Batwoman: Elegy Balances Surreal Suspense, Sexual Politics
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DC Comics’ high-profile lesbian superhero lands her first eye-popping hardcover with Batwoman: Elegy, out Wednesday. But can she shoot straight? You bet your Bat-ass she can.
Kate Kane, aka Batwoman, is by no means DC’s first openly gay character. But unlike the flamboyant Extraño or the seldom-used Pied Piper, she is one of DC’s roughest, toughest regulars undergoing a serious reboot. And she’s off to a great start with the literary-minded mayhem of Batwoman: Elegy, which collects issues No. 854 to 860 of Detective Comics and features a foreword from political geek Rachel Maddow.
Smartly written by Greg Rucka with sublime art from J.H. Williams, who is also writing and drawing Batwoman’s ongoing series starting in July, the new hardcover is a promising, powerful and often psychedelic phenomenon in a sexualized superhero landscape dominated by men in tights.
A rebooted, lesbian Batwoman takes on a madwoman named Alice in the psychedelic Elegy, out Wednesday.
Images courtesy DC Comics
The military-bred Kate Kane goes through a few other fashion signifiers before donning the cowl in Batwoman: Elegy, which is mostly driven by the back story. Kane’s tragic metamorphosis from dress-wearing Army brat to masked vigilante is communicated through standard-issue Marines wear, punkabilly tanks and tattoos, and other outwardly iconic gear. She even pisses off her rich stepmother by showing up to a formal event wearing a tuxedo and a ton of eyeliner.
Batwoman: Elegy leans heavily on these appearances to hammer out Kane’s sexuality, which is accentuated by appearances from the various women in her life. Her one-time girlfriend, policewoman and latest inhabitant of The Question’ mythos Renee Montoya, complains in Batwoman: Elegy that Kane dresses like a slut. Montoya’s relationship with Kane in the stellar series 52 artfully rebooted Batwoman as a lesbian for the new millennium.
But the most arresting femme fatale of Batwoman: Elegy is deranged villain Alice, who evokes Batman’s nemesis Joker while dishing out memorable lines from Lewis Carroll’s illogical fantasy classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Alice appears to be a once-familiar presence from Kane’s unwinding past. We won’t spoil it here for the late adopters, but it’s pretty clear that the spooky Alice — like the Joker before her — is primed to become both Batwoman’s recurring nemesis and her externalized dark side.
What we can tell you is that Rucka and Williams have packed in enough kinetic ultraviolence and murderous backstory to satisfy readers who want their sex and gore mixed in copious quantities. From Alice’s lyrical freak-outs and death-cult disciples to dark-arts showdowns featuring werewolves and other supernatural monstrosities, Batwoman: Elegy unfurls the gay iteration of the superhero who first appeared in the ’50s to disprove Batman’s alleged homosexuality with brutally surreal hypnosis.
By the time its jumbled narrative strands are separated and secured, Batwoman: Elegy‘s marriage of suspense and sacrifice is both a hard-hitting hardcover debut and a skilled meditation on sex and identity, secret and otherwise.
Its worst characteristic is that it feels too short, that it leaves too much out, which is terrific testimony to its brilliant execution. And yes, its topical sexuality might rankle those who just want their female supers to shut up and stick out their massive tits.
But those readers are best left behind, to be replaced by others who readily acknowledge that comics are blockbuster business for demographics that are growing increasingly complex, diverse and demanding as the years pass. In a perfect world, openly gay superheroes shouldn’t be a big deal. But we don’t live in that world, and neither does Kate Kane.
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