The most shocking thing about MIDNIGHT, Marvel’s new publishing initiative, launched with so much fanfare and ballyhoo that my local comic book store in the heart of Paris’ Quartier Latin had TWO LED signs bearing its name on display, is how little it does to justify itself. Where its two obvious influences, those being the 2023 relaunch of the Ultimate universe and DC Comics’ Absolute line, pulled between one and four comics’ worth of work to create a context around themselves, MIDNIGHT only gives you one sentence, printed atop every single one of its credits and recap pages. It goes like this: “Dark. Unpredictable. Unmissable. The Midnight Universe draws in longtime fans and newcomers alike to enter a terrifying new world in which anything can happen.”

Now, I don’t know how many sentences you’ve read in your lifetime, and I don’t want to assume you’ve read these ones either. But what we have here is not a very good sentence. It wants to be bold, ambitious and enticing, but it ends up reading as third-rate press release copy, betrayed by its presumptions of allure and popularity, that immediately get undercut by its use of the words “fans and newcomers alike”, directly pulled from the base vocabulary of the lowly demographic-obsessed marketing worm. It gives the entire enterprise the aura of trend-chasing hollowness, and in turn that sets those comics up for failure from the very first page. Which is surprising because, unlike G.O.D.S. and Imperial, Marvel’s most recent high-profile failures, they are not being edited by Tom Brevoort.

Instead, they reunite Jonathan Hickman with Jordan D. White, then the editor of House of X and Powers of X, now just helping out around Marvel with the Hulk comics and the just-finished Venom crossovers and whatnot. All three comics that were published this past Wednesday are molded in that shape first glimpsed in The Black Monday Murders, with one-page prose interludes transcribing documents and occasionally providing data. As such, they’re also longer than usual, and as a consequence they all demand an eyebrow-raising five American dollars and ninety-nine American cents, or nearest currency equivalent, of your hard-earned cash money, which is a demand Marvel really think they are in a position to make at this point in time, I say, with sarcasm so loud I feel the need to call it out in the prose.

That’s what’s similar, now onto what’s different. Much like DC did with the Absolute line, Midnight arrives on store shelves with its publisher’s own Holy Trinity. In Marvel terms, that’s Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and X-Men, which is the correct way of looking at things, sorry to you all, fans of Avengers. But where Absolute’s comics all played around the concept of symbolic inversions, each Midnight comic pursues the goal of reinterpreting Marvel in its own way. The advantages are fairly obvious: you have three comics as ontologically different from one another as they are from the rest of Marvel’s offerings. The drawbacks are just as predictable: there’s no sense of place or any kind of thematic throughline. My final observation on the line as a whole is that this sacrifice wasn’t worth it, even if the comics had been good.

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And that means it’s time to dirty our hands with the messy duty of critique. For sentimental and historical reasons, I chose to start with Midnight: Fantastic Four #1, a comic that somehow fails to deliver on both the Fantastic AND the Four. First and foremost, the bulk of its page count centers around Reed Richards, reinterpreted as the Lovecraftian figure of the brilliant but broken scientist who had an errant glimpse at the giant (and also purple, hint hint) thing on the other side and who is now doomed to spiral into eldritch madness, and also a pill addiction. His journey into academic disgrace and cosmic foreshadowing gets charmlessly interrupted when the other three main characters of the comic show up, tell him he was onto something, and set about to enable one another’s worst impulses, presumably. Yes, Kev Walker is tremendous at drawing strange cosmic occurrences, and he will provide deformed bodies and other horrors at a steady clip, but Ben Percy’s script never quite finds the spark, whether it’s in the action (nonexistent) or in the drama (barely even there), that would keep one interested. It’s not especially urgent, nor is it relevant. But it isn’t bad either! It’s just there, and when that’s one of the only three comics you’re releasing this week, it cannot be enough.

Happily, Midnight: Spider-Man #1 delivers on the swings, even if those are only metaphorical. Yes, it’s very much the origin story of Spider-Man, with the bright kid, the betrayed uncle, the tragedy and, eventually, the spider. But interestingly, Philip Kennedy Johnson and ScieTronc (it’s a pun, he’s French) put those elements in dialogue with the Japanese school of horror-tinged Shōnen manga. The plot itself, with the evil organization of sadistic freaks experimenting on unwitting subjects with powers great and terrible, will immediately recall Shotaro Ishinomori’s Kamen Rider, despite lacking in fights, quick bursts of exposition, or a motorcycle. The style, meanwhile, all in hardcore body horror, goofy character expressions and bawdy focus on women’s anatomies, is as close to Go Nagai and Devilman as something under the Disney umbrella is going to get. Pair that with aspects of contemporary social commentary of the kind you could find in Tatsuki Fujimoto’s Chainsaw Man, and you should have a hit on your hands. Instead, it’s a very boring comic about people having meetings at work and dead bodies. Yeah, those bodies are fucked up. In that way AND in that way. But when you pay good money for a Spider-Man comic it better have some Spider-Man in it, you know?

Meanwhile yeah, obviously: Midnight: X-Men #1 fucking ruled. It’s a Hickman comic where people talk like this. And sometimes -- when a dramatic pause needs to be made, they talk like this. It’s loaded top to bottom with self-reference and trademarks, pages with four panels of the same size going down, title cards, and yes, two people sat at a bench discussing the state of The Dream. But at its core, despite being about X-Men that are vampires (a premise so old and lame you’d think it was the current editor of the X-Men line,) it is about that ever-so-important-to-the-whole-series conflict between the old ways and the new ways, with the scary twist that there are even older ways out there, of the kind that feast on blood and fear the Sun, and they may have co-opted the new ways into something violent and terrible. Ears might perk up at this description, recognizing in this statement the ideas of Kieron Gillen’s stay on Immortal X-Men. Based on the few references dropped in the rest of the comic, that is entirely on purpose, which is cool as hell. But neither this, nor the grand and superbly evocative pictures Matteo Della Fonte drops on every page, are why I like this comic more than any other I’ve spoken of this far. My case is far simpler than that: this is a comic where shit happens. Gambit shows up, throws a card at some fanged fool, and that fool blows the heck up. Action, and plenty of it, to balance Nightcrawler and the Pope talking scripture. What a concept. So yeah, run, don’t walk. It’s extremely good.

And yet, I tell you with the same delight every horror writer feels when going for a particularly nasty twist in their tale, it’s not even my favorite horror-tinged superhero comic to have been released this week. That’s because of a comic called The Demon #1, published by DC Comics. Let’s cut to the quick in what has already been a very long newsletter: I haven’t read an issue of a comic book as generous as this in a minute, with cool new ideas on every single page. It’s not just that James Harren finds a compelling new angle on the continuing story of Jason Blood and the demon Etrigan, although yeah he does that, he reimagines the pair as a lone street wandering demon hunter and the shadow self he keeps at bay. But its most exciting trick is a sort of unified theory of Jack Kirby’s comics, lovingly weaved from instruments and devices used across the whole oeuvre. There are the monsters of course, colorful shambling creatures of every shape, but you’ll also find takes on the near-future satire of O.M.A.C., dastardly bickering villains with conspiracies worthy of The New Gods, and even flashes of the epic grandeur of the Fantastic Four, to name but a few things you should really track down and read. If you love comics, and want to love comics more, this is what you should be reading above all else.

Finally: this is long enough as is, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t get a word in for Jonah Hex and the Shadow of Death #1, a superbly realized piece of cowboy action given the eerie glow of ghostly guilt, its panels methodically lingering on those ever-so-unique monsters of the American West. It’s harsh and it’s dry and it’s damn near hopeless, which is as it ought to be. It’s a damn good time, there, now we’re done.

HEY! Thank you for your patience, I missed doing this a lot! I don’t know what’s next or when’s next, but if I just let it flow through me it’s easier to have a finished something (my drafts are SAD.) See you when I see you, in the mean time,

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