Previously on Gotham Central:

While investigating a lead on a recent kidnapping, Gotham City Police Department Detectives Fields and Driver coincidentally bump into Mr. Freeze, who executes Fields and gets away. Detectives Renee Montoya and Crispus Allen launch a manhunt to find freeze, with Driver requesting that the GCPD hold off on calling in Batman for as long as possible — it was a cop who was killed, it should be the cops who get justice.

Danny, the henchman working with Mr. Freeze, is found dead (frozen, of course) in an empty truck. The cops figure that Mr. Freeze was hauling something and then killed Danny when he wasn’t needed anymore. Driver hitches a ride with the coroner so he can be there with Fields’ widow, Nora*, when she identifies what’s left of his body.

This sequence is pretty grim, with the “camera” hanging on Driver and Nora as they look at Fields’ remains without ever showing the (presumably) gruesome details. A recurring thread in this issue and the last one is that a Batman villain like Mr. Freeze would be really scary in real life, and the freeze gun’s impact on a human body would be horrific. One of the guys working in the morgue mentions that they have to keep Fields’ remains on ice, because otherwise they start melting — not thawing, but melting. Which is gross.

Freeze is a cartoony villain, having never made the transition to Christopher Nolan’s serious Batman movies, and Gotham Central indicates that one reason for that could be that he’s too scary.

Meanwhile, the other GCPD detectives canvas the city, looking for leads on Mr. Freeze’s whereabouts. They’re racing against the clock, both because they want to catch him before Batman does and because they know Freeze will want to do whatever he’s planning before Batman comes out to patrol, and artist Michael Lark underlines this by tucking a little clock into the corner of a handful of panels to indicate that time is passing. It’s a neat little gimmick that wouldn’t really work in a different medium, which I always like to see.

The detectives largely come up empty-handed, until Driver thinks back on something Freeze said when he killed Fields about teaching the cops a lesson. Then it clicks: Throughout these two issues, there have been vague references to some kind of gala event that the cops are supposed to attend, but Brubaker and Rucka cleverly/cutely avoid actually saying what it is — because then the reader would naturally assume that it’s Freeze’s target.

Because, of course, it is: Gotham State University is presenting Jim Gordon (who has since retired in the timeline where this is set) with an honorary doctorate in criminology, which means there will be a big theater full of cops and college students that Freeze can take out in one swoop. Realizing that the stakes are now so much higher than one cop, even if it was his partner, Driver demands that they turn on the Bat-Signal and brief the Dark Knight on what’s going to happen.

The way it all plays out is very cool. There are multiple pages and multiple panels of the cops getting into position to catch Freeze, plus Gordon making a little speech (with a background cameo from Barbara), then Freeze setting up his mega-ice device on the roof, and then one single shot of Batman dropping in. The next time we see Batman, he’s appearing in a doorway to tell Montoya that he has taken care of Freeze. All of that setup, and Batman saves the day immediately and off-camera. It’s no wonder the cops resent him.

The book ends with Driver getting in his car to finally go home, and which point he hears on the radio that the FBI was too late to save the girl who had been kidnapped.

“Damn it all to hell,” he mutters, before seeing Batman standing outside his car, possibly waiting to speak with him about everything that happened (which is what he would do in a regular Batman story). But Driver doesn’t care: “…and damn you, too,” he adds, glaring at Batman.

It’s a great end to a very well-done superhero comic, and — as alluded to last week — I maintain that this would be a brilliant TV pilot, if it were a TV pilot. As it stands, it’s a great way to start a comic book.

The Untitled Comic Book Newsletter Book Society continues next week with the third issue of Gotham Central.