Art By: Ben Templesmith
Cover Price: $2.99
Release Date: January 28, 2015
Shadow Play
*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*
When we last walked through the dark pages of Gotham By Midnight, we were given Sister Justine's back story about how she came to be in Corrigan's Precinct 13 gang and it had to do with Spectre getting ornery and her parish being possessed by green drooling........ I want to call them specters but that seems confusing to me........ So some sort of other worldly being was possessing them. Spectre wiped them out and Sister Justine decided to join Jim in doing the greater good. The rest of the issue was Jim Corrigan taking out that evil monster nun thing and saving the children that had been taken by the monster and in the end we found out that there are five monsters attacking Gotham with it's growing darkness and what not. So, I'm saying that the parish monster was one and with the nun we got two out of five down. Let's see if this issue throws anymore monsters Precinct 13's way. Let's check it out.
Explain It!:
Our story begins with Jim Corrigan getting himself a new case in the form of a young girl who's been hospitalized and kept in isolation. The girl's doctor brought her to the police's attention and then they gave it over to Corrigan after they heard the doctors claims...... That's right folks, it's one of the weird ones so they toss it over to Precinct 13's nut jobs. After Jim Corrigan and Lisa Drake watch a video that her doctor has, we all see that the girl has a monster shadow that seems to do more than what the girl does........ plus for some reason she has smallpox. It's a thing, I'm not sure why but it is.......... Well that's not exactly true. She shows symptoms of Smallpox that I guess is associated with the creature that's attached to her.......... oooooo Supernatural! Anyway, now it's up to our heroes to cure the child of her darkness and hopefully take out another monster on their list.
Corrigan calls in Dr. Szandor Tarr, who's been working on deciphering the supernatural language that all the kidnapped children from the last two issues were speaking and he goes running to the hospital to help out. Meanwhile, we'll take this time to discuss the origin of Detective Lisa Drake. Throughout this story we flashback to when Lisa first met Corrigan and it turns out she was undercover for a drug bust and when she was threatened she let out some strange scream that disoriented the dealers and then she shot them.......... It's a very odd scene that I find hard to figure out due to Templesmith's art. Anyway, Corrigan was tied up in the drug dealers trunk and after she unties him, he offers her a job at Precinct 13............ He also says he knows what she is, you know with the supernatural scream and all but for some reason they keep it cryptic. I guess we'll find out more about Detective Drake in a later issue........ But I'm so damn curious now! I hate waiting.
In the end, Lisa Drake and the young girl's doctor enter her isolation room and for some reason they think a hazmat suit will stop a shadow monster from getting them......... It's not like this was their first day on the monster police force. So the shadow kills the doctor and gets out but luckily Dr. Szandor Tarr shows up and uses his limited understanding of the creature's language to distract it......... so Lisa Drake could kill it by shining her flashlight on it......... yup...... flashlight death.
That's it for this issue of Gotham By Midnight and while I loved the first two issues, this one was subpar when compared to them. Templesmith's art while normally really works to enhance this kind of dark story, came off confusing and I found myself struggling through most of the issue trying to figure out what was going on. Also, the story wasn't as strong as it's been so really I'm just a bit disappointed all around. Hopefully next month's issue turns around.
Bits and Pieces:
This is the weakest issue so far and I hope the rest of the series takes more after the first two issues instead of what we got here. Templesmith's art came off confusing and when combined with a story that wasn't that strong makes this a issue that I could see just passing on. I really enjoy the concept of this series and I hope it gets stronger as it goes on. It's just that this issue fell short.
5/10
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