Bearing in mind that I have been reading this arc for over a year now, I will try to articulate the thoughts I have had reading it as well as I can. *This is not an apology, it’s more of a confession that I might not have some facts straight.

Gotham after Midnight is a twelve part series written by Steve Niles, the man that brought you 30 Days of Night (which I haven’t read.) It has art by Kelly Jones, who is one of my all time favorite Batman artists. He drew a long run on the Batman series with Doug Moench, as well as Batman Vampire, which I have wrote a review for a long time ago that you can find here. He has also drawn a few issues of Sandman that are good. He is for all intents and purposes a horror artist. He also accounts for more than 50% of the reason I decided to pick up this book.

I can only assume that they are going to collect this series in TPB form, and my hope by the end of this review is, I can help you with your decision on whether to purchase it or not.

First off I will start with the artwork in the series. It is my belief that the art stays consistent the duration of the series. The way that Kelly Jones draws Batman’s rouges gallery is unique, and good, I especially like the way he draws the Scarecrow, but his Batman stands out as one of the best interpretations period.

Steve Niles seems to write Batman pretty well, he at least seems like he’s got the character down. He is definitely a horror writer, so I think he and Kelly Jones are a good pair. The story is told compellingly enough to the point where I kept reading it, although it wasn’t epic enough where I remembered all the in’s and out’s month to month. It seemed to start stronger then when it ended, but some of the stuff at the beginning was a bit more unique, like fighting a gigantic Clayface with a Bat-mech.

Sometimes it felt like the writing lacked a certain depth, but I liked the fact that he made Batman a detective, and that there was a mystery to be solved. The problem that I had with the mystery is that I wasn’t even compelled to try and figure it out, I just turned my brain off and let the book do the work for me. I find that I have this problem a lot with monthly superhero books, I can’t remember the details of a single issue over a months time, and so I barely even try to participate in the story.

This sounds like it’s a problem with me, but I can tell you that when a book is really good it can keep you thinking about it for over a month, for example Kick-Ass. Anyway, moving on I don’t know that this story needed to be told in twelve parts, although it was nice to look at the whole time, I might have lost something out of it in the course of a year. Although I liked the villain they introduced in this book, Midnight. Essentially the character goes around stealing peoples hearts, which works for me. I would just hate to see this become a continuing character in the Batman franchise like Hush has become.

I have just discovered that this review has just turned into complaining about a few things that I don’t like about this book, and so I will end it by just saying one more thing that I found disappointing. It is actually frustrating to me that this is one of my complaints because I always complain the opposite way about Batman comics. The last issue of this series has so much of Batman being a detective that it’s boring. The mystery in this didn’t have me caring that much, and they dwelt on it for the entire last issue, this book lacked a climax, but instead an open ended double resolution.

It isn’t all bad though, this was the first book I have read by Steve Niles, and I am not completely put off by him, in fact I might even pick up some other stuff he has done If I had ready enough cheap access to it.

Overall I think this was a fairly decent book, with really cool artwork. (Although I wouldn’t blame someone for saying that he is the worst Batman artist, I just really dig the horror style.) The storytelling’s done well with the mass exception of the entire last issue. It’s not the greatest Batman story ever told, but it wasn’t the worst either. This is an extremely good waste of time.

Batman: Gotham After Midnight going to be coming out Sept. 9th in TPB it is selling on Amazon for about twenty dollars. If nothing else this will look excellent on your shelf.