Gotham By Midnight #1

How many secret cocks can you count on the cover of Gotham By Midnight? I count two on my copy!

Just a second. Let me put my dick back in my pants before I begin.

So, for as long as I can remember, I've done this thing where I look at a piece of text and cancel out repeating letters until I'm left with only the letters with no pairs. In elementary school when the teacher would hand out dittos, I would do one of two things. I would either draw a little stick man on the top sentence and draw a path of his decent through the sentences, dropping between words, bouncing off of "o"s, being impaled on "t"s, and sliding through small "l"s to gain another life. If I didn't do that (or sometimes after I'd marked my stickperson's descent), I'd begin crossing out letter pairs until all the repeated letters on the page were crossed out. Then I'd list the leftover letters to the side and see if they could be rearranged to spell something. I mention all of this because Gotham By Midnight becomes "Day Nob" I'm sure it means something!

That explanation would have been more exciting if the secret message in the title would have been better than "Day Nob." Or "No Day B." Or "Bandoy." Or "Yo Band." Or "Boy Nad." Or "An Body." Or one of any other of the 720 possible combinations. Unless I did my math wrong and maybe I already listed all of the possibilities.

This issue begins with the statement that Gotham City can't possibly survive without protection. Isn't that putting the donkey in front of the carrot? Don't villages and cities and towns come together because people are more protected in groups than alone? So the city itself is just the symptom of people needing and feeling protected. Once the city, or gathering of people, becomes too large, the people all become strangers to each other with no connection which begins to erode the feeling of safety. The amount of protection afforded by the city passes its peak and becomes more and more dangerous as the people begin to see their fellow residents as the threat they had once felt protected from by their peers. The other people, rather than the unknown and the wilds of nature, suddenly become the thing to fear. At that point, does the city really need protecting? Why must a city that has lost its value to the community need protection? Maybe it needs to be fixed, or changed, or restructured. But does a city that kills off its populace by the dozens every night need protection?

Oh wait! I bet "Gotham City" is an inherent metaphor for "the people of Gotham City!" Stupid me! I probably got confused because DC Comics (and especially the Batman within DC Comics) constantly treats Gotham City as just another character in its universe while it treats the people of Gotham City as faceless victims to be slaughtered by the whims of the current plot. I always get the feeling that Gotham City itself is somehow more important than the people that live in Gotham, even though, as I just realized, they are one and the same.

It's The X-Files meets The Wire!

If this is The X-Files meets The Wire, does that mean Jim Corrigan is going to be the Omar Little of this comic book?

Corrigan is called Detective Corrigan by Lieutenant Weaver, so I guess he's part of the the Gotham City Police Department. Which means he's not equivalent to Omar. Maybe I should stop thinking about this comic book as The Wire or as The X-Files because I can probably only be disappointed if I'm expecting it to measure up to those shows!

The bald guy, Sergeant Rook, explains that his visit is a formality and he'll be shutting down Precinct Thirteen in two days, no matter how many g-g-g-g-g-ghosts he sees.

It looks like McNulty has his next X-file!

It turns out comic books without super heroes in them are better than comic books with super heroes in them! It seems that when a character doesn't have a cool super power to show off, they resort to talking to other characters! They open up with them and discuss who they are and trade stories about growing up and bond and all that human shit humans do! Which, in turn, makes me interested in the characters! So by page seven of this comic book, I'm already more invested in the characters than after eight issues of World's End and the seemingly infinite amount of issues of Aquaman and the Others!

This is embarrassing to admit for a guy who reads all of DC's New 52 books and hardly any Marvel Comics, but when I was a kid, I wanted to be Spider-Man.

Corrigan and his partner, Detective Lisa Drake, take Sergeant Rook with them as they investigate their new case. It's a case which the Gotham Police closed, coming to the conclusion that it was just two young girls who returned home after running away. But Jim Corrigan knows something supernatural is going on and he wants Rook to see it with his own eyes so he doesn't dry up the funding on The Spooky Files.

The young girls have only spoken in tongues since they came home. That alone won't prove anything to Sergeant Rook! My sister and her friend Colleen used to talk in tongues all the time, saying things like "Gidigo fidiguck yidigoursidigelf" to me and then laughing uproariously! The joke is on them though! Because I still don't know what they were saying! Ha ha! My feelings weren't hurt at all!

Rook and Corrigan head off to Slaughter Swamp to question some flowers about missing children. Hopefully the flowers know what's going on! I bet just before the flowers begin talking and telling Corrigan what's going on, Rook will have fallen behind and gotten lost in the swamp. He'll step out of the bushes just as the flowers finish speaking and say, "See, Mulder! Nothing out of the ordinary going on around here!" And then he'll probably pray to Jesus.

"A burrito sure would hit the spot right about now"?

Jim Corrigan had better stumble upon some for real life Goddamned g-g-g-g-ghosts already or Sergeant Rook is going to shut down The Spooky Files in the first issue! What Jim does stumble upon is an old abandoned church falling apart in the middle of Slaughter Swamp. This looks like a job for The Spectre! Or a representative from OSHA.

While Corrigan and Rook enter the church, the little girls back home begin flipping the fuck out. They might be reacting to Jim setting foot inside their school or they're reacting to the nun, Sister Justine, that came to visit them. Because nobody likes a fucking nun coming into their home and telling them that they're possessed by the devil because they masturbate constantly. Or, um, you know, for other reasons. Like speaking in tongues!

Instead of getting lost or refusing to look directly at the UFO or missing the weirdness because he's too busy trying to come up with a rational explanation for the alien/demon/monster standing directly in front of him, Sergeant Rook gets an eyeful of a Spooky File!

This isn't so spooky! It's just a private Catholic school in a swamp with midnight classes! Although the dunce monkey in the corner is kind of weird. Should you really punish a monkey for being a bit out of control in a classroom setting and for being not quite as smart as the human kids?

The Spooky Files #1 Rating: DC Comics is really hitting some home runs with their new fall comic books! The only one that probably sucks is Deathstroke but that hardly matters since a lot of people will buy that comic book simply because Deathstork Deathstroke is the title character. And the art on Gotham Academy, Gotham By Midnight, and Arkham Manor are all non-industry standard. Thank god who dwells in my belly and is currently dining on masticated doughnut!