Writer: Ed BrubakerPlot: The news gets out that Gordon is down, prompting the police and Gotham's vigilantes into action.
When things get hairy, it's good to have your family around you to fall back on for support. With her father shot, no one needs more support right now than Barbara Gordon, and yet she appears to be the strongest individual among everyone. "Appears" is the key word here, folks. She puts on a good show for Renee and the public, but once she's among her nighttime associates, she bursts into tears.
Brubaker gets the event going, showing you every aspect of the city, like a literary Jack Hawksmoor, from The Authority. We hear from the vigilantes, the cops, the media, and indirectly from the citizens and the mayor.
How many of you know the name of the police commissioner in your city? I might recognize the name of mine, if I heard it on the news, but I couldn't tell you who it is right now. But to the people of Gotham, Jim Gordon is a spotlight; not a celebrity, mind. He was there for the Original Gothamites during No Man's Land, when he had to make sense of an island of chaos. He ran for the position of mayor before that, to try to bring even more good to the city. In several ways, he is the soul of order in Gotham. If he dies, Gotham dies with him.
There are some people, like those T.V. viewers at the beginning of Batgirl #12, who only give the news a passing thought. Some scenes in that issue don't jive with what goes on here. A group of officers argues about the contaminated evidence at the crime scene, as a result of the rainfall, but here in Robin #86, it's a clear night and Crispus and Renee have no trouble examining the scene. That entire walkthrough would be perfect in Detective Comics, since it focuses on all the possible angles the two detectives go through, in order to arrive at their conclusion.
