Brad Miska | Published: Aug 18, 2026
DC’s Absolute Universe continues to absolutely tear up the comic book industry.
Absolute Batman became the biggest-selling ongoing comic series of 2025, with the larger Absolute line helping propel DC past Marvel in comic shops. And this isn’t just fan perception: according to ICv2’s ComicHub data, DC overtook Marvel in direct-market share in late 2025 and widened that lead during the first quarter of 2026.
It’s a pretty remarkable reversal. The last comparable moment was probably DC Rebirth in 2016, when DC briefly overtook Marvel in market share for the first time in nearly three years.
The Absolute Universe has obviously struck a nerve, and Marvel’s answer arrives this October with the Midnight Universe.
And, look, on the surface it feels a little reactionary.
What makes Absolute Batman, Absolute Wonder Woman and Absolute Superman so exciting isn’t simply that they’re darker or more hardcore. They’re genuinely rethinking these characters and their mythology from the ground up. Bruce Wayne becoming a working-class Batman while Joker is the billionaire is such a simple fucking flip, but it fundamentally changes everything about their relationship.
Marvel appears to have looked at that success and gone: What if ours were horror?
Marvel officially describes Midnight as a new universe where its creators have free rein to transform some of the company’s biggest characters into monsters. The entire thing launches October 7 with three books: Midnight Spider-Man by Phillip Kennedy Johnson and ScieTronc, Midnight X-Men by Jonathan Hickman and Matteo Della Fonte, and Midnight Fantastic Four by Benjamin Percy and Kev Walker.
We’ve been watching Marvel slowly tease the horror influences through its variant covers, including Midnight X-Men paying homage to Fright Night and Midnight Spider-Man very deliberatelyinvoking David Cronenberg’s The Fly.
Well, now we’ve seen pages from the Midnight Spider-Man ashcan, and that Fly homage suddenly makes a hell of a lot more sense.
This Peter Parker isn’t simply bitten by a radioactive spider.
According to Marvel’s official description, Oscorp transforms Peter into a hideous spider hybrid while pursuing eternal life. And the preview pages appear to take that concept into full-blown Cronenbergian body horror.
Peter seemingly isn’t just gaining the abilities of a spider.
He’s become merged with one.
Most grotesquely, the familiar spider emblem on his chest appears to be an actual spider embedded within his body, its legs stretching across his torso as part of him.
It’s fucking disgusting.
It also makes that The Fly homage feel much less like a cool variant-cover gimmick and much more like Marvel telling us exactly what kind of transformation story we’re getting.
Think Seth Brundle becoming Brundlefly, except now it’s Peter Parker slowly becoming whatever the hell Spider-Man actually means in this universe.
It sounds like the same horror logic is being applied across the other two books.
Midnight X-Men throws mutants into a New York overrun by vampires, with mutant “Empyres” and vampires seemingly headed toward war. That makes its gorgeous Fright Night homage pretty damn appropriate.
Then there’s Midnight Fantastic Four, which Marvel describes as beginning when an obsessive scientist explores dimensions humanity probably should have left the fuck alone, leaving himself and three others “warped in strange and horrifying ways.” Writer Benjamin Percy has specifically described his approach as cosmic, Lovecraftian dread.
And yes, the Horror Homage cover by E.M. Gist sure as hell appears to be invoking John Carpenter’s The Thing.
So maybe we’re looking at three pretty clear horror templates:
Spider-Man meets The Fly.
X-Men meets Fright Night.
Fantastic Four meets The Thing.
That’s considerably more interesting to me than simply making everyone “dark.”
I’m still staring at this entire Midnight experiment with one eyebrow raised. It feels a bit try-hard and very much like Marvel seeing what’s happening across the street with Absolute and wanting its own version immediately.
But Marvel has also had enormous success taking its superheroes into horror before with Marvel Zombies.
And if these Spider-Man pages are any indication, they’re not fucking around.
An actual spider living inside Peter Parker’s chest? Yes, please.
Categorized:Comics / BooksNews
