Gotham City Monsters #5 Review

Monster Mash

Written By: Steve Orlando

Art By: Amancay Nahuelpan, Trish Mulvihill, Tom Napolitano

Cover Price: $3.99

Release Date: January 8, 2020

Let's head on back to Monster Town in Gotham City, where our group of monsters...... and Batwoman, Seven Soldiers their way to Melmoth before he can complete his final sacrifice, which will supposedly save the Multiverse from Perpetua....... I don't know who I'm supposed to root for here.  In the previous issue though Melmoth went and escaped our heroes and to keep them busy so that he could find his final sacrifices he summed the Monster League of Evil and if you're not familiar with this group.... Well, it's essentially the Universal Monsters and who doesn't want to see our group of monsters against those?  Let's jump into this issue and see if this is the epic fight that I've been waiting for. 

Well, there's barely a fight, but for the few pages that it was around and really, just for the concept of this fight alone, I guess it was pretty cool.  I just wish that it would have been bigger than we actually got because I've been pumped to see what would happen with the Gotham City Monsters vs. the Universal Monsters.  Since this is a six issue mini though I guess we don't have time for fanboy fights and have to get back to the mission at hand and find Melmoth.

The biggest strength of this book is that it wants to play in everyone at DC's sandbox right now and that makes this book feel like it's connected to our main universe more than any other and we see that continue here with Melmoth knowing that Perpetua plans on destroying the Multiverse and it's up to him to commit these sacrifices and use the Crime Bible to create a defense against the dark mother of existence and now he's down to his final two sacrifices that he needs to complete his plan.  With that, our team is only out for revenge against his initial act in the first issue, that brought them all together as a team and while I don't agree with the deaths that Melmoth has caused, I'm wondering if the Gotham City Monsters would be so keen on ending Melmoth if he just sat down and talked to them about what he was attempting to do....... or even inform them of the Multiverse's upcoming demise.  By the end though we set everything up for our final conflict for the next and final issue to the series and while some of this mini has been kind of a slog to get through, I am really curious to see how everything ends and what effects the rest of the DC Universe have on the ending or what the ending has on the rest of the Universe.

All in all, I really enjoyed the art in this issue and even though I wish that we could have gotten a bigger fight between our two monster factions, I do understand that we don't have a lot of time to waste, even for fun side ideas.  Like previous issues though, the background and emotions to the characters we're dealing with feel forced into the issue in an unnatural way and Orlando's dialog continues to be the worst part of this series, even if I'm enjoying the majority of the ideas he's throwing into this book.  Overall, this is a decent issue with some fun and like previously, a bunch of cool call outs........ it's just that some of the time it seems like these call outs feel more thought out than the actual story.  Here's hoping that everything wraps up in a big way next issue because even though the dialog kills me most of the time, Steve Orlando has created a story that is really intriguing and has me hooked.

Bits and Pieces:

Even though the big promised fight from last issue's cliffhanger didn't measure up to my hopes or expectations, this issue still managed to be pretty fun, even if the dialog still kills me most of the time.  We got great art here and a interesting cliffhanger to a story that leads us right to the final showdown between Melmoth and our Gotham City Monsters and I can't wait to see how it ends.

6.8/10