Who or What Should Midnighter Punch Next?
I’m certainly a fan of writer Steve Orlando. I’ve been a fan of the character Midnighter since his Wildstorm Comics days– right down to the Wildstorm Summer Special in which he patiently listens to his teammate’s dating woes, while he’s dressed in an undershirt and a leather mask and ironing underwear. But I confess, I’d been slowly loosing steam on Midnighter’s solo series.
At the Special Edition NYC convention around the time of the series launching Orlando said “If corporations are people, they’re people we can punch.” I love that line. So much. A gay superhero punching corporations is kind of everything I look for in a story.
I’d been promised he’d be punching corporations and it does happen. One glorious time.
In issue 2 Midnighter goes up against an actual corporation. The only reason that he even noticed that corporation was because a widow in mourning got her hands on tech from the woman who gave Midnighter his powers. Marina, the widow, was carelessly using the stollen tech in an attempt to get revenge on the corporation that knowingly allowed a dangerous food product go to market which then lead to her husband’s death. But when she storms the building she attacks everyone she sees including low level workers who had nothing to do with the decisions that killed her husband. So Midnight intervenes.
If not for her thoughtlessly sloppy violence Midnighter would have ignored the company’s lethal misdeeds. He recognizes her just motivations and condemns her actions. The sensitivity he shows to Marina is really unusual and unexpected. He doesn’t demonize her. He pledged to work with her after her sentence. That’s kind of radical.
But that’s the last we hear of anyone punching a corporation. Sure, Midnighter did punch a ribeye steak through a mercenary’s head— in one of the most gleeful and memorable blows I’ve ever seen in a comic. But beyond Windfall Corporation the evil businesses he’s tangled with have felt too petty for my taste.
In the real world (is DC calling our world Earth Prime anymore?) Nestle is actually stealing water from draught stricken California. Oil companies pay proxies to murder people in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. And they sue documentarians if they report about it. Garment workers making the clothes that are wearing right now die on the job in industrial tragedies no different from the ones we had in the turn of the 20th century.
People are fighting back against corporate evil here on Earth Prime. It’s part of what I do at my real job. In my downtime I’d like to see a superhero punch an evil corporation that I can recognize. I’m not saying it’s a sound policy approach. I’m just saying that it would make me feel good and it was what I was anticipating in this series.
The other evil corporations Midnighter fights seem par for course fictional evil businesses in comics. At times they were petty gangsters. At other times they seemed like Marvel’s A.I.M used to be, an organization the US government would regard as terrorist, not like Nestle or Exxon which are allowed to operate with impunity all over the globe. Opponents in Midnighter seem more like gangster organizations then say Marvel comics Roxxon which at least in Peter David‘s hands had the vibe of being an evil corporation.
In issue 2 Midnighter punched thinly veiled Monsanto. First he tells another character she’s doing it wrong. But then he does in fact break the hand of a board member. He hasn’t punched any entity with publicly listed board members since. But that’s a pretty big deal.
I’m not saying his other opponents aren’t fun to take down. I did whoop with glee in issue 4 after he beats up the business men selling enslaved meta-humans to thrill killing playboys. The comic makes us cheer for him to beat up homophobes in Russia.
What we get in Midnighter is an out-and-proud badass gay hero, which is incredibly valuable and enjoyable in and of itself. He is a character that is allowed to be explicitly sexual in ways that other LGBTQ superheroes hadn’t previously been allowed. In ways that HE hadn’t been allowed to be till Orlando took over. Midnighter picks up guys on Grinder.
But I never liked Matt, his boyfriend for most of this run. Too “awshucks”. He worked in banking. M deserves better then some finance bro with questionable hair.
But now we know.
It was all an act! His boyfriend was a supervillian all along. He’s tangling with the terrifying supervillian Prometheus! See, I could tell that M’s boyfriend was no good!
Emma Houxbois wrote a particularly insightful analysis of Midnighter’s unique role among LGBTQA* super heroes. Emma explains that because Prometheus had sex with Midnighter entirely under false, and deliberately harmful pretenses, Prometheus raped Midnighter. Unlike SO many comics writers we could name (and Emma does) Orlando handles that difficult story sensitively and powerfully.
It’s a huge step for the character because Midnighter was our invincible, impervious queer idol for so long. he was our sin eater who tore peoples’ faces off so that we could point and say that we can stand and bang, we can stay in the pocket and go blow for blow. he was a naked, vicious power fantasy.
In midnighter, we had a world where the people who slurred and demeaned us died. he isn’t that any more. he doesn’t have to be that. he can love, laugh in a timbre and tone other than the sadistic thanks in part to the changing times and also to steve orlando’s vision to let him be more.
And with that plot twist I’m back on board.
Prometheus was an interesting villain in Gail Simone‘s Birds of Prey— writing him is ambitious because you need to show how thoroughly planned out his schemes are. M’s power set is that he’s always prepared for every scenario, that he’s already fought the fight at hand in his mind and has calculated every possibility and knows how to win. That’s essentially how Prometheus’ powers work too. Having them go head to head is really smart.
Prometheus’ classic costume is one of the goofiest costumes in modern comics. Issue 7’s art team of Aco, Hugo Petrus, and Romulo Fajardo Jr. do an admirable job of making Prometheus look threatening in spite of his ridiculous get up. They should get an award for that. The first annual “You Made this Dopey 90s Costume Work Award.”
I also want to give the current art team a shout-out for bravely combating same-face syndrome in their characters in the recent issues. Everyone’s face is different. I always appreciate that.
Aco’s pencils on issue 2 were aesthetically unappealing on a superficial level. But whatever the art team is doing by issue 7 I like– pretty or not. And I’m admittedly a big proponent of pretty. I got over it in this case, eventually. Or maybe it’s the combination of artists working together that improved it. I don’t know the art team’s process but issue 7 had a ton of credits.
Showing and explaining how Midnighters’ powers work is no small task and the whole team has really excelled at this for the entire run.
The entire creative team pulled off a very high stakes fight scene in issue 7. The dialog throughout the fight scene works really effectively in setting up the conflict both in terms of powers and personal philosophies. These are two fairly ideological characters who talk a lot so of course they talk throughout the fight and Orland scripts it very well. Both characters literally and metaphorically beat each other up while spouting theories that each fail a certain amount of intellectual scrutiny.
Prometheus is delusional and evil but I’d really enjoyed him saying “Look at you, judge jury, and executioner, all in the name of the justice. Killing for the “Crime” of killing. You answer crime with the same act. Crime is a societal construct.” — and he’s not wrong about that. He is wrong about everything else though.
Now all I need Midnighter to do is to start punching Shell Oil at the Paris Climate Change Summit. There’s still time, right?
Wednesdays are new comic book day! Each week hundreds of comics are released, and that can be pretty daunting to go over and choose what to buy. That’s where we come in!
Marina Lucas woke up this morning as a suburban martial-arts instructor…but when God Garden tech unexpectedly falls into her lap, she’ll end the day as the deadliest woman on the planet! That’s bad news for her – and worse for the Midnighter!