If there’s one thing comics love, it’s presenting alternate versions of classic characters. Whether that’s in an alternate timeline/future story, like X-Men’s “Age of Apocalypse,”or a hypothetical non-canonical tale, like “Elseworlds” or “What If,”writers love to dream up new ways of interpreting their favorite characters. While I don’t always gravitate towards these, the recent success of the Absolute universe made me receptive to them in a way I haven’t been since the early 2000s launch of the Ultimates.
Marvel’s latest new line of titles is an arrow aimed straight at my horror-loving heart. The Midnight line, which starts with Fantastic Four, X-Men, and Spider-Manbooks, offer terrifying twists on the classic comics, exploring various horror subgenres through the lens of superheroes.
The first issues have all dropped for these titles, and so far the line is off to a great start. I’m not sure if the titles have any plans for crossing over or building connections between the various corners of the universe, but so far their focus on laying a solid foundation individually has been a great call. Despite featuring many of the standard characters you’re used to seeing, their new context makes many of them nearly unrecognizable, retaining enough of their previous character to render the dramatic irony of the changes meaningful to the reader.
Midnight Fantastic Four, written by Benjamin Percy and illustrated by Kev Walker, pushes their focus on dimensional travel into a cosmic horror realm. Percy has successfully dabbled with horror in the pastexcited to see what he had in store
The issue starts with a pill popping Reed Richards getting fired from the New York Institute of Technology, then attempting to sneak back into his lab overnight to continue his work. His research assistant, Victor (as in von Doom), is also sneaking in, and Reed’s experiment kills Victor (at least for now) and leaves Reed in a mental hospital. There, he’s released by the mysterious Sue Storm, along with her security adviser Ben Grimm, and recruited to continue his work for her company. Along the way you also meet Johnny Storm, who clearly has PTSD from losing his legs in an unspecified crash. The issue ends with the name drop of a classic Fantastic Four concept, the Negative Zone, but does so in a way that implies more Lovecraftian horrors may be in store for our group.
For a first issue, it was a bit slow, but the pieces it’s moving are all intriguing, setting up the series for success. I was surprised that most of the characters were relatively unlikeable, but in a compelling way. Reed is reckless, Sue is manipulative, and Ben is a hired goon willing to go to drastic means for his employer. The most immediately relatable person is Johnny, but he doesn’t have as much time on the page as the others. The art brings to life strange hallucinations that Reed is experiencing, while also giving us a mad-scientist-like brief glimpse at Latvaria. Gone are the bright colors most associated with Marvel’s First Family, replaced with a darker color palette that conveys the menace of the new setting.
I’m curious to see where it goes from here. Knowing the strange transformations their bodies go through in their traditional origin story, I’m sure making contact with an eldritch horror in this new version of the Negative Zone is only going to be worse for any potential powers they might gain. Stretchy body, rock skin, invisibility, and fire generation all sound like abilities ripe for something going terribly wrong, so I can’t wait to see what shape they take.
I was so excited to see that Jonathan Hickman was returning to X-Men following his game changing “House of X”/“Powers of X,“ and the Midnight line seemed like an interesting place for him to do it. Alongside artist Matteo Della Fonte, he takes the world of mutants as we know them and mixes it up with vampires. This wasn’t the most outright horror of the books, nor the biggest departure from their standard portrayal, especially since X-Men has confronted vampires in the past, but the setup does get to the hated-and-feared core of the concept that has made X-Men endure for decades.
There’s a lot of exposition in this book, setting up a war between humans, vampires, mutants, and mutant vampires. The book smartly opens with Cardinal Stryker and his Purifiers approaching Nightcrawler, who is a priest, adding an interesting layer of religious undertones to everything. Their interactions provide a lot of the background as we cut to more action packed scenes of factional confrontations. We see a group of people stumble onto a lab for cybernetically enhanced vampires, only to see them be brutally murdered before vampire mutants, called Empyres, come to save the day. This fight is then interrupted by Cyclops, who is referred to as “the last X-Men” who saves one of the original group, who ends up being Hope.
It’s a lot to take in for a first issue, but the pieces that it places on the chess board all make for a very compelling setup, brought to life with dark and brooding art from Della Fonte. While I was skeptical about the vampire angle being a bit too generic for someone like Hickman, it gets to the core of mutants by putting a horror spin on the concept, finding new ways to push the concept of evolution within X-Men. Hickman is a long-term planner, so it’s easy to see how this complicated web he’s weaved will provide great story potential.
As much as I love Spider-Man, his was the Midnight book I was looking forward to the least, but writer Phillip Kennedy Johnson and artist Scietronc put together my favorite of the number ones. Even going back to the 90s cartoon, there has been body horror associated with the character through the Man-Spider transformation arc, but this book takes that concept to a horrifying new level.
We start a tragic flashback of a very young Peter Parker with his parents, coming home from a vacation to find their family cat dead. The lesson from his father ends up being an inversion of the classic “with great power comes great responsibility.” As they find the cat gruesomely devoured by another animal, his father says “power makes monsters, every time.” This ends up being the thesis statement of the book, not only from a superpower standpoint, but from an economic one as well.
Flash forward twelve years and Peter Parker, who alongside being a genius high school student, is also an anti-corporate streamer. He lives with his Uncle Ben, who is struggling to pay the bills because of an ongoing lawsuit he’s been keeping up trying to hold Oscorp accountable for the deaths of Peter’s parents. Peter is then approached by Felicia Hardy on behalf of Oscorp, bringing him a job offer that comes with a massive amount of fine print. Seeing this as an opportunity to change things from the inside, he forgoes his morals and accepts the position. What the audience sees that he isn’t aware of is the horrific experiments that Oscorp is performing, which lead to possibly the most gruesome sequences of any of the Midnight books so far. Predictably, one of those experiments, obviously a spider, follows Peter home, with drastic consequences for his family.
What I loved about this book was how quickly it was able to set up all the relationships, updating the standard characters to feel more modern and progressive. I loved Ben’s crusade against corporate America along with Peter’s activism, and seeing how those two both stand by or betray their ideals as the opportunity to work with Oscorp arises. It almost felt like the way Scott Snyder updated Batman in the Absolute universe, keeping the core of Peter while making him feel up to date with times. It ends with a small hint of what this new, horrific version of Spider-Man will look like, and I can’t wait for that full reveal. Horror is best when it’s grounded in strong characterization, and Midnight Spider-Man does the strongest job of pulling that off in my book.
For something that could have been a gimmicky stunt by Marvel to get headlines, the various creative teams did great work rethinking these characters in a new light. Instead of treating it like a What If, they treat it like the foundation of a new universe, making it feel like something that could be used for years to come. I’m not sure what the long-term plans are for the Midnight line, but I’m excited to follow these titles for as long as they can keep them up.
The Midnight Universe publishing line is now available.
