Midnight X-Men #1 Review

This isn’t a review of Midnight X-Men #1. I’m not going to tell you to read this comic, because if you’re reading this, there’s a chance that you’re going to be reading it, or have read it anyway, and so telling you that you should read it seems like wasted effort on both our parts – you, because you’ve made up your mind, and me, because I’m trying to convince someone whose had their mind made up. Still, if you were genuinely looking to GateCrashers’ resident Hickman stan to see if you should read Jonathan Hickman, Matteo Della Fonte, Arthur Hesli, and Cory Petit’s Midnight X-Men #1, the answer is yes. And then once you’re done so, circle back to this, because it’s not going anywhere and it’s filled with spoilers.

And now, to quote Hickman: “On with the show.”

I remember when Midnight X-Men was announced and I was so excited, but also a little, “Uh, what?” about it. Matteo Della Fonte is great, I love his work on Imperial War: Nova and Punisher vs Spider-Man #1 (so much so that I ran to buy a copy of it). But it’s the Hickman of it all. If you’re reading this, you know how much I love Hickman’s work, that much is certain. The Krakoa era, and his work specifically during that era, is extremely important to me. 

Even so, I never thought he’d come back to X-Men, after all, every project he’s done at Marvel has seemed to be a complete thought. Then again, he has been vocal about how he left X-Men earlier than planned, so it wasn’t a complete thought in that regard.

To that end, some comics worth reading before Midnight X-Men #1:

1. X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills by Chris Claremont, Brett Anderson, Steve Oliff, and Tom Orzechowski.
2. Pax Romana by Jonathan Hickman.
3. House of X/Powers of X by Jonathan Hickman, Pepe Larraz, R.B. Silva, Marte Gracia, and Clayton Cowles & X-Men by Jonathan Hickman et al.

In the foreword to the extended edition of X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills, John Lennings talks about how Claremont evolved the metaphor to allow it to metaphorically represent any kind of marginalized identity. When Hickman went forth with Krakoa, he abstracted the metaphor further, and made it an “us” vs “them” scenario – where “us” was the people looking to the future, looking to progress, and “them” were the people holding us back. According to his own words on X-Men Monday about this book:

“But primarily, the reason why I think it’s interesting here is that it offers a franchise that is almost always about ‘humans’ and ‘mutants’ (or, like in my previous X-Men work, where I distilled all previous metaphors down to ‘us’ and ‘them’) the opportunity to lay a secondary, more complex system over the top of it. So it allows you to twist and morph and reshape all of the traditional conflicts the X-books like to use into something that isn’t binary anymore. It becomes multifaceted. More interesting. A better conduit for surprise and delight.”

I pondered on this quote a lot as I did my research before writing this review – that new layer over “us” vs “them”, and it made me think about the real world in the way a good X-Men comic should, where even as we progress towards the future, we need to also consider the fights between people who have their own designs of what the future looks like.

By its own design, there’s a lot of Christianity in Midnight X-Men #1. We only see Nightcrawler (who is a Bishop in this universe) on the cloaked cover, there’s the bible verse Ephesians 6:12 on the cover, and of course, we open on Cardinal Stryker visiting Archbishop Wagner. For the uninitiated, William Stryker is the antagonist of God Loves, Man Kills, a devout Christian who uses his belief in God to kill those he believes to have been made by Satan, namely, the Mutants. If you haven’t seen it, they are the two in that iconic panel from the graphic novel. With this context, I’m sure the bible verse’s meaning isn’t lost on anyone.

“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers and the rulers of the darkness of this age.”

Like Krakoa before it, Hickman’s playing with the X-Men’s history, but the approach is different here. Unlike in 616, he’s given free rein to play with the world as he sees fit, and here we find him twisting on what was there in interesting ways. God Loves, Man Kills is one of the bedrocks of this story, and this issue makes sure you know that, to the point where it drops the name wholesale, but it’s within interesting dialogue so it doesn’t seem too jarring, rather more akin to when he drops one of his proper nouns as he tends to do. 

Even within the interactions between Stryker and Nightcrawler, you can see a lot of seeds that will begin to grow later on. He says he’s not one of Kurt’s detractors as he gives him a decree to operate independently within Kurt’s archdiocese (the area of which an archbishop in some Catholic Churches is in charge), and later on, he doubts Kurt’s own motivations, as they’re here to hunt down Empyres (mutant vampires), and Kurt too is a mutant. There are lots of microaggressions going on that almost seem like they will hurt our devout swashbuckling mutant later on. 

Magneto’s team in the House of X calls back to his original Brotherhood of Evil Mutants (Quicksilver, Scarlet Witch, Toad, Unus the Untouchable), along with Polaris, is a fun inversion of where the original Lee/Kirby X-Men start, where the Brotherhood are the bad guys and not the good ones. It’s here that we start learning about factions, how “us” has split into multiples instead of a united front. 

Particularly, we see a group of kids who break into a Stronghold (enhanced coffins) with Hope as the only survivor. As the Empyres arrive to take out the Stronghold and kill Hope, Cyclops comes in to save the day, and we learn of the final faction (for now) – that being he is the last surviving member of the X-Men. But he’s different too, he’s willing to kill for survival, and that goes a long way. 

When the issue ends with a conversation between Archbishop Wagner and Storm (who is an Empyre), we find out what the dream is in this universe, and that being the “cure”, as they prepare for what could potentially be a war between Vampires and Empyres once more.

With all of these pieces on the board, I found what Hickman is setting up to be quite the interesting take on the Mutants. Historically, the “dream” in reference to this franchise has been coexistence between Humans and Mutants. The “cure” has always been posited as the antithesis to that, taking away powers from Mutants and making them “Human”. Add onto that the splitting of “us” vs. “them” – Magneto’s very “stay out of the picture” House of X, Cyclops as the sole member of the X-Men, the Empyres up against the Church (again, drawing back to God Loves, Man Kills), is all sorts of fascinating.

But it’s not just God Loves, Man Kills that Midnight X-Men alludes to. It’s why I recommend reading Pax Romana, Hickman’s comic about time travellers sent by the Church back in time from 2053AD to guide the world in some fashion and establish Christian rule. Of course, all of this falls apart, but the book raises interesting questions on who gets to decide how the world functions, and the cycles that take place in that. House of X/Powers of X play with this theme too, so to have Hickman bridge that with God Loves, Man Kills has me very excited for what’s next.

Of course, all of this is accomplished through the visual prowess of Matteo Della Fonte and Arthur Hesli. Midnight X-Men is gorgeous from front to back, and I was particularly enamoured by the use of light and shadow (which is important to the existence of Vampires, after all). There’s lots of cool page turners, and Della Fonte’s panel work is very neatly structured to maintain the flow of this issue – it’s 30 pages long but everything it presents makes you feel like there’s more without taking away from the pace. Cory Petit’s lettering is a delight as usual. I’m always a fan of when letterers know exactly when to use the bold and when to let it go, especially in a context like Hickman’s dialogue where proper nouns are ever present.

Before I let you go, one other fun tidbit I noticed is that Sister Aquilla is Magma, and Empath (the Hellion that Cyclops kills) was in love with her for a little bit in the pages of early New Mutants. 

And the data page sent a shiver up my spine. I love a good data page.