Gonna Wait 'til the Midnight(er) Hour...

I’m of the opinion that had The Authority ended when Warren Ellis decided to leave it would be regarded with the reverence given to super-hero comics like Watchmen. It was an absurdly over-the-top, cheeky, cynical, audacious, and fun send up of the conventions of super-hero groups with the team…all ridiculously powerful and full of hubris and snappy quips…battling a mad scientist with an army of supermen, an invasion from another dimension, and, ultimately, “God”. The 12 issues of The Authority (following the lead-in from the old Stormwatch series) were pure, almost perfect pop insanity.

But The Authority was a hot commodity at the time and DC/Wildstorm was not going to let it just go after Ellis left. Unfortunately, every writer who has followed has beaten the concept to death, making The Authority pedestrian and…worst of all…dull. But then once you’ve beaten “God” how much juice can you get from smacking around analogues of the Avengers or even becoming temporary totalitarian rulers of the world?

Of all of the Authority members the one who I found most dull was the Midnighter who became a surly joke…the gay (the seemingly insecure writers after Ellis seemed to need to keep that at the fore as one of his most important character traits…Ellis presented the relationship between the Midnighter and Apollo with respectful subtlety while the writers who followed him treated it with self-conscious oafishness which included every opponent the Authority faced firing off homophobic jibes) Batman/Punisher analogue who likes hurting people and who can kill you in one zillion ways before you can blink an eyelid (or something like that.)

I gave up on The Authority a while back so I was kinda of surprised when I decided to give the Midnighter solo series a try. But I’m glad I did. In the first few issues…a odd, amusing time-travel story involving an attempt to assassinate Hitler…Garth Ennis brought some much needed humanity, humor, and reflection to the character.

Keith Giffen has taken up the reins as the new regular writer starting with issue #10 where a victim was so afraid of the Midnighter that she threw herself out of a window. “You killed God”, the girl said after the Midnighter had brutally dispatched her captors. The Midnighter, shaken to his core, reflected on what he was and then he sat off a mission to discover the man he used to be.

Giffen gives him an assistant to play off and delves into his prickly relationship with his adoptive daughter before sending the Midnighter off to a seemingly normal…but frighteningly abnormal…town that may or may not be where he came from before being brainwashed and turned into a killing machine. At the same time, Giffen doesn’t soft-pedal what the character is as evidenced by his brusque dispatching of a computer nerd/pedophile he drafts to help him in his quest to rediscover his original identity.

In his first two issues, Giffen makes the Midnighter more interesting than he’s been in quite a while while not scrimping on the action. The book is further enhanced by the sterling storytelling of artist Chris Sprouse (in #10) and ChrisCross (in #11).

Midnighter is a comic worth checking out…and who’da thought that :-)