It’s been a strange year for Marvel. Having fallen behind rival DC in market share and critical acclaim, the superhero publisher has realized things need to change. Several longtime executives have been replaced, there’s a new editor-in-chief, and the publisher is moving all of its editorial staff and operations from New York City to Los Angeles.
This year’s New York Comic Con was a coming-out party for the new Marvel regime. New editor-in-chief Stephen Wacker introduced himself to both retailers and fans in multiple panels and speeches, promising long-awaited improvements to the way the other big superhero publisher does business. At the center of those plans is Marvel’s new Midnight line, which hit stores the day before the con opened to the public.
During Wacker’s pre-convention presentation to comics retailers, he said that under his leadership Marvel plans to focus on quality control and publishing books it believes in, rather than just printing as many comics as possible. The release day for Midnight shows what that could look like, because only three Marvel comics hit stores that day rather than the usual dozens of issues: Midnight X-Men #1, by Jonathan Hickman and Matteo Della Fonte; Midnight Fantastic Four #1, by Benjamin Percy and Kev Walker; and Midnight Spider-Man #1, by Philip Kennedy Johnson and ScieTronc.
All three books put familiar superhero characters through a horror filter: Most of the X-Men have been turned into vampires, the Fantastic Four come face to face with Lovecraftian monsters, and Spider-Man experiences body transformations that would fit right in a David Cronenberg movie.
“We are building our own universe,” Percy tells PW. “So we’re not beholden to anything but the spirit of the original books, and people expect it to be revisionary. That kind of freedom is exciting to me.”
It’s exciting to readers too, who bought more than a million copies of those first Midnight issues. That only increased Marvel’s confidence in these books; and fans who excitedly arrived at the Comic Con panel about Midnight were then surprised to learn that by showing up to the panel, they would receive a free copy of Midnight Spider-Man #2, a month before its publication.
“I wanted to reward the people that came to this thing with something really tangible, something I knew they would be super excited about,” Johnson told PW after the panel. “We’re supremely confident in the books. We could have given away the second issues too of the other books as well. They’re done too and they look sick as hell.”
Hickman would have likely objected to giving away more issues; he was visibly squirming when editor Jordan White unveiled designs for characters appearing in future issues of Midnight X-Men, like Magik and Beast (who in this universe has more of a batlike appearance).
If the architect of Marvel’s recent big swings had it his way, the current model of comics promotion—in which plot details and creative directions are teased months in advance—would be done away with, and readers would have to actually open books to find out what was inside them, like Hickman did as a kid flipping through the convenience store spinner rack.
“The surprise and delight that I used to have reading comics when I was a kid is something I’m constantly trying to recreate,” Hickman tells PW. “So I am joking [about hating promotion], but also I’m not.”
But Hickman, too, is excited about the Midnight line, especially the fact that it’s open-ended. Even Marvel’s recent Ultimate line, which Hickman also headlined and which mirrored the premise of DC’s mega-successful Absolute series by being set in a world run by supervillains, was given a hard limit of two years, or 24 issues. It came to an end earlier this year to a mixed reception, while Absolute continues chugging along with no end in sight. Marvel has learned its lesson, and these creators promise their Midnight books could continue for as long as readers buy them.
“I definitely have a lot of stories that I want to tell in this world with these characters,” Johnson said. “There are new characters I want to introduce, and I can’t wait to get to all that. With how high the hype has been already, it just gives us so much road. I hope to write this story for 10 years, 20 years, whatever!”
“The job here is to tell a ripping yarn, to just knock one out of the park,” Hickman says. “I felt the need to do that creatively and not be such a big-tent guy like I normally have been over the past couple years. I just get to come in and tell a 100-issue story like I used to get to do all the time.”
DC’s Absolute line is the obvious elephant in the room. A this year’s New York Comic Con, the flagship Absolute Batman title won the Harvey Award for Book of the Year, and ICv2 founder Milton Griepp credited it with increasing the whole industry’s sales. DC’s own convention panels included announcements of new books in the series, like the long-awaited Absolute version of the Justice League, as well as updates on the progress of the Absolute Batman animated series.
For now, Midnight is not rushing to compete on the level of quantity (“just know, if there’s ever a fourth book, it was one hell of a pitch,” Hickman said on the panel) and Johnson downplays the idea that the two lines are competing.
“There’s no competitiveness on my end. I just don’t see it that way at all,” he tells PW. “Just from a pragmatic perspective, if there’s a book that hits hard and gets people into stores, then everybody who has a book in that store wins. Marvel also benefited from Absolute Batman and I very much hope that DC will benefit from the Midnight universe.”
