Richard sits hunched in the dark, well away from any window. He crushes a cockroach with his bare hand, swallows it, and vomits it straight back up.
Gotham by Daylight starts there. His phone rings, and Anna is on the line, anxious, asking when he’ll return to a certain church. Richard offers excuses. Something bright and glowing closes in on him, and the scene cuts out on his scream.
The cockroach goes unexplained, and it’ll stay on your mind for a while. By the cut, it’s plain that Richard hides in the dark for a reason. The danger in this story is the light.
WEBTOON and DC Comics revealed Gotham by Daylight at New York Comic Con, and it goes live today, October 19, 2026, at 5:00 PM PT / 8:00 PM ET. Readers get the first three episodes free, with another eight available through Fast Pass. The run is planned at 45 weekly episodes, which makes it the longest story Duke Thomas has ever headlined.
Here, daylight is the danger
Most Gotham horror happens in alleys at 2 a.m. This series moves it outside at midday. Its central creature is built entirely of light, and it appears to take over its victims and wear their skin so it can pass as human.
The art is designed around that idea. Ekass Eks works in the clean, readable style Western WEBTOON readers will recognize, with simple character designs and heavy linework. Paula Fidelis and Felico Studio handle the colors, and they supply the unease: hot, saturated tones and hard glare across every outdoor panel.
Midsommar, with its sun-blasted, painterly dread, is the comparison that comes to mind first. It only holds up if the series keeps using the glare deliberately. Should it slide into a gimmick a dozen episodes in, the comparison won’t survive.
WEBTOON has had more disturbing openings than the cockroach scene. Nikki’s “cat sandwich” sequence in Obsession still tops it. Richard’s dark room does give your eyes a brief rest before the brightness hits, though, and the contrast pays off.
Readers who don’t care for WEBTOON’s style may need some time to adjust. DC fans on the app likely know Batman: Wayne Family Adventures, Zatanna & the Ripper, Red Hood: Outlaws and Vixen: NYC. Gotham by Daylight is nastier than any of them.
Everyone in the support group is hiding something
The series takes its name from a grief counseling group. Duke attends to deal with ongoing trauma, since his parents lost their sanity after a certain Joker incident. He’s an active hero, and he still shows up for the noon meetings.
Enter Richard, a priest who runs the group. He brings Damian Wayne along with him.
Damian joins to watch over Duke, in disguise and going by “Huang.” Duke sees through it immediately. He can read a person’s “aura,” which means he sees the particular way light reflects off each individual.
The members are obviously keeping secrets. All of them know something is stalking Gotham in daylight. None of them knows how far it reaches, or none of them is ready to say so yet.
Then a creature made purely of light strikes. It outplays a Robin trained by the League of Assassins and inflicts immediate, serious harm on both body and mind. Without giving much away, the series doesn’t seem very worried about convincing you it’s about to kill 13-year-old Damian in violent fashion.
A long run for Duke at last
Duke has led major storylines before, first in We Are Robin and later in Batman and the Signal. At 45 weekly episodes, this one runs longer than either. Writer Mike Birchall doesn’t write him as a substitute Batman. This Duke is unsure about being fully drawn into Batman’s war on crime, and with Damian aged 13, the story appears to take place early in Duke’s stint as the Signal, Gotham’s daytime protector.
“My two strongest inspirations were Batman: The Animated Series, with its many non-Batman-centric stories told so beautifully, and the Junji Ito manga Uzumaki, which features an otherworldly threat arriving in a quiet town and affecting its citizens. What resulted is a horror anthology series that focuses on the everyday people of Gotham City, but in that I also found a throughline that focuses on one of my favorite characters, Duke Thomas.
Duke lives in Gotham City, he is one of these citizens himself, and I wanted to highlight that connection to these people that makes him different than other Robins. At the same time, he’s a horror protagonist now, and I’m going to be running him through a gauntlet that’s unlike anything he’s faced before. People might think I hate him at first, but my belief is that you can’t be a real hero until you’ve faced a real threat. I sincerely hope this is seen as one of the definitive Duke Thomas stories one day,” Birchall said.
Birchall also gives plenty of room to what makes Duke cool, beginning with his powers and the way he and Damian team up across the first three chapters. Duke reads the traces light leaves behind to look into the past. The series quietly hints that he’ll one day see the future as well.
That makes him the natural hero to spot the Daylight threat, which shows up soon after posing as a harmless human. Duke can sense what it is. He’s still exposed to it, and episode three leaves him in a bad spot.
Group therapy with a Twin Peaks streak
Details that seem harmless early on begin to count. Group members turn out to have their own abilities and motives, and any one of them could be replaced and impersonated by the creature, or could end up being the person who stops it. Crowd a set of quirky, clashing people into a vulnerable room and you get something like a pocket-sized Twin Peaks. You’ll want to follow each of them and work out whose side they’re on.
“Getting to highlight the ordinary people of Gotham has been so fun and fulfilling as well. It’s so easy to say ‘why would anyone live in Gotham?’ but when you break it down, that’s actually such an interesting question, and there are, of course, many good reasons. What’s more interesting to me, though, is ‘ how do people live in Gotham?’. How do they get by? How do they support each other? How do they react to crazy, cosmic-level threats? Putting these characters through their own horror stories is, to me at least, the perfect way to explore these questions,” Birchall said.
The pacing is good. Title cards arrive with better-than-average cinematic timing, and if the series keeps that up, each one will land the way an Invincible episode intro does.
Plenty is still being held back. Duke is a metahuman with a long list of powers, and these episodes barely use them. More is clearly on the way as the Daylight threat spreads through Gotham. With a weekly release schedule, expect lots of cliffhangers over the coming weeks and months.
Its case for #1
The creature looks impossible to kill and keeps spreading, taking over or killing anyone who gets in its way. Hints suggest it’s steering everyone toward a park, and that the park is what it’s really after.
Gotham by Daylight opens strong. If the next few weeks match the first, it has a real chance at #1 on WEBTOON’s superhero charts. WEBTOON started in South Korea under Naver in 2004 and turned the vertical-scroll comic into its signature format. That format fits a story that keeps dropping out of bright daylight into something horrible underneath.
Batman is gone and the city is lit up. The light was already moving toward Richard through the dark before it found him.