LogFAQs > #909380283

Let's set it up for the final two, shall we?

#3 - The Detective Agency Created by: JONA

Batman
John Constantine
Bigby Wolf
Rorschach
The Question (Vic Sage)
Elongated Man
Jessica Jones
Detective Chimp

I think prima facie evidence would dictate that, from a cursory glance, this team breaks a lot of the rules I set early in this ranking. Everyone reduplicates the role of detective. There's an overlap in skill sets. I should, clearly, dock some points for this.

But the strange thing about detective titles is that they hardly exist, and groups of them are even more rare. So I came at this title from a different perspective - what do each of these minds contribute to a team? In what way does each personality from another? And the interpersonal relationships just became fascinating to me. Batman is a hardliner against the bizarre, a skeptic in every sense. Yet he has to come to terms with the fact that some answers aren't simple in nature. There is a hole in the puzzle if you disregard the zebras and only accept the horses. Which is why the spectrum of John Constantine to Bigby to Batman is so interesting. John will accept all possibilities - hell, he'll spur on those possibilities to make even more bizarre improbabilities. Bigby may live in a world of magic, but he still believes that the simplest explanation is the most logical one. And Batman will deny, deny, deny until it's impossible to deny any further.

You have the Question and Rorschach, a relationship that is so delicious. After all, Dreams of Rorschach is one of the greatest Question stories ever told, and that just covers the Question reading Watchmen and rebuffing the personality of Rorschach. Put them in a room, and the sparks fly.

Jessica Jones can be presented, as on the show, like an embittered and hostile detective, reluctant to take cases. Pair her with the romantic (in the literary sense) Elongated Man and his windmill-tilting love of the unsolvable case, and there's something special there.

Detective Chimp and Constantine are classic drinking buddies. Jessica Jones dives into the metahuman world and holds supers accountable for themelves, much like Batman would. Bigby is a sheriff and lawmen who will disagree with Batman's vigilante tactics. Rorschach is brutal and vindictive - Elongated Man is forgiving and caring. Rorschach wants to wipe things and restart with clincal detachment. Constantine is the sort of morally repugnant character Roschach hates. But the Question would look at Constantine as an ally.

All of this barely starts to poke at the variety of cases we could take. Each self-contained mystery could lead to a web of conspiracies only Rorschach accepts wholeheartedly. The rest of the team disagrees with the leaps in logic and the tenuous connections accept for the Question, who serves a moral compass to Rorschach (unwillingly). Intimate cases, stories of regret or redemption... office doors bursting open in the middle of the night, Invisible Woman stumbling in with a knife in her side, raining pattering against the window panes as Chimp leans back in a rolling chair, nursing a bottle. It plays out as a grand sprawling tale of mysteries as varied as all of literature rolled into one small, compact series.
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"It is too easy being monsters. Let us try to be human." ~Victor Frankenstein, Penny Dreadful