Midnighter is a title that knows what it is and what it’s aiming for. It is a comic about a gay superhero designed for a gay and bi male readership but with plenty to offer every other reader too. The artwork is inventive and gorgeous, even as it depicts gruesome violence. It knows how to use a metaphor in clear, nuanced ways. It balances grit, hard choices, and vigilante glee.
Midnighter #6 is exclamation point after exclamation point with jaw busting action and intense layouts from ACO, colors from Romulo Fajardo that punctuate the big moments in the issue, and a loose, emotional script from Steve Orlando loaded with amusing one-liners and some backstabbing reveals. Reading Midnighter is like getting a new action movie each movie with a well-developed gay protagonist, who is both confident and vulnerable.
Not only does Steve Orlando’s Midnighter comic star a gay man, it tells blunt, sex-positive stories about that character. The main cast of characters in the upcoming main Avengers comic All-New, All-Different Avengers has a small minority of white dudes.
While there is still a lot of work on the road to a utopia of complete social justice, there is a trend of progressivism in some of today’s superhero comics that is impossible to ignore.
Hosted by the energetic Miz Caramel Vixen, the founder of Vixenvarsity.com, the #BlackComicsMonth Diversity in Comics panel featured a wide variety of panelists from different backgrounds, ethnicities, and sexualities. They also work in vastly different comics genres from Mildred Louis writing and drawing a Magical Girl webcomic with women of color called Agents of the Realm to David F. Walker, who directed a documentary about the blaxploitation genre and currently writes Cyborg for DC Comics and much more. One of the panelists, Mikki Kendall, only recently broke into comics with the Swords of Sorrow: Lady Rawhide/Miss Fury one-shot and is more well-known for her pieces about intersectional feminism for XoJane, The Guardian, and others as well as prose fiction. Vixen let each panelist speak their mind about what diversity means to them, and they often tied in their thoughts with their comics from Genius (which I scored a free copy of) to Princeless and even Batman.
Steve Orlando, Stephen Mooney, and colorists Romulo Fajardo and Jeromy Cox are in fine form in Midnighter #5 bringing the witty one-liners and ultraviolence that has become this series’ formula while adding some extra moral dilemmas and eccentricity thanks to our special guest star Dick Grayson. However, everything isn’t fun and games as the issue’s final page cliffhanger hits Midnighter in what his closest equivalent to happy place and adds another layer of mystery to the proceedings.
Virgil’s marketing description had me at “queersploitation.” I’m a casual buff of exploitation film history and genre and thought Virgil bringing the genre to issues of queerness was an apt marriage for 2015. The comic is executed with a sincere and serious commitment to its parent genre and sensitivity to the subject matter but lacks the campy sense of fun that many contemporary exploitation texts have.
In Midnighter #4, our titular anti-hero continues to hunt down Akakyevich, the man who has the secret of his origins and God Garden implants, but this isn’t all darkness and angst even though readers do find out why Midnighter likes to kill. Instead, writer Steve Orlando and artist Stephen Mooney, who recently illustrated an issue of DC’s digital series Bombshells, bring out DC’s resident chiseled beefcake Dick Grayson for a team-up as they fight Russian vampires (kind of) and a testosterone heavy “thrill killing” club. Mooney uses triangular panels to add punch and panache to the fight scenes while Orlando utilizes both a monster of the week storyline and special guest star to further his long game plot with a jaw dropping final page as the cherry on top.
Midnighter #2 has attention grabbing layouts and fight choreography from Aco, bold colors from Romulo Fajardo, and witty one-liners that leave both James Bond and John McClane in the dust from Steve Orlando. However, it’s the quiet moments between the mayhem that make Midnighter such a relatable character and set it apart from other superhero and action comics.
Sorry James Bond, Jason Bourne, and even DC Comics’ poster boy Batman, Midnighter makes those chumps look like Muppet Babies. Midnighter #1 acts as an effective and thrilling introduction to Midnighter’s personal and professional life displaying both his unique abilities and how he hits on attractive men. Yes, Midnighter is one of the few high profile LGBTQ characters created by the Big Two, and he is the first gay superhero to get a solo series published by DC Comics. Writer Steve Orlando crafts a character, who is a total badass (and will tell you about it while punching you in various organs), but is vulnerable when it comes to matters of the heart because he is newly single after breaking up with his long term boyfriend.