The very beginning (and lost chapters) of Greg Rucka's saga of Renee Montoya and Harvey Dent
New Introduction: Most people are familiar with GCPD Detective Renee Montoya's infamous dealings with Two-Face thanks to author Greg Rucka's popular and critically-celebrated storyline, Gotham Central: Half a Life.
However, I've noticed several people online--fans of that story, of Renee, and of Rucka--were unaware that Rucka had been building up to that story for years, starting with the very first stories he wrote for DC, one of which featured the first-ever meeting of Harvey and Renee. That is one reason why I have decided to dedicate a series of posts to the entire history of the strange... whateveritis that's going on between these two great characters.
The other reason I'm posting this is that while everyone praises Half a Life as a great Renee story, nobody seems to look at it from HARVEY'S perspective, treating him only as a villain when their history is more complex than that. There truly are two sides to every story, and the second perspective here is rarely discussed. Let's change that, shall we?
Crime novelist Greg Rucka's first three DC comic stories kicked off a journey that he'd follow all the way up to his lamented departure from the company in 2010. Everything from No Man's Land, Huntress: Cry for Blood, 52, Checkmate, The Question, and Batwoman: Elegy, it ALL stems from these first three stories, two of which feature a pair of Gotham's toughest heroines reluctantly teaming up with face-related men: one with no face at all, and the other with two too many.
Despite the consecutive order of their publication within issues #14, 15, and 16 of the quarterly anthology series Batman Chronicles, I strongly suspect that there were published partially out of sequence since the story in #14 is clearly meant to be a sequel for the one in #15, whereas the one in #16 is credited in the introduction as being the story where "Rucka first proved his mettle in comics."
Confused? Don't worry, I've arranged the stories in the order that I believe they were intended to be read. I'm also throwing in one that doesn't feature Renee nor Harvey, but nonetheless feature a pairing who will greatly impact the path Rucka takes with all of his characters. And to think, it all began with a pair of pairings, both of which were doomed to fall apart... until the remnants of those pairings joined and eventually became one themselves.
Before we look at Renee, we must first look at how Rucka wrote the man who would help give Renee new purpose many years later. Even before the oddball vigilante known as the Question reached out to Renee, there was another hardened, tough-as-nails Gotham hero on whom he set his sights, and here is where they met for the first time.
After the events of Cataclysm (but before No Man's Land), Gotham was still struggling to recover from a massive earthquake, which had turned the city into lawless wasteland of crime, rubble, and suffering. In our first story, An Answer in the Rubble, the Huntress--Gotham's resident hardass vigilante who doesn't play by your RULES, maaaan--watches with her trademark RIGHTEOUS RAGE as a corrupt National Guardsmen hijacks a shipment of morphine from medical supply trucks, with the intent to resell them on the street.
She attacks the soldiers with characteristic hatefulness, not realizing that she too is being watched--studied, even--by someone else. And when the stranger approaches, she instinctively assumes that he's another of the criminals, and in a action that typifies the kind of hero she is, blindly fires a deadly blade at the unseen figure, just kinda assuming that he's probably a bad guy:
God, I hated Helena. I still kinda do, especially whenever I remember these stories of her from the 90's. Did the writers ever intend her to be anything other than a hateful, bitter, uptight, angry, impetuous, rude, belligerent jerk? Perhaps that just makes Vic's presence and patience all the more significant. After all, most of those words certainly described the original Objectivist Question by Steve Ditko, don't they?
Indeed, we later learn that Vic saw something of himself in her here, something that would make him reach out to her after NML. Her potential shows through by the end of the story, where she has the corrupt Lieutenant at her mercy, ready to fire a spear into his skull:
Except the tragedy was that, no, as Vic would eventually learn, she couldn't. Not in the way he'd wanted.
Huntress would end up going through a lot of humbling during and after NML, and when Vic tried to help her build herself back up, she resorts to her vengeful "blood cried for blood" ways. Vic condemns her and leaves, his project with Helena resulting in failure. At least, that's how I remember Batman/Huntress: Cry for Blood, so correct me if I'm wrong.
In retrospect, one can only imagine that Helena, not Renee, might have become the new Question in time. It just wasn't in her nature, nor did she care to change on Vic's terms. Vic had better luck with his second try with Renee, so it's oddly fitting that our next story should feature her alongside the man who would eventually ruin her life and let her on the path to becoming the new Question.
A few months later, in the next issue of Batman Chronicles hits, featuring another Rucka story entitled Two Down. In it, an exhausted Detective Montoya searches for her missing brother Benny, who went out to help quake victims and never came home. In her search, she tracks down a group of what could be looters, finding Benny... along with someone else.
She leaps out, gun drawn, and demands that the group freeze. The man smiles and says, "Relax, officer..."
Harvey is very dependent on the coin still, and there's a moment where both sides of his personality speak at once as he determines the coin's outcome. But once again, it's good heads up. And then, during one rescue, a quake hits and Renee becomes trapped, knocked unconscious.
Here's the thing: we never actually SEE the outcome of the coin toss. Presumably, since Harvey is never shown as being anything but utterly beholden to the coin's rulings, it came up good heads and he was thus obligated to save Renee. But nonetheless, Rucka gave us that ambiguity, and I wouldn't take that for granted. Renee wakes up in her bed, surrounded by family, with Harvey off in the background, strangely silent and melancholy as they all gather around to hug her. It doesn't change Renee's feelings towards Harvey. Even as she watches him playfully interact with children, showing them his coin to their delight, she's preparing for the worst. Her father knows it too, and gives her a single bullet, just in case she needs to use it.
A lot more happens in this story, including glimpses of Harvey's murderous dark half popping up, Harvey saving Renee's life from scavengers, and Renee using her last bullet to save Harvey's life (a decision which she can barely believe she made), all of which culminates in Batman showing up. As they fight, Harvey goes for his coin to decide fight or flight, and that's when Renee thinks, "I understand..."
And already, we see a fundamental difference from the Vic/Helena dynamic. Unlike Huntress, who acts in reaction to the Question reaching out to her, it's Renee who does the reaching out to Harvey here. She's the one taking the chance on him, just as the Question was the one taking the chance on the Huntress.
And thus ends one of my all-time favorite Two-Face stories, on a note of hope and possible redemption. So imagine my frustration when, a few months later, Renee and Harvey return in No Man's Land with barely any acknowledgment of this story. Clearly, something fell apart somewhere, but neither Rucka nor anyone else wrote what happened.
Or at least, so I thought. Turns out, the sequel to this story was published an issue earlier, but it's a story which NO ONE ever seems to remember nor discuss. I'm not sure why that is. I suppose that it's not the most important story in the grand scheme of things, but it's a great character piece for Renee and Benny Montoya, one which helps fill the gaps between Two Down and NML. And while Harvey no longer appears in this story for reasons which remain unclear, his presence hangs heavily over the Montoyas nonetheless.
... Then he told me why he'd come home.
The story then becomes a flashback, detailing how Benny was nearly shot down while flying low-level recon into Quraci airspace (Quarc being the DCU's version of Iraq, naturally). After nearly being killed, Benny manages to destroy two APC's (Armored Personal Carriers), killing the soldiers inside.
I love stories that can give the human perspective on the larger-than-life worlds of superhero comics, and this is no exception. While Two-Face himself is not in this story, his presence is felt heavily through the coin. I'm not sure even Renee understands why she keeps the coin, and even if she does, Rucka isn't going to tell us either way. It's one of those mysteries left unanswered, especially since I imagine that few besides geeks like me really cared to know in the first place.
It's powerful for Renee to use Harvey's coin as a means of illustrating her point to Benny, a point that Harvey himself is tragically incapable of understanding: sometimes you really have no choice, and if you force yourself to think you did, then you're gonna go frickin' nuts.
Harvey can't see that because he's broken, and has found the only way he knows how to cope. But like most of us, Benny still has the burden of sanity and free will, and Renee helps him come to terms with this by doing the sort of thing that I could actually imagine the original Question doing.
It makes me wonder if, now that Renee is a "super" herself, does she live in their black and white world? Or is she, as the new Question, still living in the grays?
Either way: as we all know, the Harvey/Renee dynamic eventually collapses even worse than the Vic/Helena one, which always makes me sad to reread Two Down. Perhaps it's "realistic" to acknowledge that if you take a chance on someone so dangerously unstable, you risk having your own life ruined in the process.
Yes, realistic, perhaps. But damn depressing, to say the least. And even then... no sir, not sure I like it. One can almost imagine post-Half a Life, Pre-52 Renee Montoya looking back at compassion towards Harvey and thinking, "You should have put the bullet in his head when you had the chance." I hate that. I hate that such a moving, complex story should be so utterly tarnished by what comes later.
But then, it was important for Renee to get to that point, after she'd already faced a moral crisis in OFFICER DOWN and before her breaking point in Gotham Central, when the eventual murder of her partner led her to quit the force and sent her into a booze-soaked spiral of anger and depression. She was even angrier than the Huntress, and really, she had far more cause.
It was in this state that the Question--who had already failed to "save" Huntress---found Renee in 52, and thus, we come full circle. By the end, with Vic dead and Renee as the new Question, I'm guessing that she never went as far gone into her anger as Helena did. Or maybe Vic just learned from his experience with Helena. Maybe both. Maybe neither. So many questions...
One way or another, it all started here. It's a shame to think that if we're ever to see these stories reach their conclusion, it won't be for a long, long time. Not by Rucka, anyway. But then, isn't that the nature of superhero comics? They're out of his hands now, into the sandbox for someone else to play with or ignore as they please.
Whether anyone will, or if they'll have the talent to pull it off or else ruin the foundations of Rucka's work... well, it's almost so up to chance as please the likes of Harvey Dent himself.
But if you think you now know the full story of what happened with Harvey and Renne between now and Half a Life, think again. Far more happened in No Man's Land than most fans know, thanks to new elements which Rucka added in that story's novelization. To see what I mean, continue upward through the series and read on as the great NML kicks into high gear. As always, there are still two sides to every story, even if it's a side which few have seen themselves.
However, I've noticed several people online--fans of that story, of Renee, and of Rucka--were unaware that Rucka had been building up to that story for years, starting with the very first stories he wrote for DC, one of which featured the first-ever meeting of Harvey and Renee. That is one reason why I have decided to dedicate a series of posts to the entire history of the strange... whateveritis that's going on between these two great characters.
The other reason I'm posting this is that while everyone praises Half a Life as a great Renee story, nobody seems to look at it from HARVEY'S perspective, treating him only as a villain when their history is more complex than that. There truly are two sides to every story, and the second perspective here is rarely discussed. Let's change that, shall we?
Crime novelist Greg Rucka's first three DC comic stories kicked off a journey that he'd follow all the way up to his lamented departure from the company in 2010. Everything from No Man's Land, Huntress: Cry for Blood, 52, Checkmate, The Question, and Batwoman: Elegy, it ALL stems from these first three stories, two of which feature a pair of Gotham's toughest heroines reluctantly teaming up with face-related men: one with no face at all, and the other with two too many.
Despite the consecutive order of their publication within issues #14, 15, and 16 of the quarterly anthology series Batman Chronicles, I strongly suspect that there were published partially out of sequence since the story in #14 is clearly meant to be a sequel for the one in #15, whereas the one in #16 is credited in the introduction as being the story where "Rucka first proved his mettle in comics."
Confused? Don't worry, I've arranged the stories in the order that I believe they were intended to be read. I'm also throwing in one that doesn't feature Renee nor Harvey, but nonetheless feature a pairing who will greatly impact the path Rucka takes with all of his characters. And to think, it all began with a pair of pairings, both of which were doomed to fall apart... until the remnants of those pairings joined and eventually became one themselves.
Before we look at Renee, we must first look at how Rucka wrote the man who would help give Renee new purpose many years later. Even before the oddball vigilante known as the Question reached out to Renee, there was another hardened, tough-as-nails Gotham hero on whom he set his sights, and here is where they met for the first time.
After the events of Cataclysm (but before No Man's Land), Gotham was still struggling to recover from a massive earthquake, which had turned the city into lawless wasteland of crime, rubble, and suffering. In our first story, An Answer in the Rubble, the Huntress--Gotham's resident hardass vigilante who doesn't play by your RULES, maaaan--watches with her trademark RIGHTEOUS RAGE as a corrupt National Guardsmen hijacks a shipment of morphine from medical supply trucks, with the intent to resell them on the street.
She attacks the soldiers with characteristic hatefulness, not realizing that she too is being watched--studied, even--by someone else. And when the stranger approaches, she instinctively assumes that he's another of the criminals, and in a action that typifies the kind of hero she is, blindly fires a deadly blade at the unseen figure, just kinda assuming that he's probably a bad guy:
God, I hated Helena. I still kinda do, especially whenever I remember these stories of her from the 90's. Did the writers ever intend her to be anything other than a hateful, bitter, uptight, angry, impetuous, rude, belligerent jerk? Perhaps that just makes Vic's presence and patience all the more significant. After all, most of those words certainly described the original Objectivist Question by Steve Ditko, don't they?
Indeed, we later learn that Vic saw something of himself in her here, something that would make him reach out to her after NML. Her potential shows through by the end of the story, where she has the corrupt Lieutenant at her mercy, ready to fire a spear into his skull:
Except the tragedy was that, no, as Vic would eventually learn, she couldn't. Not in the way he'd wanted.
Huntress would end up going through a lot of humbling during and after NML, and when Vic tried to help her build herself back up, she resorts to her vengeful "blood cried for blood" ways. Vic condemns her and leaves, his project with Helena resulting in failure. At least, that's how I remember Batman/Huntress: Cry for Blood, so correct me if I'm wrong.
In retrospect, one can only imagine that Helena, not Renee, might have become the new Question in time. It just wasn't in her nature, nor did she care to change on Vic's terms. Vic had better luck with his second try with Renee, so it's oddly fitting that our next story should feature her alongside the man who would eventually ruin her life and let her on the path to becoming the new Question.
A few months later, in the next issue of Batman Chronicles hits, featuring another Rucka story entitled Two Down. In it, an exhausted Detective Montoya searches for her missing brother Benny, who went out to help quake victims and never came home. In her search, she tracks down a group of what could be looters, finding Benny... along with someone else.
She leaps out, gun drawn, and demands that the group freeze. The man smiles and says, "Relax, officer..."
Harvey is very dependent on the coin still, and there's a moment where both sides of his personality speak at once as he determines the coin's outcome. But once again, it's good heads up. And then, during one rescue, a quake hits and Renee becomes trapped, knocked unconscious.
Here's the thing: we never actually SEE the outcome of the coin toss. Presumably, since Harvey is never shown as being anything but utterly beholden to the coin's rulings, it came up good heads and he was thus obligated to save Renee. But nonetheless, Rucka gave us that ambiguity, and I wouldn't take that for granted. Renee wakes up in her bed, surrounded by family, with Harvey off in the background, strangely silent and melancholy as they all gather around to hug her. It doesn't change Renee's feelings towards Harvey. Even as she watches him playfully interact with children, showing them his coin to their delight, she's preparing for the worst. Her father knows it too, and gives her a single bullet, just in case she needs to use it.
A lot more happens in this story, including glimpses of Harvey's murderous dark half popping up, Harvey saving Renee's life from scavengers, and Renee using her last bullet to save Harvey's life (a decision which she can barely believe she made), all of which culminates in Batman showing up. As they fight, Harvey goes for his coin to decide fight or flight, and that's when Renee thinks, "I understand..."
And already, we see a fundamental difference from the Vic/Helena dynamic. Unlike Huntress, who acts in reaction to the Question reaching out to her, it's Renee who does the reaching out to Harvey here. She's the one taking the chance on him, just as the Question was the one taking the chance on the Huntress.
And thus ends one of my all-time favorite Two-Face stories, on a note of hope and possible redemption. So imagine my frustration when, a few months later, Renee and Harvey return in No Man's Land with barely any acknowledgment of this story. Clearly, something fell apart somewhere, but neither Rucka nor anyone else wrote what happened.
Or at least, so I thought. Turns out, the sequel to this story was published an issue earlier, but it's a story which NO ONE ever seems to remember nor discuss. I'm not sure why that is. I suppose that it's not the most important story in the grand scheme of things, but it's a great character piece for Renee and Benny Montoya, one which helps fill the gaps between Two Down and NML. And while Harvey no longer appears in this story for reasons which remain unclear, his presence hangs heavily over the Montoyas nonetheless.
... Then he told me why he'd come home.
The story then becomes a flashback, detailing how Benny was nearly shot down while flying low-level recon into Quraci airspace (Quarc being the DCU's version of Iraq, naturally). After nearly being killed, Benny manages to destroy two APC's (Armored Personal Carriers), killing the soldiers inside.
I love stories that can give the human perspective on the larger-than-life worlds of superhero comics, and this is no exception. While Two-Face himself is not in this story, his presence is felt heavily through the coin. I'm not sure even Renee understands why she keeps the coin, and even if she does, Rucka isn't going to tell us either way. It's one of those mysteries left unanswered, especially since I imagine that few besides geeks like me really cared to know in the first place.
It's powerful for Renee to use Harvey's coin as a means of illustrating her point to Benny, a point that Harvey himself is tragically incapable of understanding: sometimes you really have no choice, and if you force yourself to think you did, then you're gonna go frickin' nuts.
Harvey can't see that because he's broken, and has found the only way he knows how to cope. But like most of us, Benny still has the burden of sanity and free will, and Renee helps him come to terms with this by doing the sort of thing that I could actually imagine the original Question doing.
It makes me wonder if, now that Renee is a "super" herself, does she live in their black and white world? Or is she, as the new Question, still living in the grays?
Either way: as we all know, the Harvey/Renee dynamic eventually collapses even worse than the Vic/Helena one, which always makes me sad to reread Two Down. Perhaps it's "realistic" to acknowledge that if you take a chance on someone so dangerously unstable, you risk having your own life ruined in the process.
Yes, realistic, perhaps. But damn depressing, to say the least. And even then... no sir, not sure I like it. One can almost imagine post-Half a Life, Pre-52 Renee Montoya looking back at compassion towards Harvey and thinking, "You should have put the bullet in his head when you had the chance." I hate that. I hate that such a moving, complex story should be so utterly tarnished by what comes later.
But then, it was important for Renee to get to that point, after she'd already faced a moral crisis in OFFICER DOWN and before her breaking point in Gotham Central, when the eventual murder of her partner led her to quit the force and sent her into a booze-soaked spiral of anger and depression. She was even angrier than the Huntress, and really, she had far more cause.
It was in this state that the Question--who had already failed to "save" Huntress---found Renee in 52, and thus, we come full circle. By the end, with Vic dead and Renee as the new Question, I'm guessing that she never went as far gone into her anger as Helena did. Or maybe Vic just learned from his experience with Helena. Maybe both. Maybe neither. So many questions...
One way or another, it all started here. It's a shame to think that if we're ever to see these stories reach their conclusion, it won't be for a long, long time. Not by Rucka, anyway. But then, isn't that the nature of superhero comics? They're out of his hands now, into the sandbox for someone else to play with or ignore as they please.
Whether anyone will, or if they'll have the talent to pull it off or else ruin the foundations of Rucka's work... well, it's almost so up to chance as please the likes of Harvey Dent himself.
But if you think you now know the full story of what happened with Harvey and Renne between now and Half a Life, think again. Far more happened in No Man's Land than most fans know, thanks to new elements which Rucka added in that story's novelization. To see what I mean, continue upward through the series and read on as the great NML kicks into high gear. As always, there are still two sides to every story, even if it's a side which few have seen themselves.