Rating: ***

The first issue of the new Detective Comics featuring Batwoman as the lead character was very good.  I was not expecting to like it, but I was very surprised at how good it turned out.  Unfortunately, the second issue did not thrill me as much the first one did.  This issue wasn’t bad, in fact it was pretty good.  I just didn’t enjoy it as much as I did the last one. 

In the last issue we saw Batwoman was looking to find out who was the new leader of the Religion of Crime (ROC).  She discovered that the new leader was a woman who looks like a Goth version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice.  The cliffhanger for the last issue had Batwoman confronting Alice and shooting her.  We weren’t sure if the gun was a real gun or not and I thought that if it was, it would be a cool twist to the Batman universe to have one of Bruce’s “followers” use a gun.  It would have been very cool if DC went this route and it would have added to the story of Dick Grayson now being Batman, but DC did not go in this direction as the gun that Batwoman used was not a real gun.  It was a gun that shoots pepper spray bullets. 

Batwoman takes Alice away from her minions and uses something to dilute the effects of the pepper spray.  Batwoman wants to know what the ROC wants with her.  In a very cool scene, artist J.H. Williams III does something I don’t think I’ve ever seen before in a comic.  He presents the POV of the story from the inside of Alice’s mouth.  There we see her fiddling around with a razor blade that she has in the inside of her mouth and then bites down on it and uses it as a knife to slash Batwoman in the face.  Very cool.  My hat is off to Mr. Williams on his work on this issue.  The way he tells the story written by Greg Rucka is very different.  It kind of reminds me of the work I saw Tony Harris do on the Starman title in the 90s.

The blade is poisoned and it causes Batwoman to begin hallucinating.  Here is where the story got more interesting for me.  First in a nod to the previous issue, Dick said to Batwoman that she should cut her hair because all it would take would be one hair pull from a bad guy and she’d be finished.  Well we saw that the hair was merely a wig and Alice discovers this as well as she decides to grab Batwoman by the hair as she escapes, but come up empty.  Batwoman jumps off the tower where they were fighting and in a cool scene which looked more like Batman Beyond, we see Batwoman take flight as her cape becomes a glider and she looks very similar to Terry McGinnis from Batman Beyond.

After she lands, Batwoman, Kate, begins hallucinating about her mother.  The hallucinations are shown as ghostly images around her and show armed men gunning a man down as he steps out of a car.  The men then grab a woman who seems to be Kate’s mother and put a bag over her head as a young Kate is dragged away.  We then flash to reality and Kate’s father realizes she’s in trouble and races to the scene thanks to a GPS.  The ROC arrive as Kate’s father comes to help.  We have a stand off between the two and then out of the shadows comes a bunch of monsters straight out of B-horror flick.  We end there.

The back up story of The Question continues with Renee Montoya taking on the men who kidnapped the girl in the previous issue.  She beats them and gets the name of a company as clue to the case.  There she’s ambushed and knocked out.  As I said before in my last review, it’s a story that does nothing for me.  I would rather have seen Renee take on a super-villain. 

So the Batwoman storyline was okay.  I’m very interested in finding out more of Kate’s past, but as for the ROC and Alice, I like the look, but the character of Alice didn’t grab me.  I saw somewhere that things may change for a while in Detective Comics with The Question becoming the featured character and Batwoman becoming the back up.  No thank you.  I could care less about Renee Montoya as The Question.  I may drop the title if they go this route. 

So for now, I’m sticking with this book as I’m interested in the character development of Batwoman.  We’ll see if Greg Rucka can keep my interest.