Gotham by Midnight #4 Review

writer: Ray Fawkes / artist: Ben Templesmith / DC Comics Toss your script, your recipe, your rhyme book—anything that’s formulaic—because that’s what Gotham by Midnight just did. Previously, in its standard blueprint, each issue would highlight a different character, give us a flashback in their honor, and solve a paranormal mini-crime within the issue’s subplot. That’s what I expected for a few issues longer—a slow build at a consistent pace until readers are comfortable enough with the characters, then they hit us with the answers and larger-scale story arc: The Rangers fight the putties, Rita sends a monster, and then the Rangers call their zords when she makes the monster grow. Repeat like nine times and change it the 10th, right? Or the fourth! Chapter 4 came hard with Gotham’s reckoning, like a storm that wasn’t expected so soon. It began innocuously enough: Corrigan waxing philosophical as he gets drunk at the bar with a sober Sergeant Rook. Two seconds later, the bodies start dropping, the cars start speeding, and we meet the character we’ve all been waiting for, the Spectre.

Tarr, the brains of the group, has an epiphany and figures out who’s the spirit that’s been running through the city, only it’s a little late because that spirit decided to go ahead and start killing everybody. Lisa Drake begins having the worst headache of all time as she senses all the death around her, more than she’s ever felt before. Meanwhile, the Spectre rises from Jim Corrigan in the mid…