Writer: Ray Fawkes / Artist: Juan Ferreyra / DC Comics
If you’ve read past reviews of Gotham by Midnight then you probably understood this to be an underrated series. It’s engaging, paced well, and intensely fun and brooding. This isn’t that issue.
Everything in issue #8 felt out of sync from the beginning. The first two pages show a busy scene spattered with word balloons. Lisa Drake has a phone conversation at the Gotham version of Times Square, amidst a TV conversation being held by newscasters, surrounded by arguing city folk. You know something terrible is going to happen – Lisa has intuition about these things, after all – but instead of being an intense scene, it was so hectic and quick that it ultimately falls flat, and the issue never really recovers.
The two newscasters incite anger in those that hear them, causing violent rages, and Corrigan and Tarr have to stop them. The plot is simple to follow as a one-and-done and is, aside from maybe one scene, pretty forgettable. This was that episode of Law & Order you can’t remember watching.
I hope this isn’t the extent of character development we’ll reach for this series. The flashback formula from the first story arc was successful in adding depth to the team members, but it’s starting to seem that the series might rely more heavily on the Spectre and isolated, plot-driven paranormal crime stories. One uninspired issue doesn’t weigh much against the rest of the great issues in this series though, so let’s see what comes to pass in issue #9.
We know this new story arc is going to focus on Internal Affairs and the investigating of Corrigan’s division of supernatural crime, which already sounds fairly “meh” in potential, and this one ultimately didn’t do much to encourage optimism. I wouldn’t call this a filler issue, but Gotham by Midnight #8 feels as close as possible to one. But hey, they can’t all be great.
6 out of 10
Reading Gotham by Midnight? You can catch up on previous reviews here.
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