There are two more things I want to talk about regarding the Blackhawk, the first crime scene, and Burke. Specifically Burke's relationship with the murdered woman. 

Now, if we look at their interaction in #26 while remembering her interaction with Prohaska in #45, it's starting to look like Regina/Gina might be a prostitute. Her careful wording with Burke makes it seem like he's paying for her company - "Are you sure there isn't anything... *else* I can do for you?" not to mention Burke's  reply, makes it seem transactional, even though they are clearly fond of one another. Burke seems more like a trusted customer than her boyfriend to me. Then look at how Prohaska tells her to stay and relax after they've had sex, because he's paid for the room for the whole night. Not to mention how Gina says she prefers "you hooded fellows", meaning uncircumcised men. And we're starting to get a picture that Gina sleeps with a *lot* of men. 

Now, for the past few storylines, Burke has been slipping deeper and deeper into full-blown villain territory. It's not just his homophobia that's awful in Phantom of the Fair for example, an attitude that he seems to have developed since after the Scorpion arc where he had a more "live and let live" attitude to the gay businesman Nathan Lane. Things like his description of poor Robert Li's corpse, whuch was so jaw-droppingly racist, made any begrudging liking I'd started to develop for Burke evaporate. Makes me wonder why the writers decided to take him in this direction, when so much effort had clearly been put into making Burke *almost* sympathetic. 

So anyway, the scene of Gina's murder. We see Francis the cop warning Burke that this crime scene is absolutely terrible. And yet, the art doesn't reflect this at all. Was there some kind of miscommunication that meant the script didn't specifically *ask* for a pool of blood, so then Matthew Smith didn't *draw* one, and the colourist (still David Hornung) didn't see an *outline* for a pool of blood, and therefore left it as just her body lying on the dark brown floor? Without *any* blood whatsoever on her? From Francis' description, you expect to find pieces of her scattered around the room, but instead Regina is slumped on her side, and that's it. Burke's reaction then - spitting out his cigarette and running outside to vomit - becomes less about the state of the corpse and more about his shock at recognising her. And by the way, the position of Burke's hands suggest to me that he was meant to be crying, but maybe there was no note in the script specifying that tears should be running down Burke's cheeks? So instead we get this very un-Burke-like, and rather "artistic" pose that made it look like Smith was copying, or had been told to copy, Teddy Kristiansen. I can't be the only one who thinks there's a resemblance, can I?

Real Men Cry Abstract Tears