Dex is haunted and sarcastic, but also deeply caring for those who have earned it. Here, Smulders is given a meatier role than Hill. Cobie Smulders, on the other hand, is a longtime favorite of mine, due in no small part to her breakout role as Robin on “How I Met Your Mother,” but most comics fans know her best as Maria Hill, Nick Fury’s right-hand woman in the MCU. I was unfamiliar with her work before her first appearance during last year’s Arrowverse “Elseworlds” crossover, but I now think she’s one of the stronger leads in that universe of shows. She’s tough, she’s dry and she has an edge that hides just below the surface of every scene.

Ruby Rose ably handles playing Kate Kane. What helps both of these new dramas is the strength of their leads. Her becoming a private investigator seems to be the pressure valve that will help her release her anger and sadness, to process what is going on with her and come out the other side a more balanced person. Dex has not had time to process her grief, and so often sinks into drugs and gambling to push down her feelings. Dex is suffering from PTSD after serving in the Middle East, and has further trauma caused by the death of the man she loved, Benny, who was killed in the war. Kate has had decades to process her grief. Kate has taken the events that traumatized her – the deaths of her mother and twin sister – and spent much of her life training to join her father’s security company, the Crows. But scratch off the veneer, and you get two characters with very different motivations and pasts.Ĥ non-superhero comics by Greg Rucka (and 1 novel) Rucka, like any writer, has a type: tough women with troubled pasts, much like Warren Ellis likes to write snarky people with accents and trenchcoats, and Stephen King likes to write authors who are thrust into weird supernatural situations and who are often recovering from an addiction or, in recent years, a tragic accident, and sometimes both. On the surface, Dex Parios, the lead of “Stumptown,” and Kate Kane, Batwoman, are similar characters. And with a couple episodes under the belt of each show, it’s a good time to look at the two next to each other, both in terms of how they stand on their own and how they compare to each other. Rucka is one of my favorite writers, so it’s exciting to see Dex Parios and Kate Kane getting this level of exposure. These series are, respectively, his PI-in-Portland book, “Stumptown,” and the newest addition to the CW’s Arrowverse, “Batwoman.” Over the past three weeks, two television series have debuted featuring Rucka-created characters, one creator-owned and one work-for-hire. It’s been a good month for characters created by Greg Rucka. By MATTHEW LAZORWITZ, WMQ Comics senior contributor

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