Superhero comics from the Big Two often fall into two categories: comics that are new reader-friendly and can be picked up by anyone, and comics that require extensive knowledge of the intricate goings-on of the shared universe. Gotham City Monsters #5 falls into the latter category, with its references to the City of Bane storyline, the hole in the Source Wall, Perpetua, and even ideas from Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers. This might not prevent it from being a good comic, but given the issue’s other problems, it certainly doesn’t help.

The issue begins with Frankenstein and his team battling The Monster League of Evil, a squad that is basically the Universal Classic Monsters (this means there are two Frankensteins; this might be multiverse stuff, but it’s never clearly explained). Once the villains are dispatched, the team goes to Slaughter Swamp to rescue a pair of teachers from the clutches of Melmoth, who wants to kill them in order to...do something? That has to do with the Source Wall and Perpetua? It’s unclear.

Writer Steve Orlando knows his DC lore, that’s for certain. It’s been a strength of quite a bit of his other DC books, from including Extraño in Midnighter or weaving a tapestry of the future in Electric Warriors. It’s a liability in this series, however, because he seems to be coasting on continuity minutiae rather than crafting a coherent story. 

The art by Amancay Nahuelpan is passable, though sometimes it’s too busy to be really pleasing to look at. The coloring by Trish Mulvihill is mostly competent. However, it says something about her use of muddy, muted colors that whenever Batwoman is in a panel, the red draws the eye even if she isn’t the focus of the image. Some of the lettering by Tom Napolitano is difficult to read, including an amateurish instance where the reading order of balloons and captions is obviously incorrect.

Gotham City Monsters #5 is a bloated mess. Worse, it’s a bloated mess being published by DC Comics, a company that just celebrated its 85th year of publishing comics this past week. Editorial at DC should have known better than to let this go to press.

Grade: D