scans_daily

There are a thousand tales in Gotham City, this is only one of them...

It's just after the war, and Jim Gordon (former cop, former husband, current drunk) is on the run from an urban legend. The "Batman", like the rest of the city, suspects Jim of murdering a girl he'd been hired to protect, and pursues him to bring him to justice...

Jim drunkenly stumbles home, pausing for a moment to muse about the case that got him laughed off the force: the disappearance of Judge Pitt. It's a combination of this and shellshock from the War that lead to the break up of his marriage and subsequent boozing.

Once home, a mysterious woman in red appears to offer him a job. Only she isn't really that mysterious as she's his ex, a nightclub owner by the name of Selina Kyle. She wants to hire him to act as a bodyguard to a young friend of her's, which he grudgingly excepts because he needs the money, though he still seems bitter that she'd left him for "the millionaire".

Later he arrives at her club, where he has a brief run-in with some gangsters working for the local Mr Zucco (unaffiliated with the Fire Nation prince with the similar sounding name). Jim chides Selina for having guys like that wandering around her club, but she dismisses it as an occupational hazard of being in her line of business. Anyways, she introduces him to his client...

Unsurprisingly deciding to drink while on a bodyguarding job goes less than well, and the next thing Jim knows he's waking up on the shore with the body of the woman beside him. Whoops. Luckily Assistant District Attorney Harvey Dent is a friend of Jim's the old days, so he's willing to at least pay attention to his claims that he might have been drugged after that one drink. Dent muses that since the woman appeared to know Mayor DeHaven somehow, maybe there's some way that he can tie her into the case he's trying to bring together against him.

It turns out that Dent has been trying to build a case against the... blindingly obviously corrupt mayor for some time, but has been blocked at every turn due to DeHaven's seemingly endless series of connections. As Jim leaves the DA's build he notices Harvey meeting up with one of DeHaven's employers, a man called Napier, who appears to be an informant supplying Dent with information. Dent basically threatens Napier due to the relative uselessness of the information he's passing over, and demands that he finds proof linking the Mayor to Boss Zucco, despite Napier's pleas that that'll probably result in him being murdered.

Later, Jim returns to his office, where he has a surprise guest.

Batman points out that he was last seen drinking while having an arguement with the dead woman, so can he honestly say that he didn't murder the woman while he was wasted. Jim says that he has to believe that he didn't do it as it's the only thing that he has left, and Batman admits that if Jim did murder the woman, how did he end up in the ocean as well? Claiming that Jim doesn't appear to be suicidal at this point, as he still has pictures of his daughter on his desk (doesn't seem to put forward the idea that Jim pushed her overboard and drunkenly fell off the boat too).

Shortly after Batman leaves, Jim is kind of kidnapped by some of Zucco's men, who take him to their boss' house and begin beating him up in order to find out who murdered the woman. Zucco calls them off so he can talk to Jim in private, and the gangster says that he feels that either Jim murdered the woman or knows who did, and then seems annoyed by Jim's insistance that he doesn't remember what happened.

Zucco then reveals the reason why he cares so much about the girl, that she was apparently "the love of his life" and how he'd been taking care of her for the past three years before she disappeared six months ago. He then tells Jim he'll let him off the hook if he can find the woman's diary, which Jim (realising that this information could save his life) lies that he knows its location.

Shortly afterwards Jim escapes, with Batman (who apparently had decided to follow Jim) helping him escape. He then quickly goes to Selina to ask about the diary etc.

Jim stops off at his wife's house to hide, where he apologises for wrecking their marriage and takes time to watch Barbara sleep, as he hasn't seen her in ages. On the way out though, Jim is immediately picked up by DeHaven's men, who take him to see the Mayor. The mayor tells Jim to go back to his barstool and keep his nose out of his business, and casually threatens Jim's family to get the message to stick.

This, naturally, causes Jim to flip out, causing DeHaven to tell Jim to stop having these violent outbursts. Gordon says that he'd love to stay out of DeHaven's affairs, but Zucco keeps dragging him back into them. This causes the Mayor to casually tell Napier to talk to Zucco and clear Jim's name with him. After the assistant bustles off, DeHaven asks like the matter's all settled, saying that now he's got Zucco off Gordon's back he now has to stay out of the Mayor's business in exchange. Jim agrees that he guesses that this does make things square between them, so he'll give the Mayor a few tips, where he promptly tells him that Napier is working with Dent and that Zucco is taking the murder personally. He probably meant it as a way of threatening DeHaven, but the guy promptly orders the death of Napier and once Jim's left, pays a fake witness to say they saw Jim strangling the woman on the boat.

Now on the run, Jim rings up Harvey and fills him in on what's going on, before telling Selina's what's going on, and she gives him the location of Rachel's diary, which he finds and discovers what the heck is going on.

Wait, why did they feel the need to dye Napier's hair green? Anyway, Batman, now brought up to speed on what's going on rushes with Jim to his ex-wife's house, where they find one of Barbara's ponytails stuck to a wall with a knife, along with a Joker card with Selina's club's name on it. Gordon remembers that DeHaven is having a fundraiser at the club tonight, so Napier must be trying to get rid of all of his enemies at once.

They rush from there to the club, where Napier's already gone a rampage, killing several of Dehaven and Zucco's men while hanging Babs and younger Babs above the stage. Batman stays he'll deal with "the crazy one" while Jim saves his family. This results in a moment that would have been tremendously satisfying to the regular universe Jim,

So that was a, trunkated, summary of Gotham Noir. What did I think of it as a whole? There were a lot of good ideas there, and it's interesting seeing the various characters being played in a more straight noir fashion, despite the cliches that come with the genre. That said, cliches aren't necessarily bad, and hear they at least attempted to explain why the PI protagonist is a cynical drunk instead of assuming that he's a cynical drunk because he's a PI, if that makes sense.

The depiction of Batman is kind of puzzling. On the one hand, it seems to be playing the character like he might appear in the eyes of a criminal who didn't exist in a world where superheroes were commonplace, but on the other he also appears to either be a hallucination on the part of Jim (which doesn't make sense, as he interacts with people such as Zucco's men by beating them up) or as an actually spectral being of some kind. Notice how he appears to be around at the same time as Bruce Wayne, for example. It's all very perplexing.

The handling of Napier being turned into a Joker-ish character came off less well, as it appeared that they had to get him into the story somewhere, even if the way it happened didn't make much sense (why paint his hair green?!? How did he go from being, basically, an accountant to being a guy who can fire a tommygun one-handed?!?). The idea of a "straight" version of the Joker was better done, in my opinion, in the other Noir Elseworld that DC did, Nine Lives by Dean Motter and Michael Lark, which I'll also try to post in the future if possible.