Say what you want: Being a woman means you have to be a mom. It may be a cliché—there are plenty of single male characters—but writer Marc Andreyko invests Kate Spencer with so much depth and compassion, and he makes including her child an essential part of her internal conflict about whether she’s doing the right thing by being a vigilante.
So by now, it’s clear that Manhunter is DC’s Punisher, recast as a woman with a family and a day job as a high-powered prosecutor. But if the villain-killing vigilante is a Punisher analog, at least in part, then she needs her Micro. In issues #3-4, she recruits a tech genius—who she put into witness protection—to design upgrades for her uniform and battlestaff. Eventually, she gets a complete hand-me-down set of crime-fighting equipment, all upgraded and maintained by her silent partner: Darkstar’s costume, Azrael’s gloves, Manhunter’s power staff.
Around the same time as this comic, Ed Brubaker, Greg Rucka, and Michael Lark were creating the single best DC series of all time: Gotham Central. In it, there was a short interlude where the Teen Titans have to come in for questioning. Recognizing a good idea when he saw it, Marc Andreyko brought the whole JLA into Manhunter for a multi-issue arc about prosecuting the killer of Firestorm.
Great stuff.
Highly recommend the Kate Spencer Manhunter issues.
And that’s it! Thanks for reading!
Note: This post was originally on another site, published in 2013, and has been transferred here, without updates, for posterity.