Anyway, this trade has a lot of stories I like (Black Spider’s costume redesign is great), but I agree that Dr. Alchemy was made too Hannibal Lecter-ish. He even says “quid pro quo” at one point, right? I did like seeing Detectives Chyre and Morillo from Geoff Johns’ run on “The Flash”, though.

As for Gotham Central, it joins the list of a number of good books I was sad to see go. While I think Brubaker leaving did hurt the book, I thought Rucka still did a good job on the last few arcs without him. And while I really didn’t like having the book lead into the Spectre and superhero stuff, I thought the ending was quite good, but I can see people having problems with it.

If Brubaker were to come back and do a GC OGN, I’d be interested… Rucka, not so much. I’ll be honest, I liked Rucka’s work a lot more before he became a DC guy, where his sensibilities just don’t align with what I want in a superhero universe. When Brubaker was writing Gotham Central, it felt like an ensemble book, when Rucka was writing it it felt like “The Adventures of Renee Montoya and friends.” I like Montoya, and I really liked Rucka’s story that “outed” her, but I wanted a more balanced cast.

This was the first GC trade I didn’t buy. There were moments I liked in both stories, but I feel that the Hannibal Lecterization of supervillains has become a lazy writing trick, bordering on cliche, and Dr. Alchemy probably doesn’t warrant such treatment in the first place. Like Nick, I was also put off that the long build-up of “Who is Jim Corrigan?” culminated in “Uh, well, he’s just a corrupt guy, no relation, just a coincidence.”

My biggest frustration with GC in the end, though, is that instead of being a look at Gotham through the eyes of cops, or just a cool as hell police procedural, in the end it became a launchpad for the new Spectre and the new Question or Batwoman or laser-gun toting P.I. or whatever the hell Montoya winds up as.

Tim.agen wrote:
I wonder what a black and white reproduction/ recollection of Gotham Central would look like. Maybe sized like the most recent “Sin City” reprints.

I want to say that generally, color superhero art from the modern-day won’t reproduce as well in black and white. It was made for color, and the color was tailored to the art, and that’s probably the best presentation of it.

BUT… having seen Lark’s black and white work on CRIMINAL, I have to say, I’d be interested in seeing what GC would look like as affordable B&W digests. Or maybe one gigantic “SHOWCASE” style collection.

For my part, I don’t have anything to add other than the obvious thoughts most everyone is having: Cockrum co-created the All New, All Different X-Men, for all intents and purposes, making him one of the fathers of the most enduring sets of new characters in comics, and the comics industry will definitely miss him.

I seriously doubt that this title will be collected in its entirety. They’ve already skipped some issues and it’s unlikely they’ll go back and include them in other TPB’s. They’ll probably just collect the major arcs - #33-36 and ##38=40. It’s a huge shame, because ##11 and 32 were two of the best issues in the run.

I know GC stopped but this was also the last released TPB? Would really be a shame because I really looked forward to be reading the next TPB of it