BBC's Luther may be as close as we can get to that TV version of Gotham Central some of us GC readers always wanted to see

The BBC One cops-vs.-serial killers procedural Luther, which concludes its second season on BBC America tonight, isn't a perfect show, but it's more enjoyable than most procedurals, due to an imposing and lively but never hammy turn by former Wire star Idris Elba (an actual lead of color who still has his show!) and a distinctive, not-so-generic look.

(Photo source: Luther Caps)

The '60s Batman had the Dutch angles and Homicide: Life on the Street had the jump cuts and washed-out color scheme (something Homicide phased out in its later and less interesting seasons). Luther likes to take its actors and place them at the bottom left and right corners of the screen so that they're surrounded by lots of negative space. If I recall correctly, a Luther crew member said the crew favored this framing effect because it makes it appear as if comic book-style thought bubbles are about to surface above the actors' heads.

(Photo source: Luther Caps)

The framing effect, which was more prominent in Luther's first season (did some Beeb higher-up put NBC exec-vs.-Homicide-style pressure on the Luther crew to do less of it?), also enhances the show's sense of dread and unease. It dwarfs the actors and manages to make the tall Elba look as small as the runty white psychos he's been chasing this season (at times, Luther feels like a serious version of Chris Rock's post-Columbine stand-up routine about crazy white kids who scare the shit out of him, like the goofily named Trenchcoat Mafia).

Luther evokes dread and unease more effectively than most shows. The mute, hammer-wielding LARP-er who terrorized working folk in the penultimate episode of Luther's second season is scarier and more menacing than anything during Luther's American ratings competition, FX's trying-way-too-hard-to-be-scary American Horror Story. The LARP-er's muteness and the episode's preference for filming his killings from a distance or having them take place off-screen--we're subjected only to gruesome hammer-to-skull sound effects--both make his acts of violence more disturbing. And though it's resorted to the tired and annoying device of children in peril that's been used by torture-porn procedurals like Criminal Minds, Luther rarely feels as sadistic as that show (below an A.V. Club piece about Criminal Minds and its short-lived spinoff Suspect Behavior, a commenter astutely noted that "Middle America eat [sic] this crap up with a spoon. It genuinely baffles me that middle aged and conservative Americans have made this show such a mainstream hit.").

That quality of being unnerving without getting sadistic or graphic recalls Gotham Central, the much-missed DC Comics crime title that writers Ed Brubaker and Greg Rucka told from the point of view of Gotham City homicide detectives who resent Batman (Gotham Central was a bleak book, but it wasn't as sadistic as most of DC's puerile attempts at edginess, perhaps because Brubaker and Rucka write like grown-ups instead of horny and torture-porn-obsessed adolescents). From "the operatic theatricality" that crime novelist and Luther creator Neil Cross once said he's brought to DCI John Luther's adversaries to that aforementioned framing effect that creates the illusion of thought bubbles, the larger-than-life Luther is basically a comic book--or as John's teenage charge Jenny Jones (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) would prefer, graphic novel--but it's a very good one, which Gotham Central was.

There was once talk of turning Gotham Central into a TV series, which would have been nice to see, although I don't think there are any showrunners who would have been able to master the tricky balance of supervillain theatrics with much more grounded police detective business that even Rucka occasionally had trouble pulling off in the comic (for instance, the gaudily dressed heroes from the Teen Titans stuck out like a sore thumb when they were awkwardly integrated into the not-so-gaudy Gotham Central).

But after watching how Luther handles John's bordering-on-superhuman investigative skills or the theatricality of both John's adversaries and his sociopathic adversary-turned-ally Alice Morgan (Ruth Wilson) without looking goofy and lame, I think Cross would be the perfect showrunner for a TV version of Gotham Central if it ever becomes a possibility again.

(Photo source: Luther Caps)

If that TV adaptation never surfaces, then think of Luther as a pretty good Gotham Central spinoff in which Elba is terrific as deceased Gotham detective Crispus Allen, who's reimagined himself as a David Bowie-loving(*) British supercop in some sort of crime-ridden afterlife that's a cross between the original Life on Mars and Lost's much-maligned sideways universe.

(Photo source: Luther Caps)

(*) You gotta love a procedural that has a lead who idolizes Bowie and, as it's implied in one episode, uses his music to help him think, although why Luther didn't choose a Bowie track as its theme music--it went with Massive Attack's "Paradise Circus," which actually isn't too shabby--is as puzzling as any of John's cases.

We interrupt this arc of The Palace to bring you hot lingerie models who run drug gangs

Not all Colombian drug lords look like Tony Clifton. Greg Rucka's Twitter linked to an odd news story that will likely get this post way more hits than any other post I've written: "Angie Sanselmente Valencia, a former lingerie model, is believed to be heading one of the world's largest drug gangs." (Leverage showrunner John Rogers saw Rucka's tweet and joked to his writers, "Start your engines.")

Colombia's former "Queen of Coffee" dated a Mexican drug lord known as "The Monster" and then broke up with him to start her own gang. She would recruit other lingerie models to smuggle coke. If you pop that balloon on that chick's chest--surprise inside!

I was a fan of Keen Eddie, and this reads like an episode of that show. In the Keen Eddie pilot, the show's hero Eddie Arlette (Human Target's Mark Valley) is trying to bust an oxycodone dealer with the help of a mysterious snitch who looks like a Victoria's Secret model and also happens to be the drug lord's girlfriend. But she tricks Eddie into busting down the doors of an empty warehouse and escapes with her boyfriend. Eddie becomes the laughingstock of the NYPD and follows their trail to London, where, as Scotland Yard's newest employee, he becomes occupied with catching other fish, from casino robbers in Duran Duran masks to crazed stalkers of opera stars. Fox burnt off episodes of Keen Eddie in the summer of 2003 and cancelled it before creator J.H. Wyman could give Eddie the chance to find the "Big Ben" drug ring duo from the pilot.


I always had a hunch that the unseen drug lord was really the girlfriend--a Remington Steele-meets-Ra's al Ghul in Batman Begins twist. Now thanks to the "Queen of Coffee" case, my hunch doesn't look too crazy.

The Palace: Theatre of Crud begins tomorrow and concludes March 7

Why's it hard for people to call The Palace a webcomic? I've seen it referred to as a "skit"(*) and a "graphic novel," and it's neither. It just goes to show how new to the lexicon "webcomic" is, even though there's like millions of webcomics.

(*) A pet peeve of mine is the misuse of the word "skit." That's the most misused word outside of "socialist." A skit is some lame, amateurish thing kids perform at a summer camp or church. That's why that comedy festival in San Francisco is called SF Sketchfest, not SF Skitfest. Yet people still describe the sketches on shows like Python, Chappelle's Show, Mr. Show, Human Giant and HBO's new Funny or Die Presents as skits (as if the professional comedian/writers who crafted the sketches are still in fifth grade and eating their boogers). Those people are full of skit.

On Javiland, host Javier Hernandez asked me if I planned to compile all the Palace strips for a book. I told him that's always been my plan. I always approached The Palace as if I were drawing it for newspapers or print, except I'm tossing in some language that cartoonists can't get away with in newspaper strips. (I'd like to give the book a really absurd title like either The Palace: The Complete Jazillionth Season Box Set, The Palace: Let's Count How Many Times Bella Touches Her Hair--because if you tack "Bella" or "Edward" onto the name of anything these days, it'll likely make a dime--or The Palace: It's Arbor Day, Charlie Brown, which I probably can't use because I don't want Charles M. Schulz's estate on my ass.)

After I took part in that Javiland roundtable, I've realized if you're going to put together a book full of preexisting content that readers can easily see for free on the Web, you ought to add to the book some extra content that's exclusive to the compilation and has never appeared before in your webcomic. This new content would either be the original blog posts that inspired some of the strips (like the post about the racist camera by "jozjozjoz," whom I'd ask permission to reprint), preliminary blue pencil drawings (personally, I think The Palace looks better in blue pencil, before I redraw it in ink on a tracing pad), strips that I scripted or drew but decided to toss into the trash bin or a never-before-posted strip that I'd like to get a special guest illustrator to draw.

I always wanted to get special guest artists to draw The Palace for me like how Greg Rucka enlists different artists to interpret Queen & Country (or how Harvey Pekar does the same thing with American Splendor). I never wanted to draw The Palace. (Sometimes I wish I never chose a movie palace as the webcomic's primary setting. I don't like putting much detail into the background on the panel--I prefer to make The Palace look as minimalist as the single-panel strips I grew up reading--and a movie palace is an ornate setting that calls for all sorts of details in the background.)

But because I don't know any cartoonists around my hood, and I wouldn't have enough coin to pay one to pencil and ink The Palace, I've had to draw the webcomic myself, even though I've had very little drawing experience, and the only art training I've had is some watercolor class that I took at an art supplies store when I was in sixth or seventh grade.

This is the longest and most exhausting arc I've worked on so far. All 14 strips of the Theatre of Crud arc, which would be included in the book if I go through with it, are single-panel. On Javiland, I was asked why I like the single-panel format. I said writing single-panel gags is difficult, yet I prefer that format because I have a habit of overwriting, and with single panels, I have to learn to be succinct. I wish I added to the Javiland discussion that multiple-panel strips are easy to write but hard to draw, while single-panel strips are hard to write but easy to draw.

As with all other arcs of The Palace, I'll be posting one strip per day here on this blog. I don't know how I'll be able to post a strip per day when my cable modem keeps cutting me off from the Internet every few minutes. That cable modem is the crappiest thing Comcast has concocted since Sunset Tan.