InsaneJournal

7 pages.

Officer Down was a Bat/Gotham storyline that centred around Commissioner Gordon being shot and everyone dealing with it and solving the crime.

Unfortunately for Jim, it's his birthday. The story starts off with him trying to get out of the office and arranging when he's going to meet up with Babs later to celebrate, but his people from the Major Crimes Unit want to take him out for drinks first.

I'm not scanning the pages where you see it, but if you have the book or end up getting it, take a look at the detail put into his office. It's fairly organized, there's a pot of coffee, he's got his pipe in a glass case (I could be wrong, but I think he had actually quit smoking altogether, which recent comics seem to have forgotten), pictures on the wall of him in the army, his wedding (it's too small to tell, but we can safely assume it's his wedding to Sarah Essen), and a couple of pictures of a young and very dorky-looking Babs.

I just love it when you find that kind of detail in the background.

Anyway, he heads over to the bar, and gets a shadowy birthday greeting from a certain bat-garbed fellow in an alley along the way. (Jim invites him along, but he politely declines.) He doesn't really want to bother about his birthday, but it makes everyone else happy, so he humours them.

People start giving him presents.



Aww, Renee gives him a present he actually likes! I hope Renee and Jim will get to interact at some point in the current Question stories. Anyone know if the Commish has encountered her as the Question yet?



Rick Burchett is doing the pencils on this one, and I like the way he draws Bullock and Gordon.

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Look at those faces! Okay, back to the scans.



Notice how Bullock and Montoya are sitting on either side of them. It's kind of nice foreshadowing for how this arc ends, as I like to think it symbolizes how those two are the closest to him in terms of friendships and loyalty on the police force.







I miss Cris Allen as a cop.



Everybody loves him!

And then he goes outside, runs into Catwoman, unintentionally shoots her (she's not injured all that much), and then he gets shot. The rest of the book is decent, but I think this is my favourite part. There's some major Batdickery that eventually motivates Alfred to take off (IIRC, that's when he went to Brentwood where Tim was going to school), some bad art here and there, and some scenes with Babs and Dick that I could nit-pick about.

However, overall, I really do like the book because it really is a bat-family book. Something happens to one character, and you get the reactions and interactions of all the people who should be reacting and interacting as a result.

Oh, and the TPB doesn't make it entirely clear, but I believe the first issue in it (from which these pages are scanned) are from Batman, but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.