Last week, Marvel Comics announced the coming of Midnight, which everyone managed to guess was going to be one of two things: either a new horror imprint from the publisher or Marvel looking over at DC’s Absolute universe and realizing it wants in on some of that. Turns out it’s a bit of a mix of both, but with one added surprise:
For the first time since the Krakoan Age, superstar writer Jonathan Hickman is leading an X-Men title again.
Announced today by Marvel, Midnight will kick off this summer and into fall with three new titles: Midnight X-Men, by Hickman and Matteo Della Fonte; Midnight Fantastic Four, by Benjamin Percy and Kev Walker; and Midnight Spider-Man, by Phillip Kennedy Johnson and Scie Tronc. All three books will help launch a new universe within Marvel’s vast cosmic web of parallel realities, freeing the Midnight books to give their own spin on their characters and lore. The spin, of course, is going to be very spooky.
In the Midnight Universe, New York is plagued by vampires and “Mutant Empyres,” according to a synopsis for Midnight X-Men, as vampire and mutantkind both vie to disrupt the emergent peace between the two powerful factions, with those left untouched by either in the crossfires. Midnight Fantastic Four, meanwhile, reimagines the team as more of a cosmic horror when dark scientific research exposes them to the secrets of the universe at horrific costs. And, of course, Midnight Spider-Man ponders the age-old question, it sounds like, of “What if more Spider than Man?” as Peter Parker finds himself transformed into a monstrous spider-human hybrid by Oscorp and has to embrace the terrifying power that comes with it to fight back and stop them.
“I’m so enthusiastic about this project—it’s the most excited I’ve been in years,” Hickman said in a provided statement. “The conceit of Midnight X-Men aligns perfectly with the kind of stories I like to tell. It has a rich, open-ended mythology that equally mixes old and new ideas into something that feels both familiar and original.”
It’s been a wild few up-and-down years for Hickman at Marvel. After bidding farewell to Krakoa, Hickman helped spearhead the revival of the Ultimate Marvel line with Ultimate Spider-Man, one of Marvel’s biggest books of the past few years. After that was done and Ultimate Marvel started wrapping back up once more, Hickman hopped to the short-lived Imperial event, meant to revitalize the lineup of Marvel’s cosmic sci-fi books and rebalance the galactic powers of the Marvel universe, only for it to be scrapped just issues into the new lineup.
Fingers crossed, then, that Marvel has given Midnight‘s creative teams not just the time to grow an audience but also the chance to let their creation outlast more than just these initial books. We’ll start finding out what’s in store when Midnight kicks off with Midnight X-Men this August.
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