The Question | Vic Sage | Renee Montoya

The lesbian-Latina Renee Montoya has addressed numerous issues of gender and sexuality throughout her publication history. From her controversial coming out that garnered both awards and criticism, to her transition from police officer to “legacy character” vigilante, the character has inspired discussion, sometimes deep, often times heated, from both fans and scholars.

The following conversation is an attempt to continue those discussions and initiate new ones. Far from being the final say on the character and the issues addressed throughout her publication history, this discussion will hopefully inspire others to consider taking a deeper look at Renee Montoya.

Contributors:

SCOTT ANDERSON

I’m Scott Anderson. I’m not sure I have any “areas of expertise” relevant to this topic, but I did major in English and history, I’m one of the foundering group of guys of the Gay League, which I believe is the largest English-speaking gay comic readers group in the world; although, Joe Palmer could tell you more about the Gay League than I can, and I do work for Prism Comics as one of their message board moderators, the editor of their webcomics page, and one of the writers of Queer Eye on Comics column. I have also had articles printed in Prism Comics: Your LGBT Guide to Comics. The 2008 edition is coming out soon with an article of mine looking at mad scientists. My blog, which frequently discusses comic and social issues related to being gay, is read by more people than I ever expected, which is to say more than just me. Whether all that makes me an expert or just a busybody, I don’t know.

I’ve been reading comics for as long as I could read and I’ve been looking at the pictures for longer. I’ve been reading comics for as long as I could read, and before that, I was looking at the pictures.

JOE PALMER

I’m Joe Palmer and writing introductions is something I rarely look forward to doing. I have a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. My two primary focuses were printmaking and Japanese art history. Mounting debt from school loans and massive cuts to the school’s budget in state funding as punitive action to a student’s art piece scuttled my plans of going on to grad school.

I’ve read and enjoyed comics for quite a number of years now, longer than I care to admit or is relevant here. My first comics were DC and soon I was spending equal time reading Marvel. Reading habits and interests have changed over the years, but I think DC will remain as favorite.

Like Scott Anderson and actually through him, I became involved in Gay League very early on, though perhaps not exactly as one of the originals, and after more involvement and time, the website was handed over to my by its founder, Anton Kawasaki. My memory is fuzzy now, but it in 1998 (it seems like an accurate date) I was invited to become a member of GLAAD’s Media Awards nominations committee for the comic book category. This is, again if memory is correct, the first time I fleetingly met Loren Javier.

I am also one of the original members of the the prototype organization from which Prism Comics was born, and am one of Prism’s founding members though have since resigned.

Presently I am working on an idea for a comic series though its format is yet to be decided. This is still in the research phase, so please wish me good luck.

AMY READS

I am Amy Reads, an academic who studies Victorian literature and culture and gender studies. (I defend my dissertation this Thursday [editor's note -- according to Amy's blog, now successfully defended!] (!), so if everything goes well, soon I will be Dr. Amy Reads.) I also dabble, academically, in popular culture (science fiction, comics, mysteries) and issues of the body.

Personally, I am a fan of All Things Amazon, All The Time, and have loved Wonder Woman since I was old enough to pretend I could fly. I’m a DC girl, through and through, although I read Marvel, too. Dark Horse, I adore (Buffy! Hellboy!) and I miss CrossGen (Ruse!).

Renee has been a favorite of mine for some time now, as I find her origins, like Harley Quinn’s, to be fascinating: a crossover from the television show to the comic book. I particularly enjoy what Mr. Rucka has done with Renee, and I found her storyline to be the most interesting and complex of 52. As a fan, I find her to be exemplary of a new push in comics towards strong, complex women who are not stereotypical of their designations. Renee is not a stock character; she is fully realized, and I believe that is mostly due to good writing (as so many good things often are). As a feminist scholar, I find her to be the first tentative fulfillment of a long and arduous journey toward redefining what a superhero is in comic books. In particular, the fact that she has assumed the mantle of the Question and has not become “Girl Question” or “Question Mark” (Forgive Me, Friends: now you see why DC has not asked me to assume any editorial duties) demonstrates an at least fledgling commitment to rethinking the gender divide in comics.

We should never forget gender in comics, but we should never be dependent on them for our heroic designations.

The Subtext of the Mask

In the comments of a blog posting about Batwoman, Valerie D’Orazio implies that there’s an ulterior motive in hiding one of DC’s best-known lesbian characters behind a featureless gender-neutral mask:

As for the Question being being DC’s “star” lesbian character: she’s a FACELESS character named the “Question.” Wow, what a metaphor.

Whereas Amy Reads wrote in a guest column at Girl-Wonder:

Renee Montoya’s recent transformation into The Question is a transformation into an identity that is, by its Very Nature, Absent of Identity. It is a mantle that depends solely on the mantle, solely on the heroism, solely on the worth of the person, male or female, beneath. It is a mantle that, Truly, Friends, depends on a complete redefinition of The Body Beneath.

What Renee Montoya’s The Question ultimately demonstrates, to This Humble Author, at least, is that if a redefinition and a reclamation of The Body Beneath can occur successfully in our Literature, in our Popular Culture, then it can in our “Real Life” as well. Renee is a strong woman and a strong hero, and neither identity is dependent on the other.

What do you see as the subtext of a well-known lesbian character like Renee Montoya putting on this mask — is it a commentary on lesbian invisibility, an example of it, or something deeper?

Amy Reads: I think, in some ways, yes, and no, and perhaps.

That is to say, I think yes, it could be an example of lesbian invisibility, in that Renee is completely faceless, and her clothing mimics Vic’s before her, and is thus “mannish,” or clothing designated traditionally masculine (trench, trousers, hat). Or perhaps a commentary on lesbian invisibility, in that Renee cannot be visible, as she never can be visible to a society that would discount her doubly–as a woman, and as a lesbian–and triply–as also a Latina lesbian. But so, too, can we see it as post-gender and post-sex, in that the man who had the mantle before her was faceless, too, and he existed in a position of privilege, as a white man in America. In this sense, Renee could be seen as the reconfiguration of privilege, a new type of woman for a new century.

But then, I think that is the beauty of Renee. She can be a multitude of things, even all at the same time.

Joe Palmer: This is a topic that I started to mull over a little over a week ago. I can understand the points made by both D’Orazio and Reads. As humans we tend to assign names and qualifiers to everything, especially each other. One group of people (you may categorize the group as you like) decides for whatever reason that another group is unlike them and assigns all sorts of negative ideas and beliefs to the second batch. Group A starts to depersonalize group B and one method of doing that is by removing their identity by metaphorically making them faceless.

On the other hand, it would seem easier for the reader (or listener or viewer) to project their dreams and aspirations onto a faceless hero or protagonist.

Does the fact that the Question is seen without her face being obscured when she is out of costume make any difference in either of the viewpoints expressed by D’Orazio and Reads? If so, does the quantity and quality of scenes with Renee impact this in any way?

How likely is it that this topic would be brought up if the Question were still a heterosexual male hero? My personal opinion is that this would be a non-issue.

Does the facelessness of the mask lessen the possibility of the character being co-opted as a sexual fantasy object?

Scott Anderson:

I read through Val’s comments. There is no real argument about the metaphor. By that I mean, that if you see a symbolic connection between the representation of lesbians in media and the faceless mask, you do. For you, it is a metaphor.

However, when Val was asked, “Are you saying that the mask marginalizes Renee?” Val answered, “Yes.”

I just don’t see it. I pretty much agree with Val when she said, “Montoya pre-Question was a great character. She was her own character. Her homosexuality grew organically out of who she was. And, to DC’s credit, they stood by that decision even though originally it freaked out Time Warner. There was no reason to make her The Question. You could have left her as one of the long line of great DC detectives, without superpowers.” She could have stayed just as she was, but given that Gotham central was cancelled, she’d have been just as she was without a book.

The Question story arc didn’t marginalize her. It pulled her into the most hyped and best-selling of DC’s books, 52. It allowed her to star in her own mini-series. Neither of these would have been an option without making her something other than just another detective in the Gotham PD. Does anyone believe that a Renee Montoya (non-Question) mini would have been green lighted after Gotham Central was cancelled for lack of sales? Can anyone name a detective comic currently published by DC (nee Detective Comics)? Oh, sure, they used to publish detective comics, but Gotham Central was stab at doing it again, but let’s face it, CSIs and Law & Orders may rule the TV roost, but in comics, you’d have to be a detective to find a detective.

There is something to be said about the specifics of the Question’s look, but I think we have to first acknowledge the broader context. If DC wanted to marginalize Renee the simplest thing to do was nothing. Since her book was cancelled, doing nothing would have given her a one way ticket to comic book Limbo where she could languish with Hamilton Drew, Roy Raymond: T.V. detective, and the entire O’Dare family. So she wasn’t marginalized in the way the most marginalized characters are (i.e. they simply cease appearing in comics.)

So does her costume marginalize her in the sense that it removes her lesbianism or status as a woman? I think we could make a case in a general sense that her status as a woman is visually downplayed as opposed to the vast majority of female characters who have their female physical attributes visually emphasized, but I can’t say that I’ve ever heard feminist argue that there is something wrong with downplaying the female physical characteristics or stereotypical female ways of dressing in a comic character, and as a feminist, I’d have to say that Renee is a welcome change.

And this brings up the catch 22 problem with lesbian characters. When the lesbian character is created in a manner that emphasizes her female physical characteristics, we hear people complain that the character is only being done that way to make her appeal to straight male fanboys, which somehow invalidates her as contributing to diversity. Further, we hear that superheroes wearing skirts and high heels are silly, and even sexist in using that silliness in female characters. But when those characteristics are downplayed and the clothing is more functional as with the Question, Val tells us that there is a problem with her wearing “men’s clothing.” What exactly counts as men’s clothing? Pants. Flats? The only thing that stood out to me as being particularly associated with male dress was the fedora, which didn’t appear in 2 of the 5 issues of the Crime Bible mini and even when it did, I was still able to remember that Renee was a woman and tell that she was a woman by looking at her. I’m a wee bit surprised to see Val, who normally takes a fairly feminist view of things, suggesting that a woman’s identity as a woman is defined by her hats … or shoes or pants or whatever it is. I’m perfectly able to tell my sister is a woman even when she is dressed in her firefighter uniform that I suppose one might term as “men’s clothing.” The firefighter is not men’s clothing when my sister wears it. It’s her uniform, her clothing, her woman’s clothing. Similarly, the Question’s uniform ceases to be men’s clothing when it is worn by a woman. I might add that just as my sister stands out more as woman when she is in her uniform that is traditionally worn only by men, so too might we make a case that Renee’s wearing of clothing that might be traditionally male makes her stand out from other women.

The faceless element of the costume also seems to cause Val some consternation that I’m not bothered by. As I said, if she wants to read or can’t help but to read it as a metaphor, well, she does. But I just can’t see how it marginalizes Renee as a person or specifically as a lesbian. The mask didn’t hid the dramatic tension of two ex-lovers when the Question and Batwoman fought. It didn’t prevent Renee from having a sexual liaison with a woman in issue 2 of the Crime Bible series, who Renee is reunited with at the end. I might add that Renee is not in the mask when she’s making love to that woman in issue 2. So it’s not as if she lost her identity any more than Vic Sage lost his as a heterosexual or a man.

One might even argue that it is the very lack of identity that makes the Question uniquely identifiable. Frankly, I’m not at all sure I’d be able to spot Renee or Vic or even Bruce Wayne in a crowd of people in a comic book. However, the Question is immediately identifiable no matter what clothing he or she is wearing. I’d be willing to be that far more comic readers (young or old) could spot the Question than Renee … or even Bruce. To suggest that a lack of identifiable features marginalizes a character is to suggest that more people would know who Mr. Griffin was if he’d never become the invisible man. Does anyone believe that Mr. Griffin’s invisibility marginalized him as a character? Or would most of us believe that it was his lack of features that focused our attention on him? Surely, I’m not the only one who thinks that it was Question’s lack of features that made the character distinct from the rest of the suited detectives that have littered comics for decades. It was his (and now her) lack of features that kept the character from being marginalized.

The Question of the Suit

Scott Anderson: Despite what I said before about the Question’s “costume” not being “men’s clothing” when worn by Renee, I do think there is something about the issue of the suit and how it works with Renee wearing it that is worth mentioning that deals with the difference of men and women in suits.

There is something specific to the suit in American culture that suggests anonymity. It’s the uniform of business man that changes very little as the years pass or as the price rises. We can immediately tell the difference between a cheap dress and an expensive gown and very frequently we can tell pretty much what year it was made. But the suit evolves more slowly and doesn’t become much more elaborate or decorative as it becomes more expensive. It is intended to keep men from being noticed or from standing out.

The suit also becomes synonymous with the man. In the 1960s, calling someone “a suit” implied that he was a conformist, a drone in the system. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit was a popular novel and later a film that depicted men’s loss of meaning as they submerged themselves into corporate life. The suit was symbolic of the loss of individuality. Self-important politicians and business men are referred to as “empty suits.”

When Vic wore the suit and added the mask, he seemed to me to reflect a kind of anonymity that I don’t feel from Renee precisely because she is a woman. On a man, the suit suggests conformity, but to me, the suit on a woman suggests a rejection of feminine norms. It’s essentially the opposite message.

It is for this reason that I think the Question’s look works better on Vic than on Renee. The Question’s facelessness combined suit doubles the effect of the featurelessness of the character when it’s on man. He becomes a generic man, a non-entity. On Renee, I think the two images work at cross purposes. The mask makes her featureless but the suits suggest a kind of rebellion against the anonymity of conformity. Even the outfits that Renee wears depart from the standard suit. While I don’t recall ever seeing Ditko’s Question out of the suit and tie look and I only rarely recall O’Neil’s being out of it, Renee diverges from the suit and tie quite a bit. In the Books of Blood, she never wears the standard white shirt and tie. She wears a dark blouse, a ribbed sweater, and a tank top. In one book, she wears a knit cap instead of the fedora. I recall walking in a gay pride parade where a spectator held up a sign that read “More Clothing Choices for Men!” The difference in the variety of outfits between the male and female Questions validates that spectator’s desires.

Speaking of the fedora, the difference between Vic’s conformist short hair cut, essentially hidden by the fedora, making him even more nondescript, and Renee’s hair sticking out from under the fedora in a ponytail or flowing about her shoulders was striking. Part of the Question’s M.O. is that the gas that the character releases changes the color of both clothing and hair. However, while the hair color change on Vic was a clever bit that helped to suggest that he was more able to hide his identity, the fact that he had a nondescript hair style and hid it under a hat already gave him an air of anonymity. The gas changes Renee’s hair color, but we are still very aware of the style of her haircut. It stands out in a way that Vic’s doesn’t.

The funny thing is that while I think the suit and mask have greater visual impact for Vic, I think they work symbolically better on Renee, at least that’s true if we use Ditko’s vision of the character. For Ditko, the Question represented the ideal of the Rand’s objectivism and individualism. Ditko’s Question rebelled against capitulating to corporate interests and rejected societal pressures, but his Question also looked like the ultimate corporate drone, the ultimate “suit.” Conversely, Renee as the Question appears to be rebelling against all feminine conventions of fashion. While women are normally urged to accent their facial features with lipstick, eyeliner, mascara, etc., Renee has removed her face entirely. The suits on her aren’t emblematic of conformity but of her rejection of gender norms. She is ironically more a visual manifestation of the principles of individualism because she is not the standard female comic character in a skimpy outfit and porn face even while her costume in another sense removes her identity in a way that is more obvious than the usual comic book mask.

Amy Reads: The suit has such a deep and interesting history, for both men and women, that I think your resistance of its designation as “male” or “female” is quite right. The suit is, traditionally, considered more “masculine,” but women’s clothing often has included a more masculine aspect as an accent: the military style of the latter 19th century, the large shoulders of the 1980s, the boyfriend sweaters of the 1990s, etc.

But men often are subject to the lack of clothing choices–as your recollection of the sign at the parade rightly suggests–once the suit comes into fashion in the early 19th century. There are some great books out there on the suit–John Harvey’s Men in Black, Anne Hollander’s Sex and Suits, for example–that examine the impact of the shift to trousers after the French Revolution (the sans culotte costume of the French workers), and, of course, the shift to black in the nineteenth century.

By taking the suit and making it her own, particularly by exposing her hair, I don’t think that Renee is purposefully reminding the audience that she is female through more traditionally “feminine” designations, like longer hair or emphasized bust. I think Renee is putting her own mark on the costume to make it her own and, honestly, to make it more comfortable for a female body that is, decidedly, different than a male body.

“Legacy” Characters

In comic fandom currently, there seems to be a sort of backlash against what people are calling “legacy” characters — women, gays and minorities who take over roles previously held by mostly Caucasian males. Montoya is one of those characters who, as a lesbian Latina, satisfies the trifecta of what some believe is a forced diversification of comics.

Do you think such characters are an example of forced diversification, or that the comic industry is still operating under a quota or token system for women, gays and minorities?

How much of this backlash from fandom do you think arises from prejudice, and how much from an attachment to specific characters that they believe to have been replaced for the cause of diversity?

Scott Anderson: It’s hard to say how much of it is backlash to diversity vs. resistance to change vs. real criticism of poor writing. We know from the whole Hal/Kyle business with H.E.A.T. and all that not all resistance to these legacy characters comes from a backlash to perceived diversity mandates. On the flip side, it has also been very clear that some people see these characters attempts to rob traditional readers of comics of the characters to hand them to nontraditional readers of comics. Chuck Dixon and the folks on his Dixonverse message board were quite vocal that they thought that turning the Rawhide Kid gay was a theft of the character from them, turning him from something they enjoyed into something they couldn’t read, and taking the theft very personally … even though, the Kid didn’t have a comic anyway. They saw it as a retroactive theft of their memories of the character. I have to believe that the Dixonverse’s aversion to the coming out of Renee, where they readily admitted that lesbians usually have straight experiences before coming out as gay but still thought it was out of character for her to come out as gay after only being seen as straight, was based in part on their fears of homosexuality. They think there is something about children seeing gay characters being gay that will do something to children or destroy society or something that they don’t think will happen when kids see straight characters being straight or murderous characters being murderous or whatever.

I do recall that some years ago on the DC boards, someone said that they ONLY reason a writer would include a gay character in a comic was to make some pro-gay political commentary. I then created a list of — IIRC – about 78 other reasons an author might use a gay character. Some people had trouble wrapping their minds around it because they could only see gay inclusion as political, and never as artistic, realistic, biographical, thematic, etc. Of course, many of these people grew up in an era when the only time one spoke of gays was as the creepy folks of the gay agenda that wants to convert your kids. I think as the years have passed, this trend as diminished so that people can see other reasons for including a gay character, including that there was no specific reason to make a character gay than there was to make a character straight. The character is just envisioned that way.

So again, I say it’s hard to tell what is motivating people. Even when they say they are opposed to the legacy character because they are opposed to forced diversity, I have to wonder if they would still be opposed to the legacy character just because they liked the old character so much and they’re just using a argument of forced diversity to bolster their feelings. Were Legion fans opposed to the snake Projectra because they liked the old Projectra or because they hate snakes? Hard to say. Similarly, resistance to the new Question would be spawned from the love of the old Question or sexism, homophobia, racism, or something else entirely. Or a combination.

Amy Reads: Oi, this makes me So Angry.

Not, of course, at you, Scott, but at the people who think such things. With writers like Rucka and Brubaker, say, we can see the logical progression of characterization, but the response to them? I think this can be viewed further through the constant press surrounding Batwoman (”oh no! She’s a lesbian!” and “oh no! She’s a rich lesbian!” which almost seems what everyone was in a kerfluffle about). It must be “for a reason” that she is gay, no? I mean, certainly it cannot be because that is her character? Never. There must be Some Hidden Agenda.

(like the feminist agenda. I received my toaster oven several years back.)

You are certainly right that things are changing, slowly, but since beginning blogging two years ago (and thus becoming aware of a larger feminist voice in comics discussion), I have seen the common gutpunch response of “If you don’t like it, make your own comics” which almost always seems to be a veiled way of saying “no girls or homosexuals or non-whites in my comics, thank you!” which of course completely discounts the fact that 1) the world is a many-faceted thing, and 2) there are readers and writers. While I long to be A Writer (on Barda, or the Amazon Princess, thanks), I am First and Foremost A Reader, by Degree, by Profession, and of course, out of Love.

But perhaps since I am part or supportive of Said Agendas, I exist outside the pale, no?

Feel free to continue this discussion in the comments section below!

Many readers take for granted the amount of work that goes into the comics that they find fresh on shelves every Wednesday afternoon, not contemplating the role of writer, artist, colorist, letterer, editor, and all the other post-production hands that contribute to the final product.

Thanks to artist Matthew Clark (who provided art and commentary) and writer Greg Rucka (who allowed us to publish his script), we’re able to take a look at the process that goes into transforming a writer’s scripts into a story on the page. The following commentary by Clark originally appeared on his MySpace page, where you can find updates on his current work, and additional behind-the-scenes looks at his art.

Below, you’ll find a page-by-page look at the creation of Crime Bible #3, beginning with Greg Rucka’s script, then Matthew Clark’s pencil’s, then Clark’s inks, then Clark’s commentary.

All books, titles, characters, character names, slogans, logos, and related indicia are trademarks of and copyright DC Comics.

PAGES 2-3:

Matthew says: “Since I was inking this issue also I didn’t pencil as tight, keeping it loose….”

Page 4:

Matthew says: “Really loose pencils…done at size then blown up to 11×17 for inks. Notice the subtle changes, or not-so-subtle changes. I made some decisions in the inks to hopefully make the page work better. Give the book a Noir feel.”

Page 5:

Matthew says: “Every once in a while I do my sound efx…. Sometimes they make it in, other times they get digitally erased. Other times my display lettering gets covered by other display lettering, but you can still see it…more on that later.”

Page 6:

Matthew says: “This marks Montoya’s return to Gotham City since 52. After reading the script and knowing the writer well enough, I added a panel [on what] was a panel heavy page to begin with. But I felt the panel was needed. The opening shot is the added panel. It should also look similar — this is the opening shot of Lt. Gordon taking the train to Gotham from Batman Year One. My tip of the hat to David Mazzuchelli. This panel is also the only full-bleed panel in the issue. It appears again on page 22 as Renee is leaving Gotham. I felt it was a nice book ends to the story. This page also has the lettering mistake. In the script, the bar is called Molly’s. In the ref. I got and hunted around for, the bar was called Marlowe’s. I did some of the lettering on computer picking the fonts. I put in Molly’s. The Letterer put in Marlowe’s but didn’t take mine out. Check the book.

One of the things that happens is things get covered up. In the final printed version, Xenon’s lettering was covered up, so people might not have caught on that that is where Renee’s ex works.”

Page 7:

Matthew says: “This was a tough page to tackle. A lot of the dialogue is the Commish, but it’s not his book, so that’s a fine line. While he’s a headline in Batman, or he should be, in CB he’s a character actor. So he has a scene but hopefully nothing too scene stealing. I like Gordon and wanted to do him justice. Maggie got the short end of this page since it was compressed to a single page and either Renee or Gordon speaking Maggie got left to background. It happens.”

Page 8:

Matthew says: “Here is the first meeting of Bullock and Montoya since Bullock killed the gunman who shot The Commish. He’s back with his badge. Why? I have no idea. He came back during the OYL storylines…. Which is a shame, as a fan of Homicide and the fall of Kellerman, I enjoyed the writers’ tribute to that story. Being a dark and moody part of the story, I whipped out the grease pencil and tried to make the lighting really moody.”

Page 9:

Matthew says: “This marks Kathy’s new look. This page is also different from the printed version. In the top panel, I had placed a “K” on the ground to help readers with location. This page and one other had problems with the scans, but I had made copies and burned a disc. I also sent in the board just in case. STILL it was missed.”

Page 10:

Matthew says: “Art-wise, this was one of my least favorite pages. It happens. Just nothing worked for me on the page. I ended up blackening out panels two and three and redid them on a separate page. Sometimes you have to let pages/panels go. ”

Page 11:

Matthew says: “This page is one of my favorites, not the favorite, but unlike the previous page, this one worked for me. Go figure.”

Page 12:

Matthew says: “I submitted to my editor two versions since this was a big reveal of the character not seen since 52. I wanted to make it the best it could. We went with this one, a better choice I think. Also, please note the wash texture on the costume…something that was completely lost in the color. ”

Page 13:

[Page 13 Art Unavailable]

Page 14:

Page 15:

Matthew says: “Ok, I like breasts, and I’m really liking the spillage of the breasts in dresses. It’s something I’m needing to work out. Hence the Penguin Babes in panels one and two, on purpose. I figure that Cobblepot’s a boob man.

And the inks…all black and sleek looking…and yes in the last panel is me when i had longish hair and minus the broken nose…FYI.”

Page 16:

Matthew says: “At this point in Crime Bible, I needed help. Due to the holidays, the book was bumped up on the schedule, so my friend Steve Lieber and Jeremy Colwell came in and helped out, I would then go over the pages if need be to add my touch.”

Page 17:

Matthew says: “…The unfinished inks. I can’t seem to find the finished one. Special thanks to Jeremy C. for clutch help.”

Page 18:

Matthew says: “This is one of those pages that I don’t know if the art works. It’s serviceable, but really kinda blah, in my opinion.”

Page 19:

Matthew says: “After I sent in the pages all corrected and ready for lettering, I realized two things on this page I wish I had done. Panel one — pull out more see that it’s the Batarang hitting the book. Second — switch panels two and three. Honestly, I think it would have worked better, in my opinion.

Thanks to JC once again for all his brushy work.”

Page 20:

Matthew says: “Note the change. I forgot I had removed Q’s hat and then drew it in the last panel, but as we’ll see on the [inked] page, it’s on the ground. ”

Page 21:

Page 22:

Matthew says: “Hope you’ve enjoyed the look into my process. Its been fun…. I really wanted you to SEE what I had done in Crime Bible, warts and all. Thanks for looking and hopefully enjoying.”

One of Renee Montoya’s first assignments with Crispus Allen in Detective #744 (May 2000) also sees her working alongside her other long-time partner, Harvey Bullock. Their quarry is also a familiar face — Whisper A’Daire, here a Ra’s Al Ghul associate bringing a miracle drug to Gotham, but later the leader of the Dark Faith religion that Renee works with the Question and Batwoman to bring down in 52.

Rucka feels that the addition of Allen as Montoya’s partner served to bring out more of Montoya’s character: “Well, we knew the relationship between Renee and Harvey at that point. It was status quo, and it didn’t really reveal anything new about either of them. Bringing Cris in allowed both he and Montoya to be further fleshed out in a fairly organic, easy way. And the trope of a new partner was good, solid cop-story drama, so that was an obvious benefit. So it served both of them, because both of them had to get to know one another, and trust one another, and in doing so, we learned about both of them.”

Renee finds herself in the spotlight again a few months later, in Detective #747. Rucka picks up the threads started in his No Man’s Land run in telling the story of Renee’s birthday. The day is full of hardships — Renee’s father talks openly and suggestively about the fact that Renee isn’t married and hasn’t started a family, and Renee has to testify at a trial that ignores the grey areas created by post-earthquake conditions in Gotham. A pair of bright spots exist though: Commissioner Gordon remembers her birthday and provides an ear for her problems, and a bouquet of flowers delivered anonymously to her desk.

Renee investigates at the florist and finds that the sender was none other than Bruce Wayne. She barges into his office and demands to know why he sent them. His response? “Um…because you’re a hottie?” Renee is smart enough to discern who really sent the flowers: Wayne’s old friend, Harvey Dent. Renee goes to visit Dent in Arkham, with a pair of cupcakes. After her visit, in a considerably better mood, she finds a note on her windshield from Batman: “You gave him peace. Thank you for that. Happy birthday.”

Batman: Turning Points #5 (January 2001) rewinds back to one of Allen’s first assignments in Gotham, and his first encounter with the Batman. While Allen stands gaping at the Caped Crusader, Montoya slams her gun through a windshield in order to bring a perpetrator down. She smiles at the Batman, saying, “I think you scared my partner.”

Rucka feels that Allen provides an essential role in the GCPD, that of outsider: “Renee’s born and raised in Gotham. Cris isn’t. And in that, there was opportunity to further show how different Gotham is as an environment. One of the biggest conflicts I have in the Batman mythology is the justification, if that makes sense. If Gotham is so corrupt, Batman is required, then isn’t Batman a failure if, after ten years, it’s still just as corrupt?”

Renee doesn’t officially make an appearance in Detective Comics #753 (February 2001), but it’s worth mentioning that she’s the inspiration for “R’nee” in the Harvey Dent comic creation, “The Adventures of Copernicus Dent and his Plucky Assistant R’Nee.” A red-headed pastiche of pulp vixens, R’Nee is the damsel in distress in Harvey Dent’s therapeutic creation. In the end, however, the review board refuses to acknowledge that the art therapy program has any value.

March of 2001 saw the Bat-crossover story, “Officer Down,” in which Jim Gordon, on his way home from a birthday party where Renee gave him a first edition of the Long Goodbye, gets shot multiple times in a back alley. Renee and Cris lead the investigation that eventually leads to cop Jordan Rich, formerly mob capo Jordan Reynolds, whom Gordon had busted in his early days in Chicago. In the interrogation box, they play out a good cop/bad cop routine until Renee puts a chokehold on the suspect. Montoya advocates using the threat of the Batman against Rich, but Allen refuses until the last minute. They have to release Rich, but the Batman is indeed waiting outside. Rich confesses to the Batman, but refuses to make a confession.

When Gordon announces his decision to retire, and Rich files a wrongful arrest suit against the city, Montoya finds herself overwhelmed with the feeling that she let the Commissioner down. She calls in sick and goes to Rich’s apartment, where she kicks in the door and puts a gun to his head. Bullock shows up in time to stop her, showing her the handcuff key that Gordon had given all of his officers, and reminding her of her responsibility as an officer of the law. She backs off, and later Bullock finds her drinking and looking at her key. She asks where his is, and he says, “Dunno…musta lost it someplace. Wasn’t gonna use it anyway.”

Renee and Cris are investigating a series of robberies committed by police officers in Detective Comics #758 (July 2001) when they become mindless criminals themselves, spurred by recitation of Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark.” Bruce Wayne’s bodyguard Sasha Bordeaux attempts to prevent the two from robbing a strip club, when she’s taken hostage by the brainwashed Montoya. Wayne, as Batman, intervenes, using a minimum of force to take down Montoya because, as he says, “She’s a good cop.”

Montoya and Allen are booked in Detective #759 (August 2001), as Batman tells new GCPD Commissioner Michael Akin that he suspects the Mad Hatter to be involved. Harvey Bullock resents the arrest of his fellow officers, as well as having to inform them that they’ll be standing trial. By Detective #760 (September 2001), however, the Hatter’s grander scheme has been put into play — one-third of the GCPD under his control, causing chaos in the streets. Montoya and Allen fight against their own to keep control in the jail, while Batman tracks the Hatter to his lair.

The back-up story for Detective #758 also features Montoya, as she has lunch with Barbara Gordon, filling her in on new Commissioner Akin. Gordon concludes in her Oracle journal that from what Montoya says, Akin is a worthy successor to her father.

Detective #761 (October 2001) seems to deal with fallout from the Mad Hatter’s scheme, as internal affairs investigator Esperanza visits the department to talk to Montoya and Allen. However, when Esperanza talks to Montoya in the interrogation room, he explains that he’s there to talk to her about Jordan Rich. Montoya was violent with him during interrogation, and was later seen going to Rich’s apartment looking as though she were going to hurt someone. The problem comes, Esperanza says, from the fact that Rich is missing and possibly murdered.

The next issue shows Esperanza bringing Montoya along on his investigation. They talk to witnesses who place a Gallante family shooter at the scene of the murder. They bring him in for a lineup and he talks, telling them where to find the body and also who helped set up the hit. Montoya goes to Bullock’s office to tell him the news. “Why, Harvey?” she asks.

“Because it wasn’t right, Renee,” Bullock says. “He had to answer.” Bullock makes the long walk with his head down to Commissioner Akin’s office, where he turns in his badge.

When Vesper Fairchild is murdered inside Wayne Manor in March 2002, Montoya and Allen lead investigations on the scene. And later, in May’s Detective Comics #768, the two begin an investigation of Alfred Pennyworth, the butler who they think aided and abetted Wayne either fleeing the country, or faking evidence that he had. Allen’s pursuit of what Pennyworth may or may not know leads to Pennyworth accusing the department of harassment. Eventually, Wayne’s name is cleared, as David Cain, the real murderer, is captured.

February 2003 saw the debut of the series where Montoya came to the fore as a consistent leading character, Gotham Central. Written in tandem by Rucka and Ed Brubaker, with art by Michael Lark, Gotham Central covered the investigations of two shifts of Gotham’s Major Crimes Unit. Writing a book about the GCPD had been a wish of Rucka’s for long before Gotham Central: “I wandered around for months with this pie-chart poll I’d torn out of the back of a Wizard issue. The poll asked “Which supporting character needs his or her own title?” And overwhelmingly, Gordon had won. I’d been pushing and pushing for this book. And it turns out that Ed had the same idea. So we sort of tag-teamed it and managed to sell Carlin on the idea of doing the title.”

The opening storyline, “In the Line of Duty,” has Montoya and Allen trying to figure out the motives of Mister Freeze, as he freezes one officer to death and leaves the other alive, then having to deal, along with the rest of her comrades in blue, as they have to call in Batman to ensure the safety of the public.

But it’s in June’s Gotham Central #6, the beginning of the Eisner and Harvey award-winning “Half A Life” storyline that Montoya receives the full spotlight. Renee’s out jogging, when she’s handed a subpoena. She’s being sued for ten million dollars by Marty Lipari, an alleged rapist who maintains that he was assaulted during arrest. She spends the day working a robbery case, and begs off early to have dinner with her parents. They give her a grilling on when she plans to settle down, and she winds up spending the night out.

When she gets home, she’s confronted by Esperanza and partner Matt Conway, who tells her that a private detective that Lipari hired has turned up dead, that they suspect Lipari of the murder, and that Renee should watch her back. The private detective managed to get one piece of information about Renee, however — the next day she finds that she’s the talk of the office because of the photograph of her kissing another woman pinned to the office bulletin board.

Her uncouth fellow officers spend the morning deriding her lifestyle decisions, before Captain Maggie Sawyer, a lesbian herself, calls Renee into her office. She wants to know why Internal Affairs was speaking to Renee, and she also wants to tell her, “It’s a one-way door, detective. Once the closet is open, it doesn’t shut again. What you do next, you get to live with it for the rest of your life.” Back at home, Renee has a visit from her brother Benny, who tells her that her parents also received a copy of the photograph. He urges her to verify his lie to them that the photograph was faked, but she struggles with the idea of denying who she is. When he leaves, she calls her girlfriend, Daria, and tells her about being outed. On the walk home, the pair are confronted by Marty Lipari, who films them kissing. Montoya beats the hell out of him, telling him to stay away from Daria. He goes home, muttering under his breath about getting more money from the lawsuit and is greeted at his door by bullets.

Lipari’s body is found alongside a large package of heroin and Montoya’s police revolver. Montoya wakes to find that her gun is missing from her safe, replaced by another package of heroin. She’s still dealing with this discovery when a person at the door says they have a warrant for her arrest. Instead of reporting for work as usual, Montoya is walked across in handcuffs by Esperanza. Daria is brought in for questioning, and she tells them about the encounter with Lipari the night before. Esperanza tries to get Renee to cop a temporary insanity plea, but she maintains her innocence. She’s taken to jail, where Allen visits her. After chastising her for not telling him about being gay, he asks, “Who’s setting you up, partner?”

“It’s Dent,” she says. “It’s Two-Face.”

Montoya’s trial begins with a not-guilty plea and a surprise switch of attorneys, from a pro-bono to one of Bruce Wayne’s legal staff. Montoya’s mother spots Daria in the crowd of the courtroom and demands to know if she’s the one from the photograph. Montoya’s only response is to apologize to Daria.

Allen, meanwhile, gets saddled with a new rookie partner, Josie Mac, and has to solicit her help in verifying Montoya’s Two-Face suspicions. As Montoya is transported back to the Schreck, the prison bus is ambushed by men in animal masks. Montoya is knocked unconscious and stowed in the trunk of a car that scuffs a mailbox as it arrives on the scene. When Allen and Mac investigate the scene later, Mac is able to use near-supernatural abilities to find the car at the station garage — a police was behind the kidnapping. They trace the car to internal affairs officer Conway, who refuses to comment as he’s arrested.

Montoya wakes up to find Harvey Dent standing over her, offering her rare steaks and Merlot, and even Tiramisu from Daria’s restaurant. She demands to know why he’s ruining her life, and Dent replies, “I didn’t. He did. It’s how the coin came down, Renee.” Back at the station, Allen spills all that Conway told them about Two-Face threatening his child’s life and a meeting in a presidential suite to Detective Burke, only Burke leaps out the window and is suddenly wearing a cape. Allen calls all available officers to give pursuit.

Meanwhile, Two-Face explains everything he’s done so far to Renee, and tells her that he’s brought her two lives together. Now she is just like him. “You’re the only person who never treated me with pity. You’ve been kind to me. You visited me at Arkham. It’s obvious how I feel about you, Renee. And I thought that perhaps you felt the same. That you loved me too.” Montoya spurns his advances, and he lashes out at her, threatening to kill Daria too. They grapple over his gun, and then suddenly, Batman is there. Two-Face is taken into custody, and Montoya is cleared of charges. Sawyer makes Montoya take four weeks off, and reiterates what she said earlier: “What you do next, you get to live with for the rest of your life.”

Montoya builds up her courage to talk to her parents while Daria waits in the car. It doesn’t go well. Montoya’s parents tell her not to come back. Daria wraps her in her arms and says, “It’s okay, I’ve got you…I’ve got you.”

Rucka had waited for years, since his first comic story “Two Down,” to write “Half A Life.” The story serves as a balance to the previous story, he said: “The fact was, I was writing about the law of averages as much as anything else. Renee kept getting good tosses of the coin. She got a lucky streak. Eventually, that streak was going to break. “Half a Life” is about the streak breaking. And law of averages demands that all of those “good” tosses…they had to be balanced by a long run of “bad” ones.”

The “Half a Life” storyline won Gotham Central and its creators a handful of awards, including the Eisner, the Harvey, and a nomination for the GLAAD Media Awards. Rucka says he especially appreciated winning the Eisner, “Not so much because it vindicated the homosexuality — how can you? — but because it meant that enough people thought it was a good story they voted for it.”

Montoya returns to duty in December 2003’s Gotham Central #12, which starts the storyline “Soft Targets.” The mayor is assassinated by a sniper, then the school superintendent, and both shifts of the GCPD’s Major Crimes Unit are investigating. The culprit soon reveals himself, shortly before shooting out the bat-signal on the GCPD roof — it’s the Joker. Montoya and Allen get saddled with Gotham reporter Simon Lippman as they carry out their investigation, which involves trying to find the seller of a sniper rifle that the Joker is using to carry out his rampage. The Joker hacks the police system and displays webcam images of Gotham buildings with a counter at the bottom.

Officers track down all of the locations but one, but the end of the countdown only reveals a clock that’s counting up. Eventually, the image changes to that of a Gotham television reporter in captivity, just as the Joker shows up at the station to turn himself in. Turns out his plan was to lull everyone into being secure enough to go Christmas shopping, and the reporter is strapped to a bomb in the back of a toy store. Batman arrives to save the reporter, but the GCPD suffers losses, including shift captain L.T. Probson, whom the Joker murders in his getaway.

We next see Montoya in the midst of the “Unresolved” storyline, in Gotham Central #21 (September 2004), having a tense conversation with Harvey Bullock in a stairwell as she takes him up from a cell. Bullock lets her know that he heard she got outed, and that she could’ve told him…he was her partner. She tells him that he gave up the right to saying that when he killed a man. Bullock says he prevented her from doing the same thing. She responds: “What you did was calculated, Harvey. And to know that you think you did it even a little bit to save me? How am I supposed to live with that? How is Jim Gordon supposed to live with that? We were your friends.”

“I don’t deserve this shit,” says Bullock. “I gave up everything that mattered for you and the Commish.”

“That’s the saddest part, isn’t it?” asks Montoya. “You gave it up. And for what?”

In “Corrigan,” beginning in December’s Gotham Central #23, Montoya and Allen stumble into a gang hit in progress. But the hit turns out to be on a “freak” named Black Spider, who jumps in with Uzi’s firing straight into the torso of Montoya. Her vest stops the bullets, but Black Spider raises his gun to aim for her head. Allen intervenes with a few bullets of his own, and faces an inquest into the death of Black Spider and two men in handcuffs that were also dead on the scene. Unfortunately, the bullet that could clear Allen was put on iBid by corrupt crime scene investigator Jim Corrigan.

After a tip by Esperanza, Montoya tracks Corrigan to a bar full of corrupt cops. After giving him a beat down in the alley behind, he gives up the goods — the bullet’s been sold to an older rich lady collector. Esperanza and Montoya pay her a visit and find a vast collection of criminal artifacts. The two are able to recover the bullet by trading for the last bullet the Black Spider ever fired. Esperanza confesses that he traded his chance to trap Corrigan to get Allen out of trouble because he owed Montoya.

In “Keystone Kops,” beginning in April 2005, Montoya begs her way onto a case in her old neighborhood. A cop trying to rescue a kid stumbled onto a chemistry lab and was turned into a monster by what he found there. What Montoya finds in the neighborhood is that her situation with her parents still hasn’t changed. She and Cris wind up booked on a flight to Keystone to talk to Albert “Dr. Alchemy” Desmond, the incarcerated member of the Rogues Gallery that they believe abandoned the chem. lab. Alchemy works a deal — he’ll cure the mutating cop if he can see him in person. GCPD arranges for Keystone officers to transport Alchemy. But when Alchemy reaches the hospital, he escapes his bonds, and sets the mutated monster loose. Batman goes after him, while Montoya gives Alchemy a beating that puts him into the E.R.

She goes home to Daria, who tells her that her father stopped by to say that he missed her, and that he wanted her back in his life. Montoya sleeps on this prospect, but after losing it when interrogating Alchemy in prison the next day, she hears a call that the berserk mutated officer has been seen in the vicinity of her parents’ store. She arrives on the scene just as the monster cop’s partner puts a bullet through his head. But her father is there, and he’s okay, in more than one way.

The end of the year saw Montoya and Allen investigating a series of Robin murders, and the beginning of the next saw them witnessing the end of the world, interacting with Captain Marvel as Infinite Crisis falls on Gotham. Allen confronts Montoya about her history with Corrigan, and she admits that she blew any future cases against Corrigan by beating him in the alley, but that she did it for the sake of her partner.

February 2006 saw the start of the storyline “Corrigan II,” and Allen confronting his partner over her increasingly violent actions. She’s been out looking for fights at night instead of going home to Daria, and he’s been out tailing corrupt officers. Montoya finds out the latter information after snooping through Allen’s files, and she goes to confront Esperanza. But the internal affairs investigator assures her: Allen is working on his own. Allen warns her off of interfering — he’s close to nailing Corrigan, or so he thinks.

Unfortunately, one of Corrigan’s corrupt comrades spies Kenzie, the informant, narcing to Allen. Corrigan captures and tortures Kenzie, sets up an ambush for Allen, and murders him in cold blood, shooting him in the back.

Sawyer visits Montoya to break the news, and Montoya comes straight to Central to accuse Corrigan. She pulls Allen’s file on him, and puts her fellow officers on the case. All the evidence is rounded up and seems to point to Corrigan, but Montoya suspects something fishy is up. She’s working through grief though, and lets the other officers take the lead. It doesn’t work. The ballistics don’t match up and Corrigan walks. Montoya goes to Allen’s wake to share the news. She can’t break it to Allen’s wife Dore though, and tells her the investigation is still continuing. She leaves the wake to get drunk, and then leaves the bar to find Corrigan.

It doesn’t take long before he’s on his knees in his kitchen, sobbing and begging her not to kill him. Her finger’s on the trigger, but she doesn’t do it. Instead, she goes to Central the next day to turn in her badge.

Tomorrow: Renee starts down the path of self-degradation before embarking on the road of self-discovery in “A History of Renee Montoya – Part IV: Losing Face”!

Renee Montoya first debuted to the masses in 1992, as a recurring character on the acclaimed cartoon Batman: The Animated Series. Renee’s path to television started with an idea from writer Mitch Brian during the creation of the show’s writer’s bible. Once the idea was there, the character started to develop, according to Brian: “I always feel like she was my one truly original addition to the show. I ran the idea of a Latina uniform cop by Bruce, who liked the notion. I always liked the last name Montoya (probably because of the old TV show High Chaparral) and Bruce and I tossed around first names – I think he said Renee – and it stuck.”

The idea of a Latina character wasn’t a political correctness mandate from the network, but a logical extension of the show’s themes, says Brian: “It wasn’t a demographic thing. It just seemed logical. We wanted a uniform cop because the concept of the show was that it was a crime show with a fantastic element; very much what The Batman started out as. ‘On Leather Wings’ was written as the pilot to stress the cops vs Batman / Batman as vigilante aspect. It was like making a 40s crime film – but modernized – and that means, for sure, we’ll need female police officers. The idea of an Hispanic character felt modern, urban – so in that sense we got our uniform cop and female character in one package. The more female characters the better, because we wanted more than just damsels in distress. Harley Quinn was another great female character who has become iconic.”

With her name and role as a Gotham City police officer established, series producer Bruce Timm developed a visual look for Renee. According to Brian, it took no time at all for the character to come to life from Timm’s pen: “I think he had sketches of her within hours of talking about her. He may have drawn her right there. He’s amazing that way.”

A look at initial work on the character (found, along with the writer’s bible selection below, at the treasure trove of a site called World’s Finest) shows that Timm designed Renee as more masculine than other female characters on Batman: The Animated Series. The loose jacket and wide slacks of her police uniform, combined with the short boyish haircut that she appears with in early model sheets makes her seem almost gender-neutral. Though the final design for the character cinched the uniform at the waist to more clearly accentuate her femininity, she still has more of a broad-shouldered self-assuredness than many of the show’s other female characters.

Much of the writers’ original intentions for the character never made it to the screen or the comics: the original writer’s bible description of Renee describes her as a cynical widow with an affinity for children. But other details defined in this initial depiction of the character have carried through to the present — her strong ties to Catholicism and the working class, her dry sense of humor, and her uneasy relationship with the Batman:

Like Bruce Wayne, Renee Montoya lost someone near her to Gotham’s criminal element. Her husband, also a poilce officer, was killed two years ago in the line of duty. She has continued on as a “legitimate” crime fighter. She grew up in Gotham’s Crime Alley and saw, first hand, what criminal lifestyles did to people. Young, tough and cynical, with a dry sense of humor, she holds a grudging respect for the Batman, but has mixed emotions about his vigilantism. Nevertheless, they often find themselves thrown together as allies, and Batman’s knowledge of her past causes him to be particularly fond of her.

She hates Bruce Wayne and everything he stands for. Inclined to spend off-duty time in volunteer work for St. Joan’s Catholic Church, she believes that Wayne is selfish and deaf to the cries of Gotham’s poor. She wishes she had kids and has a real soft spot for them, as well as a strong dedication to her family.

Despite her cynical facade, she has idealistically sworn herself to work within the confines of the law, and unfortunately finds herself at odds with Batman’s methods. She secretly dreads the day that she might be faced with the task of having to arrest the Batman.

An unnamed Renee made her first appearance in “Pretty Poison,” September 14, 1992, but her true debut came on September 18th, in the episode titled “P.O.V.” In the episode, Renee faces interrogation from internal affairs on the subject of a sting operation gone wrong. Her testimony differs from that of her fellow officers — future partner Harvey Bullock and a rookie named Wilkes — and, as none of them seem to be able to present the truth, the investigator strips them of their badges. Renee finds redemption while following clues on her own, finding the gangsters the sting operation failed to net, and encountering the mysterious Batman. Montoya was voiced in the episode by actress Ingrid Oliu.

“‘P.O.V.’ was one of the initial springboard ideas we had when we were coming up with episode ideas way before anything went into production,” Brian said. “We wanted to do a “Rashomon” story building on the myth of The Batman.”

Courtesy of Time Warner-owned AOL Video, enjoy Renee Montoya’s debut in “P.O.V.”:

The decision to give Renee the spotlight in “P.O.V.” was an easy one, says Brian: “She’s the most deserving: the perfect combination of youth, power and experience. The other two are extremes. Wilkes is a rookie, Bullock’s a thug – neither really have what it takes. She’s the balance point compared to them.”

Montoya appeared in ten more episodes of Batman: The Animated Series:

• “Vendetta” – October 5, 1992 – voiced by Ingrid Oliu
• “The Strange Secret of Bruce Wayne” – October 29, 1992 – voiced by Ingrid Oliu
• “Cat Scratch Fever” – November 5, 1992 – voiced by Ingrid Oliu
• “Harley and Ivy” – January 18, 1993 – voiced by Ingrid Oliu
• “The Man Who Killed Batman” – February 1, 1993 – voiced by Ingrid Oliu
• “Trial” – May 16, 1994 – voiced by Liane Schirmer
• “Make ‘Em Laugh” – November 5, 1994 – voiced by Liane Schirmer
• “Catwalk” – September 13, 1995 – voiced by Liane Schirmer
• “A Bullet for Bullock” – September 14, 1995 – voiced by Liane Schirmer
• “Batgirl Returns” – November 12, 1994 – voiced by Liane Schirmer

When the contract for Batman: The Animated Series ran out at Fox, Bruce Timm and company revamped the show for the New Batman/Superman Adventures, redesigning some characters, and adding a new Robin in Tim Drake. One of the characters receiving a redesign was Renee, though there was a reason — she’d been promoted to detective.

Renee appeared in two episodes of The New Batman Adventures, “Holiday Knights,” which featured a series of vignettes about Gotham City at Christmas — one showing Bullock and Montoya on a stakeout at a local shopping mall dressed as Santa and his elf, respectively, and “Over the Edge,” a literal nightmare of a story where the GCPD storm the Batcave and Batgirl dies. Liane Schirmer provided the voice of Renee in both episodes.

Renee also had a role in the Shockwave / Macromedia /Adobe Flash cartoon series on the Warner Bros. website called Gotham Girls. Renee debuts in the third season of the series, taking part in a whodunit that led to the debut of Batman / Mr. Freeze: Sub-Zero. The finale saw a broken-wristed Montoya fighting alongside Batgirl to save the life of Commissioner Jim Gordon. Renee’s voice in the series was provided by Adrienne Barbeau, who had also voiced Catwoman for Batman: The Animated Series.

Season three of Gotham Girls is still available on the Warner Bros. website.

Though Renee didn’t appear in any of the games that viewers could play as Gotham Girls loaded, she did make a cameo appearance in two screens of the Game Boy Advance game Batman: Chaos in Gotham.

Montoya also appeared in comics that were based on the animated series over the years. Many of these stories were comic versions of episodes, others featured Montoya working in supporting roles as a member of the GCPD. One notable exception, where Renee carried the spotlight, came in the mini-series Gotham Girls.

Writer Paul Storrie says that the Gotham Girls mini-series came indirectly as a result of the Flash series: “I was a fan of the web ‘toons, but came to them a bit late. Basically, I’d been using an old, slow computer when they first started appearing, so I only watched a couple. When I finally upgraded my machine, I checked out all the available episodes and really enjoyed them. At that time, I’d already done a couple projects for DC’s “Animated Series” titles (Batman Beyond and Justice League Adventures). It hit me, as I watched the Gotham Girls webisodes, that they’d be an excellent inspiration for a comic book series. What’s more, I was hoping that the series might find a wider audience by being based on a successful web ‘toon. So I wrote my Batman Beyond editor and pitched him the idea for the mini-series. He liked it, but was no longer editing the Batman Animated. He referred me to Joan Hilty, who had taken on that task. Joan thought the idea had merit and, after a bit of back and forth, I got the green light.”

Storrie was already a fan of the Montoya character, having first heard of her in an interview with Paul Dini and Bruce Timm about the animated series: “I remember reading an interview with, I believe, Paul Dini and Bruce Timm, about this Latina cop who was going to be partnered with Harvey Bullock and the description they gave just made her sound like an interesting character with lots of potential…When I started to look at doing the series about the ladies of Gotham City, I thought Renee deserved some time in the spotlight and it would be great to add in the perspective of a regular cop on the strange events that can take place in Gotham.”

In issue #4, “I Carry A Badge!,” we learn a little of the animated Montoya’s background — her parents were not happy that she decided to become a cop, thinking that prejudices against Latinos would lead to unhappiness. But Montoya stresses, in a conversation with Batgirl, that she chose to be a police officer to help change the system from the inside. Working together, Montoya and Batgirl try to take down the trio of Harley Quinn, Poison Ivy and Catwoman and recover a mysterious vial of chemicals.

Storrie holds the Montoya spotlight story in high regard: “Originally, my plan was to do a 4-issue mini, where each of the villains (Catwoman, Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn) and then Batgirl each had their own issue. Renee would be appearing throughout, but wouldn’t be featured in any particular issue. Then DC asked if I could expand the series to five issues and I was tremendously pleased with the opportunity to give Renee her own time to shine. Truth to tell, issue four is my favorite of the series. Not just because Renee is a great character, but because I’ve always been a fan of hardboiled private detective novels and it gave me a chance to dip my toes in those waters, using the first person narration from a tough as nails protagonist.”

Storrie still follows the character today, in her appearances in the mainstream DC Universe, and feels that the evolution of her character is consistent with her animated roots: “Renee has been written by a number of terrific writers who have done an excellent job of portraying her as a tough, smart, dedicated woman, with plenty of nuances to her personality. That’s the kind of rich character that’s a pleasure to write oneself. Although, as a Vic Sage fan, I was disappointed to see him die and pass on the mantle of The Question, Renee is probably the best character in the entire DCU to take up that mantle. As a good police detective, she is obviously devoted to the quest for answers. Maybe not in the same way that Vic Sage was, but then no one really follows the same path to the truth as anyone else.”

And over 15 years after helping co-create the character, Mitch Brian still keeps up with Renee today: “I think the issues of gender and sexuality that she’s brought to the fore are nothing short of thrilling. It’s one more way that comics can deal with serious, adult themes and make for deeper drama. And I’m all for strong female characters. As I mentioned, it’s like watching your daughter grow up. I started her out but she has had to find her own path. I’m proud of her and support her unconditionally.”

Tomorrow: Montoya makes the transition into the DCU!

Mitch Brian recently contributed to The Book of Lists: Horror, which will be released in September by Harper Collins. His monthly show on film genres can be heard on line or via podcast at http://www.kcur.org/uptodate.

Paul Storrie recently wrote an issue of Moonstone Books’ Twilight Crusade, called “Gabriel,” with art from Walter Figueroa and Chad Hunt that explores a perspective on the War between Heaven and Hell by the old soldier / angel of destruction Gabriel, who has grown weary of her role. His work can also be seen in recently published trade paperbacks Star Trek: Alien Spotlight, and Justice League Unlimited: Ties that Bind; and the forthcoming Worlds of Dungeons and Dragons #7 from Devil’s Due and William Tell: One Against the Empire from Lerner Books.

According to writer Greg Rucka, the covers to three issues of the Crime Bible series were crafted by artist John Van Fleet in homage to specific pulp novel covers, as provided by Rucka and editor Michael Siglain. Below are the original covers alongside their modern counterparts:

From Jesse Dumont’s “I Prefer Girls,” art by R.A. Maguire — 1963

From “Private Detective Stories v.11 #6″ — November 1942 — Artist Unknown

From “The Shadow v.49 #5 / #293, The Mask of Mephisto” — July 1, 1945 — Artist Unknown

The following interview consists of two parts — a detailed look at the first issue that was supposed to be the first in a series of five, but was not possible due to mine and Greg’s busy schedules; and a retrospective look back at the series after its completion, conducted in mid-June.

Greg was kind enough to give us a glimpse of his writing process, and an explanation of the elements that drove the series….

Eric Newsom: So we open the book, and our first taste of the book is an actual represented page of the Crime Bible. How’d you come up with this concept, and what was the thought behind it?

Greg Rucka: It was actually one of the first thoughts I had for the series. Mike Siglain called me up, uh…this would’ve been late May, I think…about the time that Black Adam and Four Horsemen had been given the go-ahead. And he said that DiDio was asking for 52 follow-up minis, pronto, and that he wanted a Crime Bible one (hence the series’ title), and that he figured it should feature the Question.

Now, understand, at this time NONE of us on 52 was in any position to really be taking on any kind of work at all. We were, to a man, fried beyond belief. Just toasted completely. And Siglain knew this. When he called, I kinda let out a groan, and he said, yeah, I know, but the thing is, Grant can’t do it — he was already at work on Final Crisis — and probably wouldn’t do it anyway. And if it’s Q, it really ought to be you. And I groaned again. And he went in for the kill.

You don’t write it, he said, they’ll have to get someone else.

So I told him that okay, yeah, I had a couple ideas, we could work something out. And before we were off the phone, we had the meta-textual idea already fleshed out.

Initially, we wanted the covers to look very much like “book” covers, as well, but from a marketing standpoint, that never got out of the blocks. But one of the first things I said to Mike was, if we’re not calling it “The Question: Fill-In-Subtitle-Here” and instead we’re calling it “The Crime Bible: Fill-In-Subtitle-Here”, then by definition, it needs to be as much about the actual Black Book as it is about the Question, etc. And he agreed. So we knew pretty early on that we were going to show the reader the actual Black Book, and that we wanted to do it in a new way.

I’m very fond of the opening pages, as far as it goes. It took us forever to settle on Lieber for the art (which was stupid of us, because he really should’ve been the first choice), but Trautmann had been working with me on Checkmate, and before that, he’d been, basically, the guy who made story bibles for Microsoft. He’s a master at these kinds of meta creations, and he was over at the house, and in literally, like, 30 minutes with Photoshop, had created the actual page for the bible. And my jaw hit the floor, I was like, okay, we HAVE to do it like that.

EN: From what I’ve seen, you seem to be pretty involved at every point in the production of Crime Bible. Are these sorts of formatting issues a normal concern for you, or is this a special case?

GR: No, I’ve never been this hands-on on a book before. Not even on something like Hikketeia did I get this involved. But the more Mike and I discussed the series, and what we wanted to do with it, the more I kinda realized that I had a vision for it, and I wanted to try to execute it to the best of my meager ability, given that I cannot draw to save my life. And I’ll tell you, right now, there’s a man in Spain who is cursing my name because I’m asking him to rework layouts on issue 5 yet again.

It’s been marginally successful thus far. The Page 1s are coming out almost exactly as I’d hoped. Some of the issues are executing better than others, but at this point, only 2 is completely locked down. 3 should be in by the end of this week, I think.

EN: We established in our second interview session that you were previously a renaissance lit. major, then a religion major — and I thought of this fact when I was reading the text for the opening page. What was the process like in writing this stilted, antiquated — I’ll say it, Biblical language?

GR: Possibly the hardest things in the whole series for me to write, actually. At least at the start. I ended up trying to find as many different versions of various religious texts as I could, just to see how the language worked.

Initially, the idea had been that the Page 1 in each issue would be from a different edition of the Black Book, ie, issue 1 would be from the Prophet’s Edition, issue 2 would be the Sana’a Codex, etc. But for reasons that have yet to become clear to anyone but myself, Siglain, and Trautmann, it became necessary to abandon that and unify the “style.” But I actually wrote versions with misspellings, with stylized 14th century syntax, like that. And I sent them to Siglain, and he came back and said, dude, this stuff is dense enough as it is, do you really want a version where you’re making it even harder to understand?

EN: Those versions will go in the Absolute Edition.

GR: An Absolute Edition might be getting a little ahead of ourselves, but it would be cool, when all’s said and done, to do a version that shows all the stuff that didn’t make the cut. There’s a lot of material existing only on my laptop right now.

EN: I know someone who has a website that would post that stuff if you were interested later. If it didn’t fit in the trade paperback, that is.

GR: Yeah, I think I know the guy you’re talking about. We’ll wait and see. Don’t want to take sales from DC!

EN: In this issue, we see the lesson, even the image, from the First Book of Blood made literal. Are there literal interpretations of everything on the page, either in this issue, or later on?

GR: The parallelism with the imagery is intentional. The rest of the “matching,” i.e., biblical text to story text, is much more allegorical/metaphorical. We don’t see anyone literally having their eye put out by Flay, for instance.

More to the point is the nature of the lesson, and Cain’s admonition to the Caitiff that, I think, is at the heart of the issue. It’s all well and good to practice deceit, but when you let yourself believe the lie, you’re no longer the master of the lesson, but its victim.

EN: Speaking of Flay, we start the story with he and the Order of the Stone. Beating people in burlap sacks. On what looks to be an abandoned cruise ship. A number of questions arise — Why start here, with the villain, for instance?

GR: Again, it goes to how Siglain and I originally conceived the series, that it was as much about the Black Book and the Dark Faith as it was about the Question striving to both understand and thwart them. And I wanted to establish that there was an entirely different element of the Dark Faith than we’d seen before. That’s one of the goals of the series, to establish the actual Religion of Crime as an organized force in the DCU, though one that isn’t always pulling in the same direction. I dug the idea that there were different “sects” in the religion, different manifestations and even interpretations of the worship.

But as for Flay and, in particular, the location, both are crucial to the story later. A lot of what’s said at the beginning of the issue has resonance throughout the series.

EN: Flay is a character of your creation?

GR: Yeah, Flay, the Order of the Stone, the Daughters of Lilith, all of that’s my fault.

EN: I see Flay as a sort of antithesis of Montoya’s other teacher, Richard Dragon — with opposing goals, but a number of similarities as well.

GR: Yeah, I can see that, though it wasn’t a conscious choice on my part. But, like Richard, he is another “master,” though what he’s mastered is entirely antithetical to what Richard would teach.

EN: But in a way, their teaching styles are similar. They both know, dealing with their student, that simply pointing out the lesson and saying, “Here it is,” won’t work. They use non-direct, somewhat obtuse ways to get their point across — Richard’s used a wheelchair. Flay uses, in this issue, a family turning murderous on itself.

GR: Well, pull the sheet back all the way, then. What was the Deceit being taught?

EN: Well, in the end, Flay rebukes Renee’s statement that she should and could have been more in control of what had happened.

GR: He does call her “liar” at the end. And if she actually believes she should have seen it, then she’s failed to master the lesson, if one draws from what Cain tells the Caitiff in the opening text.

But if she’s lying to herself, that’s not really using the lesson as the Dark Faith would teach it, is it?

EN: No, because that would be falling prey to deceit….

GR: Right. So if we’re asking has she mastered the lesson, the question (!?) is where was the deceit she practiced. This one, I hasten to add, is not a clear-case at all. The lessons in issue 2 and 4 are much clearer. The lessons in 1 and 3 are far more oblique.

And one can argue — or I hope one could argue, because it’s very much my hope that people can and will — that in almost every case, Renee hasn’t actually committed the sin in question. Stress on “almost every case.”

EN: That’s what I was thinking, especially…well, I don’t want to give too much away, but I’d agree on that point.

GR: Yeah, well, like I said, it’s all very calculated on my part. As I’ve said before in our previous conversations — or at least, as I think I’ve said before — I’m not a real fan of writing infallible heroes. I think that makes them boring. What I think makes a character heroic is their fallibility and their efforts to overcome it whilst doing whatever noble endeavor they may be pursuing.

This take, incidentally, has gotten me into trouble lately. The latest Kodiak book put a lot of noses out of joint for a similar reason, I think; a lot of folks believe what he does in that novel is ultimately indefensible.

But I kinda like that — I don’t want easy answers for the most part. More to the point, I like my stories messy, and like my gray areas to be vast, with the black and white zones narrow and treacherously easy to step outside of.

EN: Skipping back to the beginning…one of the things that I didn’t notice the first time…the name Stanton T. Carlyle. First, I’m curious as to how you go about naming your characters, and second, what’s the story behind this name?

GR: Uh…this is going to be kinda embarrassing, actually, especially since Doug Wolk had that nice write-up on the issue. I tend to name characters, primarily, for “sound.” Carlyle is based on an academic that I knew second-hand about 10 years ago, when my wife was at the U of O. Carlyle was envisioned very much to be the young, “hip” professor who still “gets” all of his students, and who is devoted to keeping up with pop-culture events, etc.

I wanted a name that sounded preppy, that sounded a little stilted, and that sounded self-important enough to justify writing a book debunking the Dark Faith. So I flapped around and started putting pieces together until I hit something that worked. The fact that there’s a Ditko-ref at all in the name is entirely accidental, but, I suppose, it goes to the whole lit. crit. school of it not mattering what the hell the author’s intent is, it’s the text that matters.

I pick names quite deliberately, attempting to reference something, perhaps, or otherwise to conjure a sense of character. And I like names that aren’t mundane — I’m not a fan of naming characters “Tom” unless I want a name that sounds, for lack of a better phrase, well-used and well-loved.

EN: So the Eric Stanton / Nightmare Alley / Thomas Carlyle all-in-one reference is a complete happy accident? If you were Nathaniel Hawthorne, academics would be fighting about this name in 20-page conference papers for years to come.

GR: Would it make you happier if I said it was entirely intentional?

EN: Nope. Not me. I hate arguing about Nathaniel Hawthorne.

GR: [laughs] Though I have to admit, I wish I’d actually seen Nightmare Alley.

EN: You should! It taught me the importance of knowing the difference between drinking alcohol and wood grain alcohol.

GR: That’s an important lesson to learn early.

EN: But speaking of academics — our chats always have such nice segues — the two villainous characters with the most face time in this issue are a bad-ass martial artist evil monk and a nerdy-looking professor. What’s the impetus behind showing two such disparate members of the Crime Religion?

GR: That disparity was precisely the point. I wanted to establish early on that not every member of the Dark Faith was going to smash someone’s head into a stone book and then serve them to the various under-bosses who came to dinner.

Carlyle is, very much, who he appears to be. Just like Flay is, pretty much, who he appears to be. Both follow the Dark Faith. Both follow it differently, but towards a unified end.

Hopefully, one of the things that’ll come out of the mini-series is the sense that just about anyone in the DCU could be a devotee of the Religion of Crime to some extent or another. That the mugger on the street corner and the accountant in the 38th floor office, they’re both praying to Cain at one point or another.

EN: That answered my next question: Are there only members with useful occupations or talents? We get an idea through these two how very different members could be, but could my mailman be a follower of Crime? My next door neighbor?

GR: Absolutely. I’d toyed with the idea of actually doing a story where the coven-leader was a suburban soccer mom.

The Dark Faith provides different things for different people, but ultimately, its appeal is in allowing a “justified” abandoning of morals. Some people do it all the time, they live it — that’s Flay, that’s the Order, their whole existence is in pursuit of the perfection that is Cain. It’s why they are, for the most part, aesthetics — Cain needed little to commit his sins.

Others turn to it for their own gain, which is entirely appropriate within the construct of the Dark Faith. I want a new car, a new house, a new wife, I’m going to use hook and crook to get it, and the Dark Faith provides the means and opportunity for it. Once I’ve got it, I’m done…until the next time I want something.

EN: Which, I think, still serves to mirror other religions. When do people generally pray? When they want/need something. The difference might be that the Crime Religion pays off with tangible results.

GR: Yes. Again, it’s an attempt to create something that’s very loosely — and I stress that it’s loosely — viable within the DCU. The fundamental problem with a nihilistic religion is that you’d have to be totally off your nut to pursue it.

The Dark Faith isn’t nihilistic, which, I think, was a misconception when it first was introduced. It’s a very materialistic religion — take what you can, be strong enough to keep it, and cheating isn’t just acceptable, it’s expected.

If the Dark Faith has an ulterior motive, it’s in eroding morality.

EN: This first issue is set in London…what was appealing about that locale for this story? Because it seems to me to set a perfect mood for the mini-series, and I can’t pinpoint exactly why.

GR: Well, the most pragmatic reason was to establish that the Religion of Crime was global — we’re in Chittagong on pages 2 and 3, then we jump to London, so we’ve just covered half the world. But it’s also London, city of mystery and intrigue. Jack the Ripper and Sweeney Todd. And it allowed me to show that Question wasn’t based in any one place; she was moving where the questions took her, where she could find the answers.

As far as that goes, and I noticed this on the message board at the site, Question is not a Gotham hero, and she does not, in my opinion, fall under the Bat Group. She stands outside, as Charlie did. As stated, she goes where her questions lead her, and if that’s to Gotham, fine; if that’s to Hub City, fine. If that’s to London, then she’s going to London.

There was one other reason to pick London, as well. It’s a real city, and a city that could be represented realistically, which was another, sub-textual way of trying to reinforce that the Dark Faith was pervasive and global. Starting in Metropolis, for instance, would have pretty much said, “it’s all hokum” from the start.

And yes, it’s a comic book about a woman who puts on a mask that hides her features, I know that. But trying to balance the “realism” with the “fantastic” is a game I play with myself all the time, and here, I thought it was important to try and provide as much verisimilitude as possible.

EN: I think that part of it too has to deal with — you talked about Jack the Ripper and Sweeney Todd — the element of timelessness that London has as a city that’s both modern and centuries old. And that mirrors that element of timelessness with the Crime Bible.

GR: That certainly helped. There were so many questions about the Religion of Crime going into this, not the least of which being, well, if it’s been around for so long, why hasn’t anyone in the DCU ever mentioned it before?

EN: Especially if my mailman is a member….

GR: You should get a P.O. Box. Might be safer.

There’s a certain nod-and-wink going on here, obviously, because we all know it’s a new concept, it’s something that Grant introduced. So there’s an inherent ret-con involved in the story, trying to establish that, yes, it’s new, but it’s also old, in the way that you can buy a copy of The Necronomicon that’s been published a week ago…but the book’s been around forever.

Which is part of the reason for Carlyle’s speech at the start of the book. How old is it? How can we discern what’s true and what isn’t? The biggest difference with the Black Book and, honestly, just about every other religion extant in our world, is that the Black Book is a living document; it’s being added to constantly. Nobody’s writing new books of the New Testament, or, if they are, the Pope sure isn’t approving them for distribution.

EN: I anticipate the answer to this will hearken back to what you’ve already said, regarding splitting the time between the Crime Bible and the Question, but many have noted what they feel is a minimal presence of Renee in this issue….What I think they’re actually feeling is the change in P.O.V. since the last time we saw her in 52.

GR: Yeah, I cut the narrative for this, for a variety of reasons. First, I don’t think the reader should get to be inside the Question’s head.

I think that was one of the wonderful things about what Denny did, and it served to force the reader to ask their own questions. And, frankly, the first-person narrative in 52 served two purposes: first, it was to establish Renee as a PI, using a traditional PI trope, i.e., “I was sitting in my office one day, when he walked in….”

But second, and more crucially, that first-person narrative of Renee’s was self-indulgent beyond belief. It was representative of her internal struggles, her despair, the frankly miserable (and often-times unlikable) state she was in. Well, guess what? It’s been 18 months or so since then. She’s got her shit together in a way she didn’t back in 52.

As for her presence in the issue, or lack thereof, as said, it’s issue 1. This issue establishes the structure for future issues, and it’ll become clearer what that is as those issues come out. But now that we’ve been introduced to the world and the Dark Faith, we can focus more on the Question, and her place and struggle in that context, as well as Flay’s.

EN: Was Peter Kürten a figure that you were familiar with and had filed away for future use, or did you research him for the series?

GR: I was familiar with Kürten before writing Crime Bible, yeah, from my days post-college when I was obsessively reading everything and anything about serial murders, profiling, and forensics.

And there’d been a twitch in my head or something that reminded me about him and his fascination with scissors. So it all came together. If I’d used the Book of Moriarty, I’d have had to come up with a way to push a character off the Reichenbach Falls, and that’d have meant moving the story to Switzerland, i think. So that wasn’t really a choice, y’know?

EN: So, since you brought it up — is the implication there that these two figures, one real (Kürten) and one fictional (Moriarty), are linked to the Crime Religion too? Or are they like Cain, figureheads for the cause?

GR: I think it’s safe to say that both have had an impact on the Religion of Crime. If the extrapolation is that Kürten’s crimes were Dark Faith inspired or otherwise tied to the religion, then that works in the context of the story.

As for Moriarty, well, he’s a character-by-association, at least, in the DCU, as Holmes has actually appeared in DC comics before. So the mind-bending comes when Carlyle cites Kürten as a “real” person, but consigns Moriarty to fiction in the same breath.

My take on that is that Holmes and his stories in the DCU have become legends; the factual information is too spotty for any one academic to be sure. They treat Holmes like Shakespeare.

EN: Christopher Marlowe was Sherlock Holmes!

GR: And Francis Drake was Zorro!

Uh…maybe not….

EN: So we see Flay following the Carlyle family around, lurking in shadows, and eventually giving Giselle orders at the book’s climax. Are Flay and the Order of the Stone a well-known faction of the Crime Religion?

GR: To some. In the same way that the Daughters of Lilith are known to some. Again, that mugger we were talking about, he probably has no idea of the depth and breadth of the Religion of Crime. Giselle is clearly in-the-know, so that when Flay meets her in the park, she knows who he is and what he represents. Whether Carlyle actually had met a member of the Order prior to issue 1, that’s unknown in the confines of the story.

Like all secret societies, there are “levels” of knowledge, of initiation and acceptance.

EN: That’s similar to how other…nameless secret societies…are run. The normal guy at the bottom of the pyra — nevermind.

GR: Shhh…they’re always watching.

EN: So the bigger question here is perhaps whether or not you have the whole organization mapped out for yourself….

GR: Yeah, I’ve got a big-ass document that’s constantly in revision detailing the Dark Faith, its structure, compiling all the scriptural quotes, etc. There’s even a schism in the church, but we don’t see that in this series.

EN: But only Grant Morrison has an actual copy of the actual Crime Bible….

GR: I think he has two, actually. The one he wrote, and the one that was…given to him.

EN: There was a point when I was reading the script where I was worried — I have a thing about violence against children, and I was glad to see that you had Renee stop Giselle in the nick of time.

GR: You and me both. And it was important that Renee-as-Question not fail “entirely.” The sinner, Carlyle, could die in a dramatic construct, but the innocent, the child, that would’ve been a loss, and I didn’t want her starting out in issue 1 with a tick mark in the loss column, y’know?

Though Siglain and I toyed with it at the start, we rejected it, obviously, and I think for all the right reasons, not the least of them being the one you cite — I’m not a fan of showing violence against children. There’s a place and a kind of story where it’s appropriate, but gratuitous cruelty has been rather liberally applied in comics of late, I think, and I wanted this depravity to be fairly specific in its application.

EN: You get the same result either way, I think — showing the depths of sin to which followers of the Dark Faith will sink — without actually going through with it.

GR: Yeah, and since that was the point, it wasn’t necessary to actually go through with it.

EN: And violence against children is a terrible thing, but having the attacker be the mother takes it a whole step further. Like I said, my guts were twisted when reading.

GR: Yeah, that’s the depravity to the nth degree. And that she’s gleeful at the thought of this “offering.” Ick.

EN: Can we address at all at this point the cause behind Flay’s intense interest in Renee?

GR: I think it’s there in the text, though it becomes clearer in issue 5. I’m not sure I want to give it away. Shard tells us all we need to know for now.

EN: We’ll leave it at that then.

GR: Probably a good place to stop. But I will add…no, actually, I won’t. Let’s see what this next week brings us, shall we? I think we might start seeing some further reactions to the issue. We can talk about it when we hit issue 2.

Alas, our discussion of issue 2 was not to be, as the holidays hit and schedules were packed to the brim with unavoidable conflicts. Thankfully, Greg was willing to sit down with us in early June to discuss the remainder of the series!

EN: The cover of issue #2 probably best illustrates the lesson contained inside — Lust. How do you address this subject as a writer? It seems as though, especially in comics, you would have to walk a fine line with both editorial and the readership.

GR: All of the covers were something Michael and I put a lot of thought into, before passing on the concept to John Van Fleet. We really wanted a pulp feel to each of the covers. I sent Michael something like a good 200 vintage pulp covers, novels, Strange Tales, like that.

For “Lust” there was an obvious sub-genre, the lesbian pulps. The covers to 2, 4, and 5 are actually directly inspired by actual vintage covers of one sort or another (for more on this please see this piece on Crime Bible cover inspiration). For #2, there were certain tropes to be found in the covers to the lesbian pulps — they invariably had one woman, normally “butch”, reaching for a scantily clad “innocent” woman, tempting her. So that’s what we were after, quite clearly.

But the concept of lust was one that I found murderously difficult to convey in 22 pages, especially given what else had to happen in the course of the story. And — and I am well-aware the field-day that people will have with me saying this — I’ve always felt that Renee’s fatal flaw was lust. Or, to explain it more fully…a lot of homosexuals, when they first come out, work to “make up for lost time.”

So…the whole issue, literally and figuratively, was one that we tried to approach with a light touch. In point of fact, Siglain and I held Jesus [Saiz] back so much that when the issue went before DiDio for approval, he actually came back and said it wasn’t racy enough. There was a whole series of color corrections done before the book went to press where a lot of Elicia’s clothes were “edited down.”

I mean, seriously, we’d sent Jesus all this reference, so he wouldn’t end up drawing “trashy lingerie,” and in the end, Elicia shows a lot more skin that we’d planned for at the start. The conflict was in trying convey sexiness and desire without resorting to trashiness and that sort-of standard comic Great Big Female Secondary Sexual Characteristics. But — and I realize I’m all over the map here — I really struggled on the issue, because I really wanted to try and convey that sense of pressure that lust commands, the sense of almost irrepressible need.

The only way I can think to describe it is the teenage first-time feeling, that sense of now dammit now! Even as I talk about it, I’m not sure that’s a clear concept, y’know?

And the length of the issue was a problem, too, because there was really only room enough for three major scenes with Elicia, and that’s not a lot of time to really convey that growing sense of desire. Am I making any sense at all, here?

EN: I think so. But like you said, it’s hard to talk about lust in concrete terms.

GR: Yeah. The key moment was Elicia telling Renee that “you never wanted me.” I’m still not sure the issue works, frankly. I really wanted the reader to understand the sense of desire, the need to surrender to it. If I could’ve added the sound effect of tearing clothes, I’d have done it.

And, of course, after Renee does have sex with Elicia, she’s immediately hit with the follow-up of lust, i.e., regret. She’s practically self-loathing. It was also important to me that all of this be conveyed as a universal thing, not a homosexual one, if that makes sense. I didn’t want anyone reading it and thinking, oh, well, Renee’s queer, of course she has no self-control, of course she regrets it after the fact. I’m talking in circles, I apologize.

EN: Well, I don’t want to get too personal here, but I could definitely identify with what Renee was going through. Not specifically in the brothel setting, I should add, but…yeah, it’s hard to put these things in concrete terms. I think most people will feel the sense of what you’re getting at though.

GR: See, that’s the thing. It’s universal, or practically so — we’ve all felt that primal drive, that moment when your hips start shifting without you meaning them too. That sweaty, fumbly, backseat of car, trembling hands need.

GR: Maybe we should move on to another question.

EN: Right!

GR: Either that or we should offer the reader a cigarette.

EN: I liked seeing the mention of the Barcelona House in this issue. We read about Montoya’s investigations there in the trans-dimensional journal.

GR: Yeah, see, continuity! I was also trying to further establish two things, there: First, that Renee had been chasing these leads for a while, that she knew of at least one other “convent.” And second, that the Dark Faith was global, that there were elements and strongholds to be found everywhere.

EN: Did the process of working on the journal help you flesh out the concepts of the Crime Religion for yourself, as well as the reader?

GR: Not so much, frankly. I’d been steadily building the thing in my head ever since running with the ball Grant had passed to me in 52. I’ve got, literally, hundreds of pages of notes about the religion. I’ve even written a “writer’s bible” that I keep revising.

EN: You should write them out in book/verse form.

GR: Trust me, if I had the time, I probably would. You can read, in the afterward of the hardcover, some notes on the journal, etc. And I talk a bit there about what I was thinking, etc.

EN: So we’re not over the Crime Religion after this series by a longshot it seems?

GR: No, the Dark Faith plays into Final Crisis — Grant uses it, of course — and it factors strongly into Revelation, as well.

EN: That’s great, because I think it’s a concept that could fuel hundreds of quality stories.

GR: Ideally it’ll continue to play in the DCU. I think Grant handed us all a wonderful toy to play with, and it’d be a shame not to use it, y’know? By the same token, though, I’d like it to maintain a sense of internal logic, if that makes sense. That each “book” of the crime bible be consistent, things like that. That the Daughters of Lilith continue being what they are, rather than, say, turning into a bunch of child-murdering cannibals, etc.

Hence the desire to present a writer’s bible.

EN: Though if there are disparate representations later, you could always call those “Reform Dark Faithers.”

GR: Wait until you encounter the Kane Heresy.

EN: Or “Southern Independent Dark Faithers.”

GR: “Give me that ol’ time Crime Religion, it’s good enough for me!”

EN: Ha!

GR: There actually is a schism in the “church,” but that won’t be seen for a while, yet.

EN: We’ll let that tantalizing teaser hang there then.

GR: Thank you.

EN: One of the subtle touches I liked in issue #2 is the fact that Abigail seems to be leading Renee to the men on display first, before Renee’s attention is drawn elsewhere.

GR: Yeah, that’s exactly what she’s doing. The assumption, logically enough, is that Renee’s straight. And Renee goes in willing to pretend that she is, until she sees Elicia.

The idea — and again, it’s hard to convey in a comic without defaulting, I think, to pure iconography/manga style, ie, stars and hearts in her eyes — is that she sees Elicia and is immediately struck by her.

EN: In the script you sent me, Elicia’s name was originally Elena. Would you like to explain the name change / give a shout out to the real Elicia?

GR: Yeah, the name was changed in honor of a woman, named Elicia, who used to work at Olympic Cards and Comics in Lacey, WA.

EN: Which is, if I might interject, a fantastic store…though I only saw it at its old location.

GR: Yeah, the new location — you have to see it the next time you’re out here. It was explained to me that she was a BIG Renee Montoya fan. But Elicia For Real is queer, and, I believe, has gone so far as to get a Renee as Question tattoo on an arm. So it was a simple change, made to make a fan smile.

GR: Hell, I used your name on the telegrams in the Montoya Journals. I’ll steal from everywhere, I’m not particular.

EN: It’s not every day that a fictional version of yourself gets to sleep with your favorite comic character.

GR: No, though it’s not really something you can put on a resumé, you know?

EN: So what is it about Elicia (the fictional Elicia) that Renee finds so hearts-shooting-from-the-eyes appealing? Is it just lust, or is there a sort of Robert DeNiro-Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver thing going on here too?

GR: Oh, I think it’s a couple of things. The first was that, initially, Renee was hit hard by her beauty. The idea was that Elicia, to Renee, was heart-breakingly pretty, just achingly so. Then they get along. They like each other. Not that they’re in love, but again, that primal connection, that lust element — they’re near each other, and the more time they spend together, the more they want each other.

That’s the other thing, is that it’s mutual, to a great extent. And then the third catalyst, so to speak, is Renee’s resistance. There’s sex all around, there’s indulgence all around, it’s perfectly permissible in the environment, but Renee keeps refusing. Anyone who’s ever been in that situation, faced with that kind of mutual desire, they know that ignoring it doesn’t make it go away; it makes it infinitely worse.

EN: Another touch I liked in this issue was the use of the regurgitant pill (and the fact that Saiz actually draws in the vomit stain on the next page). In this series we see Renee using investigation methods that she wouldn’t have been able to do as a member of the Gotham P.D. Is it a matter of developing new techniques, or do you see the skills of the vigilante crimefighter to be the next step up from police work?

GR: Oh, I think a lot of what Renee does is based on “WWCD”, y’know? What would Charlie do to get to the truth? So she enters the situation trying to maintain her cover, but also trying to give herself an out. She went to the brothel planning on getting into a room with one of the hosts/hostesses, and from there taking a look around. And she knew she’d need a good excuse to be left alone.

But she’s certainly evolved from her days on the GCPD. After all, she’s got the freedom the mask gives her, so all bets are kinda off.

EN: There’s an interesting parallel between the woman facing being sacrificed at the end of this book and the brothel being burned at the end. It seems as though Flay is willing to sacrifice everything to bring the Faceless to leadership.

GR: He is. There’re a couple of things to that, of course, though they may not have been clear in the text as much as in the sub-text. The first is that the Order of the Stone and the Daughters of Lilith do not like each other. Flay has the line about daughters “moaning on their backs” or something like that, and Abigail positively acts like she’ll need to fumigate her office after Flay visits. So Flay’s not really concerned with collateral damage to the Daughters.

But there’s also the fact that Flay is a zealot, he’s a true believer, and he’s going to bring Lilith’s prophesy regarding the Faceless to pass. He’s going to make it happen. That, he feels, is his place in the world, why he’s there.

EN: I thought there was a strong sense of Abigail not really being in on the plan.

GR: No, she’s not in on it at all. All she knows is that the head of the Order of the Stone showed up at her convent and said there was this person coming in, and she needed to be handled in this certain way. He didn’t say why. If he had, Abigail probably would’ve monkeyed with Renee more, just to undermine the Order.

There’s another sub-textual element at work, here, too, which didn’t come across in the series at all…which is that the Religion of Crime is without a head at the moment. There’s no High Madame. Mannheim vanished, and when he returned, he was no longer the Prophet. And Whisper A’Daire, the last High Madame, is missing presumed dead.

GR: There’s another project I’ve been working on, and actually, the timing was supposed to be that, in this other thing, you’d know about the High Madame “problem”, and witness the arrival of the new head of the Dark Faith.

But that got pushed WAAAAAAAAAAAAY back, so Crime Bible was kinda left in a vacuum.

EN: Onto issue #3?

GR: Sure!

EN: Cobblepot calls the Crime Religion “Gotham-come-lately.” This adds again to that paradoxical mystique we’ve talked about before — the question of: is it centuries old, or something new? It seems like it would be a hard balancing act to pull off and still have the concept be believable, but I think you do it well in this series.

GR: Yeah, it’s always fun trying to retrofit a new idea into established continuity. Still, I think the idea of this cult lurking below the surface for all these years works, in the DCU certainly.

Cobblepot is uniquely positioned to talk about the religion — the whole “really, what sort of name is that?” riff, for instance.

EN: He’s really grown to be one of my favorites in recent years.

GR: I’ve always loved Cobblepot as a character, frankly; he’s terribly hard to write, I think, and most folks write him off as a joke, but I like him. He is always his own worst enemy, I think.

EN: Tomorrow, we’ll be taking a look at the script to this issue alongside the original pencils and inks by Matthew Clark. I found it interesting to see how many of the specific details were from your scripts — like when Cobblepot pulls a Broomhandle Mauser, for instance. Clark also brought a lot to these pages too, though. I guess my question here is, how do you approach establishing the visuals of a page, and does that approach differ depending on the artist you’re working with?

GR: Working with Matthew is its own thing, for the record, because he’s one of my best friends, and he lives ten minutes from my house. So when I’m scripting for him, I know he and I will be working pretty closely on the final result.

But when I’m scripting anything, I tend to lay heavy on the details I think are important to character. I can’t draw, so I try, always, to write a script that explains, clearly as possible, what’s happening and why it’s important and what is important about it. Ideally, the result is that the artist can take the script and say, okay, I know what we need to accomplish here, and this idea works, but I’ve got a better way to do this thing, etc.

It’s such a collaborative process that I find myself constantly trying to balance conveying what I feel is vital to the story, while at the same time trying to allow the artist as much freedom as possible to accomplish our goals. So I tend to overscript, as far as that goes; I think that’s partially a fault of being trained, primarily, in prose. But I cut my teeth on the short story, and God is in the Details in the short, so I try to mark specific details when I think they’re needed.

The Mauser, for instance, is entirely character — but could you imagine Cobblepot with a .44 magnum? It wouldn’t work. Of course he’s got an antique, and one in perfect condition.

EN: I could not imagine that. I think the Mauser’s pretty perfect. Also, that he downplays it to Flay when, as you said, we know he has it for a reason.

GR: I like Cobblepot as a gentleman, or as someone trying desperately to be one. Always terribly polite, right until he has you killed, cut up, and melted in acid.

EN: What inspired the names of each edition of the Crime Bible? Sana’a is a city in Yemen? Fitzgerald is…F. Scott (or Zelda?)? In this issue, we’re dealing with the Bastard’s Folio.

GR: The whole idea of naming editions was taken from the Lovecraft mythos, the idea of differing “books of forbidden knowledge.” The Necronomicon (sp?) is always presented as having differing iterations, differing translations. Even real Bible historians denote differing authors, etc. So the naming convention was based on the concept that these different editions were marked in certain ways, each with a story of some sort behind them.

The Sana’a Edition, for instance, is the one that Charlie grabs in 52. The Fitzgerald is named for the translator. I went with Fitzgerald not so much because of F. Scott, much as I admire his work, but because the name had an authority to it, at least to my ear. The Bastard’s Folio is named after the person who printed it. The other named edition, I think, is the High Madame’s Binding, which is the complete pure text, kept in hiding for use by the High Madame alone. It has all the spells, all the prophesies, all the codes.

I don’t know what to add. I mean, I’ve spent way too much time thinking about this stuff. I toyed with the idea of having one of the editions printed in an ink that was a narcotic of some sort, things like that. And, of course, we wanted to set up the idea of the codes, so that readers who wanted to try their hand at it could fiddle with the text pieces at the start of each issue, trying to decode them.

Re: the Sana’a Edition. Where did Charlie grab it? In Yemen.

EN: Aha. I missed that one.

GR: Yeah, that one was pretty literal. There are other named editions out there, but only a handful. The thing that marks them as special, that earns them their “name”, is that they’re “true” texts, as opposed to edited or altered.

EN: This issue is the first of two homecomings we see during the series, with Renee visiting her old Gotham Central stomping grounds, the grave of one former partner, and having an intense stairwell conversation with another. Did you have any feelings of figuratively coming home yourself while writing these scenes?

GR: Huh. Interesting question. Yeah, I think I was very aware — as was Michael — that having Renee back in Gotham was something we needed to address.

Getting to write Central again, even in the most broad terms, was a delight, y’know. And the meeting with Gordon was fun for me, because I’ve always loved the character, and I liked the idea that he was, even after all that had happened, both fond of and paternal towards Renee. Writing Bullock was interesting. I like the character, but I’m not really fond of how he was brought back, ie, with no explanation. So putting him and Renee opposite each other, especially after all that’s happened to them respectively, was a moment that needed to be seen. I’d have let it run longer, but, again, there were space constraints.

I suspect they’ll run into each other again at some point. They’ve got a lot of ground to cover.

EN: Gordon leaves Montoya with an open invitation to re-join the ranks of the GCPD. Do you think she’d ever be able to go back to being a cop, after her experiences over this series and 52 (and the end of Gotham Central (oh, and the forthcoming Final Crisis: Revelation))?

GR: Hell no. Being a cop almost killed her. Despite the toll that chasing the Dark Faith has taken on her (and continues to take), what she tells Kate later in the issue is true — she’s the best she’s been in a long, long time. She’s clean, sober, healthy (relatively — not talking mental health). And on some level she’s content, because she has a purpose and a direction, and that was something that she’d most definitely lost at the end of Central.

There’s another element, too, actually. She can’t be the Question and be a cop; they’re incompatible. To be the Question, she has to follow her curiosity wherever it leads. As a cop, she simply cannot do that.

EN: Speaking of Kate, we see her here carrying a guitar case. We don’t really know too much about her yet, aside from what we’ve seen in a few issues of 52. Someone e-mailed me to see if I’d ask you: is the implication here that she’s a socialite-turned-musician?

GR: She is, in fact, a socialite-turned-musician. She plays a mean guitar.

EN: And this one’s from me: When Kate takes the Crime Bible edition from Cobblepot, there’s a tone of familiarity in the way she speaks to him. Is Kate well-known around Gotham at this point? Or is this just a part of the fact that Cobblepot seems to deal with everyone in Gotham at some time or another?

GR: It was more intended as Batwoman’s manner, rather than a hint at a prior encounter (though I did try to at least acknowledge the Iceberg lounge beat from Countdown, there).

EN: When Renee and Kate fight over the book, I’m reminded that there’s a history of violence between them that we also saw in 52. Is this just a comic book trope — that throwing punches is the way superheroes deal with things — or is this a recurring element of their relationship?

GR: A little of both, I think, though I hesitate to say anything that would imply either was physically abusive to the other. When they were together, after all, neither of them was wearing a mask. But so much of their relationship is defined by passion. But unlike in issue #2, where it’s lust, pure and simple, what’s going on between Kate and Renee is much more complicated.

They bring out each others’ passion, both towards each other, and towards the things around them. The thing I was reaching for — and you can almost see it in the issue, I think — is that they can be very good together. Their chemistry when their in the guy’s apartment, for instance, the banter and the ease, is another element of that.

But Kate’s fighting Renee for a very specific reason, here — she’s honestly trying to convince Renee to alter course, where the course is something that is scaring Kate a lot; she’s afraid for Renee. And I’d add, by the way, that the punches in 52 are thrown for very specific reasons — the first one, when they meet for the first time in so many years, was played both as a P.I. trope, and as a response to a pretty nasty dig by Renee. The Batwoman punch is very purpose-driven — Renee’s about to shoot somebody, and Batwoman don’t cotton to no killing.

EN: In the original script, the pages of the Crime Bible that Renee looks through on the train were blank. What was the impetus behind adding a message from Flay here?

GR: Looking at the final art, both Michael and I were afraid we were being too subtle. I’m still not sure it was the right decision to actually add the message, but it was important to me that the reader understand that Renee had been duped, that Flay was playing her all along. So all the conflict, the fight with Kate, the additional damage done to their relationship there…it was all for nothing.

EN: I think it works, because this is the only issue, if I’m remembering correctly, where Flay doesn’t show up at the end to reinforce the lesson learned. And so there’s still evidence of his hand at play.

GR: Yeah, that’s correct. And the series needed to keep “on point” so to speak.

EN: In the opening pages of issue #4, we see a personification of the “Red Right Hand” that Darkseid’s Bitch once sang about (according to the set list from the journal). Does Flay have any supernatural power over the officer in this scene, or is the madness purely psychological?

GR: Heh. Good catch. It’s entirely psychological. Flay’s power is simply his skill as a killer, and he’s an incredibly proficient one. The idea was, bluntly, that Flay had this man’s life in his hand. Quite literally could and would kill him. And just a capriciously as he slaughtered everyone else in the bar, he lets this man live. And, let’s face it, Hub City is full of people on the brink of madness.

EN: If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be Hub City!

GR: You got it!

EN: I like the presence of Tot in the scene at the lighthouse (an interesting symbol), especially that he and Renee aren’t buddy-buddy. Their relationship seems tenuous, but they’re here together to honor Charlie’s memory in a way.

GR: Very much so. Eventually, I’d like to have the opportunity to follow-up with Tot some more, and allow him his grief in a way that we haven’t been privy to thus far. And he really doesn’t know what to make of Renee, and Renee’s relationship with Charlie. As I’ve said before, there’s the question of whether or not Charlie was actually his son or not. So Tot’s got issues where Renee’s concerned.

EN: Where is this lighthouse that Charlie has left them? Will this be a base of operation for Renee in the future?

GR: That’s the idea. As to where it is, I’m still somewhat undecided, frankly. I was thinking somewhere in the Southern U.S., maybe the Carolinas or Louisiana.

EN: We certainly have a bunch of lighthouses in North Carolina. I can vouch.

GR: Yeah, that’s why I was considering it, frankly. And it puts it reasonably close to established DCU “hubs.” As for the symbolism of a lighthouse…entirely intentional. Of course Charlie would leave them a lighthouse.

EN: Speaking of the DCU, I think you once told me that trying to make the DCU timeline literal was an impossible task, but here you’ve sort of defined the distance between this and the original Question series by saying that Myra was recently elected for her third consecutive term. What were your thoughts behind this little mention?

GR: I wanted her to still be mayor, and time had to have passed. It was pretty much as simple as that. I also liked the idea that, not only had Myra stuck it out, but that she was still fighting the good fight in Hub City, despite everything that had happened in the DCU in the interim.

EN: It was good to see that she’s still there and possibly making progress, especially in light of what it seemed like she was sacrificing at the end of Denny’s series.

GR: That was important to me, to show that all of her sacrifices (and there have been so many), hadn’t been in vain. She’s always been truly heroic to me, especially the way Denny portrayed her, the way he detailed the obstacles she struggled again and again to overcome.

Issue 4 was very much pure homage to Denny and Denys, from the madness aspect to the appearances of Tot, Izzy, and Myra. We even tried to get some of Denys’ style in the art — the beat where Myra learns that Charlie has died was very much lifted from the way he and Denny would script key beats.

EN: That was my next question, actually: while the last issue was a homecoming for both you and Montoya, this issue is something different — you and Renee going to someone else’s home. How did it feel to go to Hub City for the first time?

GR: It’s funny, because I didn’t really think of it that way; I guess I’d been to Hub City a lot in my mind, if that makes sense. I’ve read and reread the Denny/Denys series so many times at this point that I feel I know the city as well as I know Gotham.

For obvious reasons, though, it was crucial that we take Renee into Charlie’s world, both as his epitaph, and as a service to continuity of character and story. She’s carrying his legacy; part of that legacy is Hub City, and all it entails. Of all the issues in the mini, this one has Charlie’s ghost most heavily upon it. I mean, how many times did the Question end up chasing someone on a rooftop?

EN: I just want to say that I liked the little chalkboard easter egg with the names of creators associated with the Question/Renee. Gives a nice bit of history in a book that, as you said, is already dealing with that subject.

GR: Yeah, we had fun with that.

EN: Here again in this issue, the lesson learned is debatable. Flay seems to be the real murderer here. What is it he’s trying to lead Renee to — an understanding of evil, or just inner confusion?

GR: Yeah, this is the weakest of his lessons, I think, and certainly the one she can defend most easily. But one of the things that, I think, a lot of people overlooked was Flay’s threat — and perhaps that was the lesson of murder; Flay creates a killer via murder; Flay forces Renee’s reckoning with the threat of murder.

In the end, though, his goal is straightforward enough — he wants her to face each lesson in turn. Whether she actually submits to it in the moment may be irrelevant; that she understand them and experience them is more to the point.

EN: I hadn’t thought of it that way — that unless she agrees, she’ll be partially responsible for his actions?

GR: That’s the implicit threat. He’ll go on killing and killing unless she agrees to his terms. Though, in 5, he as much admits it was an empty threat. That’s not to say that I think it was empty; if she hadn’t turned up, Flay certainly would’ve gone after every target he could’ve. Probably starting with her parents.

EN: Issue five — we return in this issue to the ship graveyards we first saw in the first issue. Where did you hear about this place? It seems a perfect place to set these final scenes.

GR: This was another Trautmann-ism, actually. When I was working on the second Perfect Dark novel, he’d suggested setting one of the action set-pieces in a similar locale, though it was in India, not Bangladesh.

I did some research, and it’s frankly fucking horrible. The work environ is awful. Children and old men slaving away on these beaches for pennies, doing work that literally kills people every day. Seemed like the perfect place for the Order of the Stone to have their temple.

EN: Is this supposed to be THE Red Rock we’re seeing here on the ship? Or is this a symbolic rock used as part of the ritual?

GR: No, it’s a symbolic rock. Actually, the knife that Flay pulls is supposed to be flint-napped (sp?) from the Red Rock. The rock in the hold is red only due to the blood spilled upon it. In the same way that the rock in the Bethesda “convent” is red for the same reason, rather than because it’s the original red rock.

EN: I was a little sad to see Flay die in the end, not because of the ramifications for Renee, but because I found him interesting as a character. Did you work up any sort of back story for him to explain how he came to be the zealot that he was?

GR: Some, yes, but only as much as I needed to make him work for the purposes of the story. It’s funny you mention it, though, because Michael had much the same comment, and we actually discussed — briefly — whether there was a way to accomplish our ending without killing him. But in the end I couldn’t see a way to do it.

I liked Flay as a pure zealot, as a true believer. Very doctrinal, very directed — a man who saw his purpose and his duty, and whose faith was unwavering. That look of incredulity on his face when Question turns away from him, refuses to kill him…that to me spoke volumes about the character, because that was his only moment of doubt, ever, in the series.

EN: Was the cliffhanger with which Crime Bible ends always the plan?

GR: Yeah, though I have to say, I never saw it as a cliffhanger, per se.

GR: I mean, I knew and recognized that we were ending in a place that practically demanded another story, more answers (ha!)…but in its way, I thought that we had provided a resolution to the initial question of the series. It was a terminus, but as such, it was also a launching point. Yet another example of being too damn subtle for my own good, I’m sure.

And, to be brutally frank, when Siglain and I were working on the series, we didn’t know where or when we’d get to use Question next, so we wanted to load the deck as much as we could, and leave in a place that kind of required another story.

EN: I think the point at which it became a cliffhanger for folks was when you didn’t re-up with DC, and for some reason, everyone assumed that you’d never write another DC comic ever again.

GR: Ah, see…I never thought of that, because my not re-upping had no bearing on whether I was going to do more stories for DC. It was simply an issue of needing to take a break to get some other projects up and running, and to get some fresh air after four years in harness.

When we meet up with Question in FCR, it’s clearly after the end of CB, and things have changed. And there’s a reference in, I think, issue 2, where she mentions obliquely that things haven’t been good. So there’s a story to be told there, as well. It was not, shall we say, Good Times for Renee.

EN: And that story will be Final Crisis: Revelation?

GR: Some of it, yes. The full story will come after, I suspect. We’re discussing what happens after FCR to Question.

GR: Grant has some interesting ideas, actually, so I suspect he and I will have a conversation in San Diego about it this year. And by conversation, I mean that Grant will open his brain and let a half dozen ideas tumble out, and then expect me to understand each of them. If I’m lucky, I’ll get, maybe, one of them.

EN: Any final thoughts on Crime Bible before we get to FC:R? Do you consider the project (the series, the journal, the code, the whole nine yards….) a success?

GR: Well, not from a commercial stand point, no. I think we were hobbled by a horrible title, and a complete and utter lack of promotion, frankly. From an artistic standpoint, and a storytelling one, yes, absolutely. I think it’s one of the most ambitious and complex stories I’ve done for DC, and I think we managed to pull it off.

And I am, still, very proud of it. And I think that, once it’s out in trade, more people will find it, and hopefully, they’ll like what we did.

EN: Well, we’ll be doing our best at the site to encourage folks to buy it!

GR: It’d be nice. The worst thing, frankly, was feeling that we’d busted our humps on this thing, and nobody was reading it. That’s frustrating, plain and simple. Not to sound too petulant, or anything.

EN: I think it will hold up really well — might even work better — in the hardcover, so hopefully you’ll find some new readers for there.

GR: I think reading it as a whole will help, yeah. I don’t know about the hardcover, but the softcover will certainly get a few people to pick it up who didn’t before.

The hardcover edition of Crime Bible came out to the direct market on June 12, and to the general market on June 24. Buy a copy for yourself today!

In honor of the wide-release of the hardcover The Question: The Five Books of Blood by Greg Rucka and accomplices, we’re presenting a week of (long overdue) content related to the new Question, Renee Montoya. Stay tuned, as we’ll be uploading new content every day!

MONDAY, June 23 –

• A History of Renee Montoya – Part I: Secret Origins
• Crime Bible Wrap-Up Interview with Greg Rucka
• Crime Bible Cover Inspiration

TUESDAY, June 24 –

• A History of Renee Montoya – Part II: From Screen to Page
• Crime Bible #3 From Script to Page with Matthew Clark
• Face to No-Face with Costumer Jessica Smith

WEDNESDAY, June 25 –

• A History of Renee – Part III: On the beat
• The Question of Gender and Sexuality with Scott Anderson, Joe Palmer and Amy Reads

THURSDAY, June 26 –

• A History of Renee Montoya – Part IV: Losing Face
• Steve Lieber reveals technique behind Crime Bible engravings
• Behind the Scenes of the Montoya Journal with Eric Trautmann
• Nick “Holiday” Hartz breaks the Crime Bible code
• Becoming Darkseid’s Bitch

FRIDAY, June 27 –

• The (Not Quite) Complete Renee Montoyagraphy
• Final Crisis: Revelation Lightning Round with Greg Rucka
• Final Crisis: Revelation Talk with Philip Tan

Just a reminder — the hardcover edition of the Crime Bible comes out today.

The brain-weary owner of this site could’ve used the reminder awhile back. Everyone stay tuned for our Renee Montoya-themed week, which will take place during the week when the hardcover hits the GENERAL market, June 23-27th.

For those needing assistance with today’s New York Times crossword puzzle, specifically this clue:

“[Blank] Montoya, DC Comics heroine known as the Question.”

The answer: Renee.

From Comic Book Resources:

Rucka confirmed both The Spectre and The Question figure into Morrison’s “Final Crisis” but couldn’t share many details on that front. The Question was already seen in #1. “The Question is actually very prominent in ‘Final Crisis.’ Grant’s using her pretty extensively,” Rucka teased. “Geoff [Johns] and I have talked about how to use The Spectre following this, There are some plans in development. I think both The Question and The Spectre come out of all the ‘Final Crisis’ stuff in very strong position as far as character visibility goes.”