Sentenced: 3-2-14
Shiri is Sentenced by:
(page 10, panels 5-6 through page 11, panel 1)
Allen: Well, maybe he’s a suicide. The kid worked for Batman after all.”
Montoya: Great. You want to ask him if Robin’s been feeling depressed recently? “How’s he been sleeping? Any signs of drug use? Trouble at school?”
I will start out by saying suicide is in no way funny. Ask me about my struggles with depression and anxiety sometime. They aren’t funny either.
What struck me about this passage is the attempt to normalize the complete and utter insanity of Gotham. Of having to ask the question: is this the real Robin or not? A teen masked vigilante or not? To be forced to hypothesize on whether or not there’s a “flock” of Robins. To be running not against the clock, but against Batman. Fucking Batman.
To have that as part of one’s every day life and still have to function as a partner, a parent, a cop… How is that even possible? The real world is bad enough, but vigilantes and super villains?
But Allen and Montoya manage. Right here. This is the key to the sanity of the whole GCPD MCU.
Totally inappropriate humor that normalizes something impossible, brings it, at the very least, into the realm of recognizable, human experience.
I strive, in my own writing, to integrate the fantastical and weird into “real” life, but I’m not sure I’ve ever pulled it off this smoothly or succinctly. Something else to strive for.
Wow, that list is getting long…
Luke’s Sentence:
From one of my least favorite books I have read in a long time, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, this sentence jumped out at me:
The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death.
First off there is the use of succeeded. Not quite a typical use, and sets up the rest of the sentence that is all about communicating the horror of the pain that Jekyll felt in the change to Hyde. Next, I really like the grinding ‘in’ the bones and not ‘of’ the bones. And though the end is a great example of the writing that made Jekyll/Hyde a pain to read, it does end on a vivid image.
So, I guess that the beginning of the sentence, with the different use of ‘succeeded’ and the ‘grinding in the bones’ that really caught my eye. I liked how those two flowed together.
Recent Comments