The Grace of Gilda: The Complete History of Gilda Dent, Part 1
What must it be like, to be a villain’s love interest?
To be a supporting player of a supporting player, vanishing into comic book limbo and emerging once every ten or thirty years to again play your role on the sidelines of someone else’s tragedy? What happens when writers think that your love isn’t enough, and that you need to be something else ( Read more... )
"I think the only people he definitely kills are his own men, who are themselves killers."
He also shoots and possibly kills a cop (or a uniformed bank guard), leading to another cop saying "Two-Face is a murderer!" But I feel like Finger wanted us to forget that by the third part and make it seem like he never killed anybody other than maybe his own murderous goon. Even back then, I feel like killing a cop would read as a worse moment of crossing the moral event horizon than shooting Batman. It sure wouldn't have flown with the Comics Code, that's for damn sure!
"I think the main plank that needs to be added to Gilda, going forward, is to explain why she likes Harvey as a person, not just a checkbox labeled "Spouse" (or worse, an abstract Apollo). The easiest one would be his Tireless Dedication to Justice, but Bruce already view(s/ed) him that way*, so having Gilda use it would be redundant unless some writer could find a really fresh take on it"
You're damn right, it's way overdue. I think the story coming up next post may give the closest example we've ever gotten to what she loved about him. Mark Verheiden writes her describing Harvey's passion for justice and how the law helped him make sense of a chaotic upbringing, which becomes even more meaningful when imposed on EotB's changes to his childhood the next year. That little detail would be a great place to start developing why she fell in love with him.
Differentiating it from Bruce's relationship with Harvey could be the tricky part, but it's not impossible. In Verheiden's story, Grace displays an empathy that Bruce--even at his most tortured about Harvey--rarely does. Also she's far more emotionally available than Bruce, who cannot open himself up to emotions for any number of reasons. I think Gilda/Grace and Bruce would have fundamentally different reasons for admiring and loving Harvey's pursuit of justice, with Bruce seeing it more in terms of himself and his own crusade and trauma.
"... he's, in a way, a victim of his own success."
I think you're right, which makes the fact that he's so often short-thrifted in terms of merch and appearances all the more galling. It's like he's one of DC's favorite toys, but only to keep on the display shelf, not to actually play with. Does that make sense? It makes one wish they'd just stuck with Paul Sloane or someone else to take on the mantle.
""HEY READER DID YOU KNOW BATMAN DOESN'T LIKE THINKING ABOUT HIS DEAD DEAD PARENTS"-land"
I already told you this in DMs, but I'll say it again: this made me laugh my ass off. So true!
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Gilda, on the other hand, is pretty much potentially the other way around AND potentially a bit of a protagonist to Batman's endangering antagonist in this equation which might help to develop both herself AND BATMAN if done right as she challenges Batman to not try to throw her husband back in to a line of fire that already helped costing him his sanity. There's far more to life than Just That and fact of the matter is that the people Batman's attempting to save and protect usually want Not That, they just want to live a life. Harvey is a bit between worlds there, and actually portraying someone (Gilda) dealing with mundane domestic elements like, say, her having a job that is dependent on commisions and clients which leads to a potentially fluctuating personal economy and just having a house/flat to maintain and own personal needs and that just being struggle enough? That could be a pretty nice, relatable change of pace for superhero comics period, as this is a story-telling industry that usually prioritizes action and thus oddly enough lacking in variety. And that might help us see Harvey the Person, too.
tl;dr: Gilda to the left, Batman to the right
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"And Harvey he knew only in the context of his own cause, so Harvey might just being a dude after reform and not coming back as an ally could potentially be a bit of a syn-tax-error paradox for him. (I refer to The Big Burn's "LIKE YOU DID, BRUCE" as well as... and I hate to say this, Face the Face.")
This sort of thing might be helped if writers fleshed out the stories where Bruce and Harvey knew each other from school (or, shudder, as fellow patients at the Innsmouth hospital for troubled children, if we really want to revisit Scott Snyder).
Your Gilda thoughts are something I'm going to take into consideration as I work on my conclusion to this whole retrospective. My roomie, who already read through the first drafts, has some ideas of her own about where they could go with Gilda that might or might not intersect with what you're positing here. Especially as the most recent stories about Gilda and characters like her are forcing them out of such relatable stories in order to drag them kicking and screaming to the level of Batman and his world.
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