(With no offense to Jock, I imagine Williams would have done wonders on these split panels, as he did with the final Batwoman/Alice fight in Elegy.) The juxtaposition of "new" and "old" Bat-hero is interesting, though maybe a little less so since Bruce Wayne is both alive and New-52ed, and also I'm not sure Rucka makes any statements here that really crackle. Through a number of split pages and panels, Rucka parallels Batman's work with Jim Gordon and Batwoman's work with Maggie Sawyer, and how each vigilante underestimates their prey and gets in over their heads. With Flashpoint, some of this is a little confused). This makes it, kind of, the first team-up between Bruce Wayne and Kate Kane, though that "really" happens in the first volume of Batman, Incorporated (or in Batwoman: Hydrology. "Cutter" is a story told, masterfully but somewhat confusingly at the outset, at two periods of time - one, when Batman Bruce Wayne searched for a missing heiress, and the second as Batwoman stalks a serial killer (Rucka's Batwoman stories, you'll recall, came while Bruce Wayne was "dead" after Final Crisis). In essence, I probably would have found "Cutter" to be a discordant note had it been included in Elegy, and maybe it's better that "Cutter" was set aside, especially for bookstore buyers who wouldn't ever miss "Cutter" if they didn't know it wasn't there. Also, while "Cutter" is interesting, the "Go" storyline that completes Elegy is Rucka's real Batwoman triumph.
Artist Jock does nice work on "Cutter," a preview as it were of his unforgettable chapters of Batman: The Black Mirror, but his thin lines and minimalist style are starkly different than J.
When I read Elegy, I was vocally disappointed that "Cutter" wasn't included having just read "Cutter" alongside Elegy, however, the reasons are fairly clear. "Cutter" holds some mystique because it was not included in Elegy even though the issues followed right after those that were collected, and because it completes Rucka's Batwoman work with DC Comics. There's nothing terribly significant about the "Cutter" storyline from Detective Comics #861-863, except that it stars the Kate Kane Batwoman and it was written by her creator and author of Batwoman: Elegy, Greg Rucka. A new entry in our "Uncollected Editions" series, where we look at single issues that might've made a collection, but never came to be.
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