Writer: Greg RuckaPlot: After saving the life of a Ukrainian councilman, Jim Gordon and Batman receive an unlikely visit from an old adversary.
Greg Rucka set me up. Just like Crispus Allen, his recent addition to the GCPD, successfully completed a police sting this issue, he set me up, I tell you! The regular Detective Comics writer took Turning Points #1, a great comic in itself as I noted a month a back, and used it as the basis for his extremely satisfying tale in this issue. That's not to say #5 cannot be read exclusively, but to enjoy it more fully, the first of the books in this series of one-shots will be a welcome prologue.
I never really figured out who the bearded man was, until Jim Gordon spoke his name. For a while there, I half-thought the guy wanted to meet the Cop and the Crusader to cap them, or something. Instead, he uses the GCPD's new laserlight Bat-signal to summon each of them and offer his thanks. This is a man who held a churchful of people hostage during a wedding, because his family was killed in a car crash, and he felt he'd lost his own life by remaining to live.
Batman rarely gets the opportunity to receive, much less accept positive, verbal feedback from everything he's done. After what Jim Gordon's been through since No Man's Land, he deserves some real thanks, too. This is the kind of acknowledgement that spans well over a decade, because that's how long it took Dr. Corbett to start his life over, and create a new family.
Gordon connected with Corbett all those years ago, because they'd both lost their wives - the doctor's wife, to death, and Gordon's, to divorce. Witnessing that Corbett made good for himself was enough for Jim, and for me, but a truly wondrous thing happens next.
In several ways, Bruce Wayne is still the boy he once was, because of his lost childhood. He abandons his menacing ego for a moment, and allows the third layer of his persona to emerge, something usually only reserved for the time he spends in the Cave. Corbett's daughter wants nothing more than to meet a superhero. At the start of this issue, she epitomizes the common sentiment that Batman is merely an urban myth, but at the conclusion, young Dina and Batman face each other. They are positive results of tragic circumstances. In that moment, they understand that we have it within ourselves to make sense of this chaotic reality, we just have to know what to look for.
