Gotham by Midnight #2 Review

writer: Ray Fawkes / artist: Ben Templesmith / DC Comics Gotham by Midnight #1 was a solid beginning to DC’s new series, even to readers who aren’t generally horror fans. I made a few minor predictions in my first review: “…no shock value or gore, and I don’t expect much of that anytime soon.” Issue 2’s first page leaves me hilariously wrong:

Similar to most readers I also expected the story plot to stall in favor of allowing character development to catch up, and we were thankfully right. If Fawkes treated his characters like the throwaway casts of 90s horror films, the comic would definitely suffer. He moves in the right direction though as we see our first character flashback, giving insight into Sister Justine’s introduction to Jim Corrigan 5 years ago and how she got involved in Precinct Thirteen. She is well written – a quiet nun you have a soft spot for, like the horror-movie version of Sister Mary Roberts from Sister Act. Given Sister Justine’s flashback we can expect similar exposition for the rest of the cast, so we have that to look forward to, as the rest of the characters are still flat.

Fawkes’ plot is paced well enough to keep you reading. While the villain seems more grotesque to me than actually interesting, I look forward to reading the characters that have been relatively unseen – Szandor Tarr and Lisa Drake – who we can expect to learn more about soon. As for our protagonist, the tough-guy cop Jim Corrigan, I remain optimistically lukewarm. I can’t get d…