While Batman deals with the aftermath of "Fugitive" as it concerns Cain and Luthor, Detective Comics is concerned with examinining what happens to Sasha Bordeaux now that everything is over. While I'm curious as to the fate of Sasha and her place in the DC Universe, this issue spends a lot of time telling me things that I'd already figured out, and so I enjoyed the characterization but found the story a little lackluster. The backup story has also shifted a bit, from the enjoyable "Josie Mac" to the inscrutable "The Hunt," and my enthusiasm for Detective Comics begins to wane as Rucka prepares to exit the title. I'm hanging on largely in the interest of finding out what happens to Sasha in the long run, and while I find the stories to be crafted well enough, they're not holding my interest as they once were.
Every turn in Sasha's story has led to further questions, which speaks to the interest Rucka has managed to foster in the character. The first question was, how long before she figures out the secret identity? The next, what do they do with her now? The last, what happens to a character who knows Batman's secret identity - death or amnesia? Fortunately, Rucka seems to be gearing up for a different option, and I'm definitely curious to find out what's going to happen to her at the end of next issue, which will presumably be the last we see of her before she heads off into limbo with Dr. Kinsolving from the Knightfall series, who made a similar discovery before meeting her fate.
Unfortunately, while I have an interest in the end result, I haven't been grabbed by the story that is taking us there. Even given a hopelessly convoluted legal system, I'm having trouble understanding why it's been so hard to get Sasha's conviction overturned when Bruce Wayne has suffered few legal entanglements from his fugitive status, let alone his murder conviction. Sasha's recruitment by an outside agency is certainly an interesting twist, and a clever use of a supporting character who no longer fits into Batman's world, but the outside circumstances (Rucka leaving the title, for instance) leads me to a certain sense of where the story is going, which has robbed the story of a lot of its dramatic tension. I also feel that having Batman search for Sasha when we're simultaneously being shown where she really is takes a lot of the mystery out of the book.
While I've been a fan of Lieber's work elsewhere, and his Detective work has been solid, the art here doesn't have the same spark that his work on smaller projects has had. The characters look a little loose, not as expressive as I would expect from Lieber usually, and in fact the work in general seems a little dry and lifeless. I also was not fond of the change of the Checkmate uniform, as I found the new ones to be fairly dreary and boring, while the originals had a nifty design that worked rather well for the organization, even if it wasn't quite as realistic for a covert operation.
The backup story, which started off interesting enough, also seems a bit plodding this issue, being largely a pursuit of a character the reader doesn't know by another character that the reader doesn't know. It's all paced well enough, and we get a good sense of the chase, but there's nothing to connect the reader to either character and so the outcome of the chase winds up being pretty pointless.
