Thanks to Ben Templesmith’s art, Gotham by Midnight works a lot better than it should. A lot of Ray Fawkes’s dialogue is generic cop show stuff, but Templesmith has a way of visually rushing some of the conversations through how he positions the characters. In other words, he makes the problem spots shorter than they’d otherwise be… and it helps immensely.
Some of this first issue plays like Templesmith’s famous, mysterious (and unfinished) cop comic Fell. It does not seem unintentional. The story beats for the first few pages read like a remake.
Fawkes introduces a bunch of characters and a lot of story. The final investigation sequence is a little rushed–in the script, not the art–because Fawkes has an idea for an effective cliffhanger. It’s a little forced, but once the comic switches into full procedural mode, a lot of the seams start showing anyway.
Not bad.
CREDITS
We Do Not Sleep; writer, Ray Fawkes; artist, Ben Templesmith; letterer, Dezi Sienty; editors, Dave Wielgosz and Rachel Gluckstern; publisher, DC Comics.
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