The Grand Poobahs at Marvel saw that DC is killing it, sales-wise, with the Absolute line, so Dan Buckely (Marvel’s Executive Editor) and my old bête noire, Stephen Wacker (Marvel’s E-i-C), called Editor Jordan White into the offices and whined, “We’re the House of Ideas!!!! Why can’t we sell shit like this?!?!? Make it so, or Tom Brevoort will find you and do what he does!!!!” White, not being a dummy (and being justly terrified of Brevoort, whose powers are legendary), said, a bit off-the-cuff, “Ummmm … Marvel superheroes in horror comics?” and Wacker and Buckley leapt from their plush couches (upholstered with the delicate skins of newborn babies, you understand) and said, “Holy shit, nobody’s ever done that before!!! DO IT!!!!” And lo, the “Marvel Midnight” initiative was birthed into the world! I’m sure that’s how it went down.
This week, Marvel cleared the decks of everything they usually publish and fired up the Marvel Midnight Machine, as the only three books they brought out were the three books of the new initiative. You know what Jason Bateman would say about that:
I mean, my store was pretty crowded, and my retailer ordered a lot (including the fuckton — that’s a technical term — of variant covers) and had sold quite a few by day’s end, so … good job, Marvel? The three comics, in case you didn’t know, are Midnight Fantastic Four, Midnight Spider-Man (no longer Amazing or Spectacular, sadly), and Midnight X-Men (no longer Uncanny). And I bought all three, and here’s what I think about them! (I should point out that each of these is six (6!!!!) bucks, but each is 32 pages. I’m sure Marvel will lower the price when the page count comes down. Right, Marvel? RIGHT? Hello?)
I’m doing these in the best way to order something, and that’s alphabetically, so the FF is up first. I read this first, too, because I respect the order of the alphabet! This is from Benjamin Percy, Kev Walker, Frank D’Armata, and Joe Sabino, and as I read it, I began to get a sinking feeling in my stomach, which did not go away as I read the other issues in the launch and which I’ll return to in due time. We begin with a lighthouse on a cliff in a storm that gets zapped by purple lightning, which makes something in the cave below it glow purple, but we don’t return to this, because Percy is playing the long game, yo! Then we move to the New York Institute of Technology, where a young-ish and disheveled Reed Richards is being dismissed because he’s doing some hinky things with university funds and equipment. That night, he breaks back into his laboratory and tries to continue his experiments, and he’s found by his research assistant, Victor, who wants to help. Oh, and Reed is addicted to some kind of pills that makes his eyes turn purple and seems to keep him from noticing anything around him, because instead of following proper safety protocols when doing his experiment, he just turns on his weirdo machine while Victor is trying to adjust something, frying the shit out of our sweet Latverian RA and giving him a pretty good reason to turn into a super-villain. Luckily for Reed, kajillionaire Sue Storm, who keeps launching rockets that explode before they reach space, has the juice to get him out of jail, so she takes him to her futuristic base in California and shows him that a Cthulhu-like monster is somehow blocking the rockets from leaving the atmosphere. She thinks the monster came from the Negative Zone, which is what Reed was trying to access when Victor got blowed the fuck up, and she wants him to open a gate to it. I’m sure nothing can go wrong with that!
In Midnight Spider-Man, Philip Kennedy Johnson, ScieTronc (yes, really), Neeraj Menon, and Joe Caramagna bring us a story of 17-year-old Peter Parker (his age is important, believe you me), who’s being raised, it seems, solely by his uncle, Ben. On the first few pages, we get a flashback, as 6-year-old Peter comes home with his parents from a vacation and discovers that while he made sure that his cat had enough food and water for the week, but he forgot to check if the cat was inside, and he finds it in the garden, rotting and maggot-infested. Oh dear. His father, who probably wasn’t winning any Dad Of The Year Awards before shuffling off this mortal coil, tells his SIX-YEAR-OLD CHILD:
The dog was just bigger, Peter. Power makes monsters, every time. The stronger something is, the more monstrous it becomes. And monsters just do what they do.
That’s a father comforting his son after the son caused the death of his cat, I’ll remind you. I mean, sure, you don’t want to sugar-coat death with children, I get that, but fuck, Richard, what the fuck? Of course, this bon mot is absolutely relevant later, and of course, Peter remembers it verbatim, even though he was, you know, six years old and a bit upset by the fact that he found his cat’s corpse ripped apart out in the yard.
Anyway, a decade later, Peter is about to turn 18, and it appears he’s already in college and able to be Curt Connors’s RA (lots of pub for the research assistants in Midnight Marvel!) even though he’s only 17, but sure. He takes care of Ben because Ben is sick-ish (he’s well enough to drive Peter around and work, but he needs medication for some issue), and Ben is suing Oscorp for something, which Peter thinks is frivolous but which Ben says is important because you should always do what’s right even if it drives you into bankruptcy and kills you. Armed thugs from H.A.M.M.E.R. are rounding up a homeless dude while they’re driving by, but they don’t notice. Meanwhile, Oscorp is performing experiments on their employees, trying to turn them into … I guess Hulks (gamma radiation is involved), but they’re also filling them with mutant growth hormone, so I guess they’re just being sadistic for the hell of it. The results are, naturally, horrific. Felicia Hardy visits campus and offers Peter a job, because she knows he’s so very smart, and he just zips right off with her to Oscorp, telling Ben on the phone that they need the money and maybe he can change things from the inside (as he’s very aware that Oscorp is shady). He meets Hank Pym at the facility, which is nice for him, and Felicia bullies him into signing their contract, which isn’t very nice. When he gets home that night, something horrible happens to both Ben and him. Peter gets spidery, of course, but I don’t have high hopes for Ben’s survival. Oh dear.
Then we come to Midnight X-Men, which is by Jonathan Hickman, Matteo Della Fonte, Arthur Hesli, and Cory Petit. Cardinal Styker arrives in New York to consult with Bishop Kurt Wagner, basically to give him a heads-up that the pope has giving the a-ok for Stryker and his goons to kill vampires. As a lot of mutants are now vampires, this does not make Kurt happy. Meanwhile, a group of humans who are apparently somehow involved in some kind of organization finds a bunch of coffins hooked up to machines, but before they can do anything about it, the vampires inside them wake up and start killing. Quicksilver witnesses it and zips back to Magneto, who leads some kind of mutant group, and tells him about it. Magneto can’t violate a “truce” that everyone is talking about, so he sends someone unaffiliated with his group, which turns out to be Fucking Gambit and some other mutants. They fight the vampires, kill them all, and notice that one human is still alive, because, as it turns out, she’s a mutant (but doesn’t know it yet). Before they can do anything about it, Scott Summers shows up, blasts Empath’s legs off (ok, that’s pretty cool), and rescues the girl (who, of course, is Hope) by blasting through the concrete above and letting sunlight in (killing Empath and burning Fucking Gambit, but not killing him because Remy is too damned popular with troglodytes who think he’s a good character). Finally, Ororo visits Kurt and he tells her that Stryker is there to kill her and her mutant-vampire kind (“empyres” because “m” for “mutant” and “pyre” because “y” is kewler than “i”). Ororo does not seem worried.
Ok, let’s nit-pick some things before I write more about the quality of these things. Percy really leans into Reed’s dicknishness, which I can appreciate, as I’ve been banging the drum for everyone understanding that Reed Richards is one of the Marvel Universe’s biggest monsters for years. Percy seems to want Sue to match Reed’s dicknishness, which I guess is fine, and I imagine there will be some hate-fucking on both parts in the near future, but the problem with making these characters such dicks is the temptation to redeem them, and I hope the fact that this is a “horror universe” will help make Percy resist that temptation. We’ll see. I wonder when Ben and Johnny switched places — in the original story, Ben is the smart, engineer-y type and Johnny is the waste of space, but somewhere along the way, Johnny became more competent and Ben became a joke (I know, I have read very little FF over the years, so that’s just my impression). In this comic, Johnny is the pilot and Ben is the (mostly) silent bodyguard, and it’s an interesting switch. I don’t really have any nits to pick about the X-Men book except that Fucking Gambit is in it, but the Spider-Man book bugs me. Peter remembering exactly what his ghoulish father told him is one of them, but also: his parents didn’t think to check on the cat before they left? I get it — teach the little whippersnapper about responsibility, and it was his cat. He was also, as I’ve noted, six fucking years old. You didn’t think to say, “Hey, Pete, let’s make sure the cat is good before we leave?” Plus, you don’t leave a cat for ten days with an untended litter box — come on, Parkers! All this makes me think that the Parkers were terrible, terrible parents, which means Richard’s “monsters exist in the world, Peter, and your life sucks because of it” speech is probably the absolute best he can do. Fuck ’em. Then, Peter is obsessed with money, which, sure — his uncle is sick somehow and they don’t have a lot to take care of him. He signs a contract with the same company that his uncle is suing, and yes, he thinks the lawsuit is foolish because they’ll never win (which he believes thanks to Dad’s cheery dead cat speech), but … I mean, really, Pete? And it’s probably going to be pertinent because Johnson makes such a big deal about it, but Peter signs a contract with Oscorp. He is, of course, underage (by a day, sure, but still), so he can’t legally sign that contract without an adult present. It doesn’t seem terribly relevant in light of what happens to him at the end of the book, but Johnson does make it a thing, so I can’t imagine it won’t come back around. Sorry, just some nits to pick!
So, what do we think of these comics? Well, they’re fine. Much like the Absolute line, they offer us some superficial differences that will gradually flatten out to a standard template, I think, because you can already see it happening (which is where the sinking feeling in my stomach came from). There’s Doom, there’s a Negative Zone, there’s a spider biting people, there’s a (probably, although perhaps not quite yet) dead uncle, there are humans hating mutants even though they might have cause because the mutants are, you know, vampires. Sue and Reed don’t want to study the Negative Zone, they want to go into it, because they’re stupid. Peter is greedy because he’s stupid. All the mutants … well, none of them act stupidly yet, but I’m sure it’s coming. You throw on a gloss of body horror (because most superhero stories, especially in the Marvel Universe, involve body horror in some way), and hey presto! you have a new universe. You might think I’m bitterly cynical, and you would not be wrong, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to read cool comics and I don’t want anything new to succeed. I can just see the pattern here, even if some things are tweaked a bit. Reed is a huge dick, not just a regular dick. Johnny has artificial legs, so he will eventually fly. Peter learns that with great power comes great responsibility in an even harder way than in the Original Recipe Universe (his uncle can’t just get killed by a burglar; he has to suffer). Mutants are even more segregated from society because some of them like to drink blood, and humans are even more aggressive about hunting them down. It’s fine, and if Marvel is truly committed to the horror part of this conceit, they might be interesting to a degree, but there’s nothing fundamentally different about them. They’re just telling the same stories with a slightly different kink to them. You know, like the Absolute Universe.
I’m also a bit bummed about the talent on the books. Percy and Johnson are decent enough writers, but I don’t pay enough attention to Marvel, I guess, to know if they’re superstars. Scott Snyder is, and I guess Hickman is at his level, so that’s the comparison there. Midnight Fantastic Four corresponds loosely to Absolute Wonder Woman, I guess, in that Percy and Thompson are both good writers (Thompson is better, and not because I’ve “known” Kelly for years and think she’s awesome, but because I think she’s stealthily one of the best writers working right now), but they haven’t quite reached the level of super-duper-stardom that Snyder and Hickman have. However, both of those books have artists on them that break the “house style” of DC and Marvel, and that’s nothing but a good thing. Sherman, of course, is one of the more inventive artists working right now, while Walker has a cool, cartoony style that does not conform to the smooth, thin-line style that Marvel seems to prefer. His work here is tremendous — he uses a lot of blacks and thick inks to emphasize the darkness of this world, and his Cthulhu thing at the end is very cool. D’Armata, of all people (Our Former Dread Lord and Master always liked D’Armata, but I was always of the opinion that his work in the early years of digital coloring, back in the ‘Oughts and early ‘Teens, was doing a lot to ruin comics art — he’s gotten better since then), makes sure that the book is not overwhelmed with darkness, striking a good balance with Walker’s heavy blacks with some luminous hues that highlight some of the weirdness. It’s a nice-looking comic.
For the other two books, Marvel chose distinctly not superstars, and I wonder why. Marvel obviously wants to tap into that sweet, sweet manga market without, you know, actually doing what manga does well (large chunks of relatively inexpensive comics that the kids can read — remember, this is 6 bucks for 32 pages), so I get why they gave Midnight Spider-Man to ScieTronc, as their art is very much in the manga style, but here’s the thing: that seems like a bold but possibly foolish move, given that it does not appear that ScieTronc has done much in comics at all, at least from what I can divine, and this is a big launch for Marvel. I mean, consider their other two big Spider-Man launches: Ditko had been around for some years and had proven that he could handle whatever Lee threw at him, and Bagley had been around maybe even longer than Ditko and had proven he could handle whatever Bendis threw at him. What has ScieTronc proven? It seems that DC, at least, is trying to emphasize the continuity of creative teams these days, and maybe Marvel will, too, but giving this high-profile book to a fairly unproven talent seems dicey. Maybe it will work! The art itself is fine — very manga-y, as I noted, but the body horror parts are quite cool. I don’t have any problem with it, just that I wonder how many issues we’ll get before there’s a replacement. Meanwhile, Hickman ought to have the juice to get someone BIG on Midnight X-Men, but he gets Della Fonte, who has the same problem as ScieTronc, in that he’s done a little work for Marvel but nothing to indicate he’s ready for a major book. Plus, Della Fonte suffers from “Marvel house style” syndrome, in that his work is just bland. His lines are a bit thin but not loosey-goosey like ScieTronc’s, so we don’t get any kind of kineticism with it. It’s technically competent, but it lacks the creepiness of Walker’s work or the pizazz of ScieTronc’s work. Hesli’s muted coloring means that the dark scenes feel murkier than they do than in Midnight FF, which is not a good thing. Ironically, the colors hearken back to the Decade of D’Armata, when the coloring hadn’t quite caught up to the digital penciling and colorists often bludgeoned the lines into submission, blurring everything and making it all look somewhat static. Given that this issue features the most action of any of the three, it’s too bad that Della Fonte and Hesli aren’t quite up to the task. Once again, Hickman seems to have the juice to get someone from the top shelf. I get Marvel wanting some manga vibes for the Spidey book, but what does Della Fonte bring to the table and couldn’t Marvel chuck some money at a someone with a bigger name? Over at DC, Dragotta is going nuts on AbsBats, Sherman is doing wonderful things on AbsWoW, Rodriguez was phenomenal on AbsMars, and Albuquerque is killing it on AbsGA. Rafa Sandoval on AbsSupes would be the closest comparison, as Sandoval didn’t do anything too snazzy on that first issue, but Sandoval is a better artist and had a longer track record, so the comparison doesn’t quite work. I know on some of the second-tier Absolute titles DC got people who might not move the needle, but this is one of the Big Three Launch Titles, and I don’t know if Della Fonte can really cut it. I know DC tends to have better talent these days, but Marvel does seem to be putting a big push behind this, and you’re telling me that the big artists, who mostly try to work for themselves these days (and more power to them) wouldn’t be tempted by the sweet residuals that I’m sure Dragotta and Sherman are enjoying right now? If I’m Buckley, I’m breaking out my olde-skool Rolodex and starting with Mike Mignola and working my way down from there. If you’re not going to Go Big, you might as well Go Home.
Anyway, that’s my (far more than) two cents. The books were fine, but like a lot of Marvel and DC’s attempts to revitalize their characters with new twists, it felt like putting a fresh coat of the same paint on an old house. I always welcome these kinds of things, and I’ll probably get the first trades of all of these, but I can see the way forward, and it looks like the old way, which, I mean, who cares? Good for Marvel, aping DC’s big success from the past few years, because if it gets more people reading comics, I’m all for it. We’ll see if this has the runaway success of AbsBats and the others. If it does, I guess my nit-picking means nothing!!!!
Midnight Fantastic Four: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
Midnight Spider-Man: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
Midnight X-Men: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
What did y’all think of them? Did they get your blood pumping like the olden days of yore?!?!?
