Gotham is about to face a problem that cannot be punched, investigated from a rooftop, or solved by waiting for a signal in the sky. Gotham By Daylight, a new DC horror anthology written by Mike Birchall, is set to debut on Webtoon on October 19. Its unnerving premise turns one of Batman’s most familiar visual ideas inside out: Gotham is trapped in perpetual daylight.
That might initially sound less menacing than the city’s usual rain-soaked, moonlit alleys. But the sunlight in this story is not safety. It is the condition surrounding a mysterious supernatural menace called The Daylight. And the people confronting it are not Gotham’s customary costumed defenders. The series specifically follows ordinary residents trying to survive a threat that does not sleep, in a city with no Batman swinging in to save anyone and no Bat-Signal promising help.
It is a sharp setup for a horror anthology. Gotham normally operates as a superhero setting where an extraordinary response is always somewhere nearby, even when things become catastrophically strange. Gotham By Daylight removes that expected safety net and asks what the city looks like from street level when the impossible arrives anyway.
A horror story about the people who live in Gotham
Birchall is also the creator of Webtoon’s Everything is Fine, and has framed the new series around the question of daily life in a place as notoriously dangerous as Gotham. Rather than treating the city’s citizens as background figures waiting to be rescued, the anthology places their choices, relationships, fear and resilience at its center.
“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?”
That distinction matters. “Why would anyone live there?” is an outside-looking-in question, often played as a joke about a comic-book city’s unreasonable crime rate. “How do people live there?” is more useful for horror, because it focuses on systems of support and the practical decisions made under pressure. If the city cannot return to night, people still have to find shelter, make contact with others, decide who to trust and adapt to a danger whose rules may not be clear.
Birchall’s emphasis on community suggests that Gotham By Daylight is interested in more than isolated scares. The premise can accommodate intimate stories of neighbors, families, coworkers or strangers forced into uneasy cooperation. It can also explore the opposite: what happens when fear splinters those connections. Neither outcome is guaranteed by the announced details, but the stated interest in how people support one another points toward a human-scale approach to an enormous threat.
What “anthology” can mean for Gotham By Daylight
An anthology is a series made up of multiple distinct stories rather than one uninterrupted plot following a single protagonist. The format is particularly suited to Gotham By Daylight’s concept. A citywide condition such as endless daylight can be viewed from many social positions, neighborhoods and personal circumstances without requiring every installment to chase the same lead character.
The supplied description does not establish how long the individual stories will be, whether characters will recur, or whether The Daylight’s origin will be explained. Those are meaningful unknowns. What is clear is that the anthology label gives the creative team room to present Gotham as a lived-in place rather than merely a stage for one hero’s adventure.
It also gives horror a natural advantage. Horror often becomes more effective when readers understand what a character has to lose before the supernatural element disrupts it. A broad anthology can make room for different kinds of loss and survival: not just a fight against a monster, but the terror of a community’s routines no longer functioning. The endless daylight premise is especially effective in that respect because it turns a supposedly ordinary condition into something inescapable.
Daylight as the threat, not the relief
In conventional visual shorthand, daylight exposes danger. It makes it easier to see the path ahead and harder for a lurking threat to remain hidden. Gotham By Daylight reverses that shorthand by making unending daylight itself part of the horror. The name of the menace reinforces the reversal: The Daylight is not merely the setting’s weather or lighting. It is the supernatural threat the citizens must confront.
This does not mean readers should assume a specific mythology or set of powers for The Daylight. No such details have been announced. But it does establish a powerful thematic tension. Gotham’s darkness has long been associated with danger, secrecy and the space where vigilantes work. Here, the permanent absence of darkness signals that the familiar order of the city has already failed.
Taking Batman out of the immediate rescue equation is equally important. This is not presented as a Batman mystery where the reader waits for Bruce Wayne to identify the culprit and restore normality. The lack of the Bat-Signal changes the scale of responsibility. For the people in the story, there may be no reliable sign that expert help is coming. Survival becomes a collective, immediate problem.
That perspective complements other recent Gotham-set comic material that has leaned into pressure-cooker locations and civilians caught in the city’s hazards. Readers following a Gotham Central story built around a threatened last train can see the shared appeal: Gotham is often most flexible when its infrastructure and inhabitants matter as much as its iconic vigilante.
Why the Webtoon format fits the premise
Gotham By Daylight arrives as a Webtoon Original, positioning a DC horror concept inside a platform built around vertical digital comics. While the announcement does not detail the series’ update schedule or chapter length, the format itself is worth noting. Vertical scrolling can control pacing differently from a printed page: a creator can place a reveal farther down the screen, use a long empty space to build anticipation, or make readers scroll into an image rather than view it all at once.
Those tools are not guarantees of quality, and there is no announced information about the artistic execution of Gotham By Daylight. Still, they are a natural match for horror. Suspense is often about controlling when a reader receives information. In a story about a threat defined by ceaseless light, vertical composition could also potentially play with repetition, distance and the oppressive sensation of a sky that never changes.
The project also expands the range of Gotham stories available in the Webtoon space. Batman: Wayne Family Adventures, the Eisner-nominated slice-of-life series by CRC Payne, is heading into Season 5. The two concepts share Gotham and Batman-related characters, but their stated modes are strikingly different: one is a continuing slice-of-life series, while the other is a horror anthology designed around regular citizens and a supernatural crisis. That variety is useful for readers who want DC settings without every story delivering the same genre experience.
The wider Webtoon slate
The Gotham By Daylight reveal came alongside several other Webtoon updates. In addition to the new season of Batman: Wayne Family Adventures, The Egg Project is returning for Season 2. Creator amyahue!’s romance follows Cherry and Riku, who remain assigned to co-parent an egg for their senior project. The series has accumulated more than 18.7 million views.
Belle Morte, an adaptation of Belle Higgins’ Wattpad novel, is also on the way. Its world treats vampires as major celebrities while humans are paid blood donors. That is a distinctly different vampire framing from Gotham By Daylight’s cosmic-leaning threat, but it shows the breadth of supernatural storytelling in the upcoming lineup.
Elsewhere, My Dear Watson from heiMO launches as a Webtoon Original on October 31. The series won the “Most Gripping” genre award in the 2025 Webcomic Legends contest. Its protagonist, Cat Chen, can rewind time whenever they die, against a backdrop of rising violent crime.
Additional previously announced Originals being previewed include Covenant Once Given, a Webcomic Legends contest winner; The Witch’s Mirror, the second series from Star Catcher creator Ro-taniah; Love, Theodora, the second series from Not So Silent creator ROSEOAK; and Romeo and Romeo, a royal romance from Love Bites creator Alicia Wallace.
What readers know—and what remains under wraps
For now, the essential pitch for Gotham By Daylight is concise: an original DC horror anthology, written by Mike Birchall, in which endless daylight traps Gotham and ordinary people face The Daylight without Batman’s intervention. It is a premise built less around lore completion than atmosphere, vulnerability and how a population reacts when its world no longer makes sense.
There are still major unanswered questions, including the specific citizens whose stories will be told, the nature of The Daylight, the relationship between anthology installments and whether any familiar DC figures will appear beyond the important fact that Batman is not the rescuer. Those unknowns are part of what the October 19 debut will need to answer.
What has been established is the series’ intended angle: Gotham’s residents are not just collateral in another superhuman crisis. They are the protagonists. In a city defined by a hero who operates in darkness, Gotham By Daylight finds its horror in what happens when the light never goes away.
