If you’re a fan of noir crime dramas, mysteries, or the hot gossip of Gotham, then you’re probably a Gotham City: Year One fan. The series has been excellent from the first issue, exploring an earlier time for Gotham when the crime was low, racism was high, and the Wayne family was as crooked as they come. Or so we think. In Gotham City: Year One #5, we learn new truths while trying to believe unreliable characters.
If you’re hungry for answers, rush to the comics shop and pick up this issue, as it starts with answers and keeps delivering from cover to cover. The story opens with Richard Wayne’s wife shouting expletives and leaving a hotel room in a huff. She passes by a Black woman, the very same woman who went to Slam Bradley with a ransom note. Inside the hotel room is Mrs. Wayne’s husband, and so begins a tryst you may not have seen coming.
This issue is filled with a compelling gumshoe and noir tropes, like the battered and used woman dishing, but the detective questioning every detail of it. We get to see a murder in the rain, the sick and somehow deeply romantic moments right after it, and even a little of the occult. As the story progresses, our protagonist Slam tries to make sense of things staying on edge and the reader on edge with him. It all builds towards a cliffhanger that’ll have you back for more next month, but with plenty of questions still unanswered.
On top of all that, Slam continues to show he’s not some straight-laced cop. In an entertaining sequence, we see a unique torture tactic to get answers involving driving recklessly with a man in his underwear on the roof of his car.
Richard Wayne, we come to learn, was a pretty big jerk.
Credit: DC Comics
Phil Hester’s art is as good as ever with inks by Eric Gapstur. This book expertly plays with shadows, as harsh straight lines are accentuated by heavy inks. The blacks in this book are as impenetrable as Gotham’s darkest secrets. There are a few instances of panels repeating, which slow things down and draw your attention well. The coolest page is during the murder, which is done up like an old movie poster juxtaposing a silhouette of two lovers kissing while a bloody body lays at their feet.
Jordie Bellaire’s colors continue to do a lot of storytelling on their own, be it the flashback scenes cast in a blue teal or the harsh reds and oranges popping in to enhance the feeling of danger. In the scene with the fortune teller, there are lots of purples and pinks as if to convey we’re in a magical place.
My only gripe is the chaos of the city feels a bit lost amongst the answers and testimony given. The idea of Gotham on fire and people taking the streets is compellingly raising the stakes for Slam to figure out who killed the baby, but it’s unclear what the implication of it all is. One gets the sense everyone will just go home the next day. We get one page of violence in the street and plenty from the radio, but the cultural impact doesn’t seem believable enough.
Expect meaty answers in Gotham City: Year One as the series barrels toward its finish. As penultimate issues go, King and Hester deliver plenty of answers while keeping you second-guessing every truth, setting up a showdown that has been brewing ever since Slam met Mrs. Wayne.
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