![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
about_facesBefore I get to the actual post, there's a photo I've gotta share with you guys. At a strip mall in PA, at a store I won't name (it rhymes with Shmot Shmopic), while I was totally not listening to Lady Gaga on the store's awesome headphones, I saw a guy there who happened to have the Best Tattoos Ever.
He claimed to have the entire TAS Rogues Gallery on both his arms. You can see a bit of Penguin (in a cloud of money), plus I also saw Clayface, Scarecrow (the second version, who was in the most episodes), and a Mr. Freeze outline that had yet to be colored in.
If I hadn't been so shy, I'd have wanted to get shots of them all, but at least I got the one that was most important to me, as well as most of the Riddler, which is the second most important. Third would have been Hatter, and man, I hope he had Hatter. Man, why can't Comics!Hatter be more like TAS!Hatter? I blame Grant Morrison and ARKHAM ASYLUM: A SERIOUS HOUSE ON SERIOUS EARTH.
But really, this kid was only about nineteen. How much money did these cost him, and how much would he be paying to maintain them for the rest of his life? Either way, I salute his dedication, and also his taste. Anybody can get a Joker tattoo (probably the Heath Ledger version, as I'd expect from someone who hangs out at Shmot Smopic), but to get all the Rogues, especially in their TAS versions? That's cred, man.
Now, onto the actual post!
So hey, remember how I was all like, "How come we never found out what happened between Two-Face and Renee Montoya after they first met, and he let her keep the coin? Even in the novelization, we never heard about what really happened next! What the hell?"
So it figures that, literally two days after I posted my final part of the big NO MAN'S LAND posts, I track down a copy of BATMAN CHRONICLES #14, which features Greg Rucka's very first work for DC Comics, an illustrated prose piece that focuses on Renee Montoya and her brother Benny. And while it was published six months (two issues) before "Two Down," the story where she and Harvey met, it was actually a sequel in prose form!
If you're like me, this is huge! And if you're not... well, I hope you at least find it mildly interesting.
I'm guessing pretty much no one's read this story, or else somebody probably would have brought it up already. Greg Rucka's first work for DC is a obscure oddity, almost entirely forgotten and never reprinted, that serves as the lost first (or second) chapter in Greg Rucka's decade-long saga of Renee Montoya.
And while Harvey Dent isn't actually in this story, his presence is definitely felt throughout.
If you haven't already, be sure to read "Two Down" first, as this story occurs some time after the meeting of Renee Montoya and Two-Face, who had been helping Benny Montoya find survivors in the post-earthquake wreckage of Gotham City.
... 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, which Renee keeps with her for reasons she doesn't entirely understand (reasons which Rucka never explains, either in the comics or the NML novelization).
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?
He claimed to have the entire TAS Rogues Gallery on both his arms. You can see a bit of Penguin (in a cloud of money), plus I also saw Clayface, Scarecrow (the second version, who was in the most episodes), and a Mr. Freeze outline that had yet to be colored in.
If I hadn't been so shy, I'd have wanted to get shots of them all, but at least I got the one that was most important to me, as well as most of the Riddler, which is the second most important. Third would have been Hatter, and man, I hope he had Hatter. Man, why can't Comics!Hatter be more like TAS!Hatter? I blame Grant Morrison and ARKHAM ASYLUM: A SERIOUS HOUSE ON SERIOUS EARTH.
But really, this kid was only about nineteen. How much money did these cost him, and how much would he be paying to maintain them for the rest of his life? Either way, I salute his dedication, and also his taste. Anybody can get a Joker tattoo (probably the Heath Ledger version, as I'd expect from someone who hangs out at Shmot Smopic), but to get all the Rogues, especially in their TAS versions? That's cred, man.
Now, onto the actual post!
So hey, remember how I was all like, "How come we never found out what happened between Two-Face and Renee Montoya after they first met, and he let her keep the coin? Even in the novelization, we never heard about what really happened next! What the hell?"
So it figures that, literally two days after I posted my final part of the big NO MAN'S LAND posts, I track down a copy of BATMAN CHRONICLES #14, which features Greg Rucka's very first work for DC Comics, an illustrated prose piece that focuses on Renee Montoya and her brother Benny. And while it was published six months (two issues) before "Two Down," the story where she and Harvey met, it was actually a sequel in prose form!
If you're like me, this is huge! And if you're not... well, I hope you at least find it mildly interesting.
I'm guessing pretty much no one's read this story, or else somebody probably would have brought it up already. Greg Rucka's first work for DC is a obscure oddity, almost entirely forgotten and never reprinted, that serves as the lost first (or second) chapter in Greg Rucka's decade-long saga of Renee Montoya.
And while Harvey Dent isn't actually in this story, his presence is definitely felt throughout.
If you haven't already, be sure to read "Two Down" first, as this story occurs some time after the meeting of Renee Montoya and Two-Face, who had been helping Benny Montoya find survivors in the post-earthquake wreckage of Gotham City.
... 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, which Renee keeps with her for reasons she doesn't entirely understand (reasons which Rucka never explains, either in the comics or the NML novelization).
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?
