It is small and personal in the way that this series is at its best.
The featured arc has the Joker being a sniper around Christmas. That feels like a spoiler to me, since the story leaves uses it as a reveal, but there is no way you could reach that point unspoiled. You have the title of the book, the cover art (Joker with a sniper rifle), text everywhere advertising this as the Joker book, etc.
I frequently recite that this is a series about people who are good and truly #%@&ed, and this is the point where it becomes most apparent. The Joker is as bad as Batman's rogues gallery gets. The movie version of him as up-close with knives is solid, but you get a whole other set of problems when you give him a sniper rifle. Death is instant; nothing to be done. You cannot see it coming. It just happens, and maybe it is about to happen to someone else. Then again, it is the Joker, so he may be doing something else entirely. How characters react to the news that it is the Joker is illustrative. Some panic. Some leap to immediate action. Most quietly realize that they are good and truly #%@&ed.
This is also a good arc for playing up the MCU-Batman tension. Det. Driver got to embody that in the first arcs, the difficulty of wanting to solve problems on their own versus needing the Bat to deal with the freaks. Now we have the villain who, more than anyone else, sees it as a game between himself and Batman, with the main cast as audience or pawns.
The third arc mixes personal lives with a villain-free arc. There is a superhero cameo, but it is entirely irrelevant to the story; they must have had a "1 per arc" quota to meet, or perhaps needed someone for the cover. Anyway, the arc is standard police procedural, and it spends too much time unsuccessfully trying to get us to care about yet another set of detectives. The series has a large cast, and I just cannot get emotionally attached to every detective on every shift, no matter how much I may love character development. I get the sense that Vincent has a history from previous comics, and good for (fictional) him that he gets a moment in the spotlight, but I have no reason to believe this guy will ever be important again, so his shadowy history is just a waste of pages to me. The arc is titled "Life is Full of Disappointments," and it does indeed disappoint. As I will get to later, it also features the worst art of the series.
The final arc of the book, "Unresolved," competes well with the Joker's "Soft Targets." It will come down to personal preference, but since I keep citing how much I love the personal, detailed work in the series, I will take this arc over the Joker's terrorist antics. This one obviously has links to the past (fully explained within), and it cashes out the Harvey Bullock comments from the first half of the series. It does everything you want from the series: it has detective work, it deals with their private lives without losing the story thread, it brings in supervillains, it has more mundane human evil and error, and it stands alone while filling a place in a larger mythology. It is just a good piece of work.
Let's talk art. Brian Hurtt does the breather issue in a cartoony but not particularly good style. Sarge is particularly poor. Nate as a blocky football-player type works very nicely. The Stacy artwork is the best, presumably as a result of focusing effort on that character. It reminds me of some early Sam Keith art. Brian Hurtt does, however, do a much better Batman than Michael Lark.
Mr. Lark remains excellent. It is unfortunate that he shares the second arc with another artist, because his strong attention to detail on faces makes it rather jarring when someone else does the faces slightly differently. It is like having two actors play the same part in a single episode. Or maybe Lark did them all and I'm just hallucinating small differences; the pencils switch each arc. All the last book's notes apply, particularly the great faces. I cannot say that I like the color work on the "Soft Targets" arc, with the tendency to do entire pages in a single color scheme; it suggests lighting but often feels washed out, an experiment that did not quite work. If there were slightly more consistency in how rooms were lit, and there is quite a bit, it would be a great effect. As it is, I am not clear if having the political offices look like criminal sites has the obvious potential meaning or is just random.
Also, I liked Stacy better with short hair than with pig-tails. Personal preference. Stacy does not consult me on these things.
Greg Scott's art in "Life Is Full of Disappointments" is unfortunate. It has a blotchy look, demanding that the colorist pick up most of the weight. Next to Lark's finely detailed work, it looks messy, amateurish. It has cartoonish open space without the clear definition that makes the DC Animated Universe style look, and it is not meshing with the noir. The face-work is where the contrast in styles is most apparent; many scenes will have faces that are just a line or two, an indistinct blob. Vincent's face, however, is done well. One bit I particularly like is the gratuitous Huntress cameo. Her mask really looks like a mask that a human being is wearing. Superhero costumes normally look painted on, as if the outfit were a part of the hero. She looks human and slightly ridiculous. It keeps everything grounded.
The last arc is Michael Lark again, this time with Duane Swierczynski. Mr. Swierczynski's art meshes very well with Mr. Lark's. This arc has a better version of the "Soft Targets" use of single tones to light a scene. Given the oranges, I presume that quite a bit of the story happens around dusk, which is an apt metaphorical choice in the art.
Book One: In the Line of Duty
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