Written by John Ridley
Art by Giuseppe Camuncoli
Published by DC Comics
I hadn’t thought much about Renee Montoya as a comic book character in a long, long time.
As a Batman fan in the 1990s, I remember watching the uniformed officer created for Batman: The Animated Series as a tiny bit of Latinx representation in kids’ cartoons.
And then I saw her move into the comics themselves as a strong-willed, honest cop in the Gotham City Police Department’s Major Crimes Unit.
I’m sure one time there was a pin-up drawing from 12-year-old me of Batman’s helpers standing on Gotham’s streets, the Bat-Signal overhead: Tim Drake Robin, Alfred Pennyworth, Jim Gordon, Harvey Bullock, and Renee Montoya. I know it would have been on copy paper my mom brought from her office job, and chances as I was still inking with ballpoint pens.
By 1998 or so, I dropped out of the Bat-books just before the Cataclysm and No Man’s Land storylines. Gotham was rocked with an earthquake and cut off from the federal government. (I’ve written it before: ’90s comics were wild.)
But I jumped back into comic book Batman in 2002 with Gotham Central, which ran for 40 issues through 2006. Written by young guns Ed Brubaker and Greg Rucka – little did I know they would become two of comics’ best writers of all time – and initially drawn by Michael Lark (!), the series put NYPD Blue cop drama into Batman’s world via the vaunted MCU, who handled Batman’s rogues gallery.
This is where Renee Montoya truly became Renee Montoya, to me and likely most other Batman readers.
John Ridley’s fourth entry into The Other History of the DC Universe gives the floor to Montoya and largely operates from that history. Book four’s title reflects this explicitly, taking place from 1992 to 2007.
In that decade and a half of the character’s publication history, Montoya had gone from being an officer to detective to MCU, to off the force and becoming The Question.
And now Montoya gives her memoir account of that time.
In queer literature, you can read much about closeting and disclosure, and attendant themes of duality, masking.
Furthermore, the psyche that develops out of walking a tightrope – for safety and social approval – lest your truth is revealed, family and community turn on you, and your world falls apart. You can read about the LGBTQ communities and the marginalization that can manifest in compulsive behaviors – sex, alcohol, drugs, etc.
Ridley filters much of this into Montoya’s story.
Here, Montoya as someone always caught in the middle and trying to walk the line in the space between the top and bottom, good and evil, right and wrong, lawful and criminal, even law and justice. If not to be good, then to avoid being the worst.
Montoya felt that way as the child of undocumented Dominican immigrants who were able to start a neighborhood bodega (corner store, papi store, mom-and-pop store, what have you) and provide for their two children.
She came to understand Gotham itself in the same fashion, as a place built by the poor for the whims of the moneyed elite. Montoya notes that such rapacious greed somehow filtered down into the especially depraved criminality that gripped the city from its past to today’s psychopaths such as Victor Zsasz, Hugo Strange, Scarecrow and Joker.
She felt that way about keeping those feelings about other girls in her mind and not in deed, as a way to bargain her Catholic soul out of hell. (I remember being taught about sublimation in theology class at my Catholic high school.)
She felt that when, as a teen, she knew she was gay and closeted herself so deep that faking attraction to boys and dating them became second nature. And she did the same when she aped the ways of her racist, sexist, homophobic brothers in blue once she joined the force.
Part of Montoya’s story is about the struggles that face cops who also belong to underrepresented or marginalized peoples.
Montoya lives at the intersection of Latinx, female and gay. Her words echo that of many officers of color who talk about the necessity of police growing up in places with lots of crime and violence, yet also feeling conflicted about the systemically oppressive nature of police departments as a whole and Black and Latinx people’s justifiable disdain of police.
I love Giuseppe Camuncoli and Andrea Cucchi’s art under this section of text. It’s a TV appliance store window – emblematic of looting during the Los Angeles riots after the cops who beat Rodney King were acquitted. One TV shows Murtaugh and Riggs from Lethal Weapon; another has video from King’s assault; another of Ice-T in his “Cop Killer” era with his metal band Body Count; another of Chuck D and Public Enemy.
There’s so much more that Montoya gets into: Jim Gordon, Harvey Bullock, Batman and his Bat clan, Kate Kane both before Batwoman and after.
Montoya sees Batman as an interloper who disregards due process and procedure; who sees Gotham as a raw, lawless heap that only he can control like a gang boss; and thinks of him as a lowlife nobody who puts on the suit to feel big.
It never crosses her mind that Batman could be someone like Bruce Wayne – where else is Batman getting a car, plane and a boat — even though she knows Kate Kane is Batwoman. And it’s odd that, even once she becomes a mask herself and appreciates the queerness of it all in bending “the rules” into something new and pesonal, Montoya can’t see the Bat as something just as queer.
She sees that in Two-Face.
Gotham Central was where I first read about Montoya as a queer woman. Had I read any queer characters in mainstream comics at that point? Probably not, outside of DC’s Vertigo books and Camelot 3000.
But Gotham Central also is where, in issues #6-10 through the award-winning arc “Half A Life,” Montoya was outed at work as gay and kidnapped as a plot by Two-Face.
Those were affecting issues with Montoya at the center of a coming-out story where she juggles a truly good relationship with her girlfriend, nuanced family rejection, and workplace harassment. And that’s all running parallel to Two-Face’s obsession with Montoya that read as allegory to the violence lesbians face from abusive straight men and patriarchy in general.
Yet in this story, we see Montoya go from despising him as a criminal and monster, to respecting and admiring his hopeful actions of community protection/building and survivalist brutality during the No Man’s Land era, to abusing her in “Half A Life” and nearly killing him, to finding some kind of peace with him.
I will say, this part of the story, in which Montoya, now The Question, empathizes with her abuser, is hard for me to swallow in our real world where abusive men harm women. It didn’t matter to me how they did connect, human to human, during No Man’s Land. Reading the words “love it its own kind of crime” and Montoya comparing Two-Face’s abuse to her own addiction-driven, neglectful mistreatment of her girlfriend Daria just feels off, if not wrong.
Ridley expertly depicts Montoya’s relationship to Two-Face in a way that mirrors Batman’s own relationship with the villain. Just as he still sees his friend Harvey Dent in there and hopes for his rehabilitation, Montoya remembers the good Two-Face was capable of before.
It may work, on some level. It still feels squicky for me. It’s like the avenging angel kind of post-abuse storyline that tries to turn left into something approaching restorative justice.
That section is one of the ways in which Ridley attempts to steer into the prior problematic depictions of these marginalized characters, and sometimes those stories can’t be recontextualized.
It’s a disappointing piece in what remains a strong work, amid Montoya’s path to full self-actualization.
She finds her truest self in The Question’s faceless mask and boundless philosophy that seeks to obliterate that tightrope of a binary Montoya had walked her whole life.
A GCPD-centered HBO Max show has been announced that will take place in the world of the upcoming The Batman movie by Matt Reeves starring Robert Pattinson. If Gotham Central’s themes and storylines find their way into that show and another version of Renee Montoya appears, I hope they can break a new path.
Ridley’s account is a solid place to start.
