Marvel’s new horror line arrived on the stroke of midnight on 7 October with three launch titles. Midnight X-Men comes from Jonathan Hickman and Matteo Della Fonte, Midnight Fantastic Four from Benjamin Percy and Kev Walker, and Midnight Spider-Man from Phillip Kennedy Johnson and ScieTronc. They were the only Marvel comics out that day. Before a single copy went on sale, Marvel announced that the three issues had sold over a million copies combined, with second printings already ordered. “Sold”, in comics-trade parlance, means bought by shops. Whether a million people actually read them is a question for next month’s reorders.
The premises do exactly what’s on the coffin lid. The X-Men no longer fight for acceptance but hunger for blood. The Fantastic Four venture into the unknown to unleash terror rather than prevent it. Peter Parker is turned into a hideous spider-hybrid by Oscorp in its pursuit of eternal life, which is essentially Cronenberg’s The Fly with web-shooters. Percy, at least, is honest about why he got the gig: “any other circumstances, Marvel wouldn’t let me write the Fantastic Four.”
None of this is new territory for the House of Ideas. Marvel ran a fine horror line in the 1970s with Tomb of Dracula, Werewolf by Night and Man-Thing, and Marvel Zombies had heroes eating each other twenty years ago. The real model here is DC’s Absolute line, which proved an alternate-universe reboot could pull in readers who would never touch decades of continuity. Marvel clearly hopes Midnight can do the same. With Hickman, the man who gave us Krakoa, at the X-Men end, the books at least have an architect.
The marketing has its own gothic excess. There are Bloodbath variants, Horror Homage variants, Gallery variants and virgin variants, and the X-Men cover pays tribute to Fright Night. The launch covers are “cloaked”, hiding most of the artwork so you have to open the comic to see it. That makes it the first cover gimmick since the 1990s foil boom that actually encourages reading the thing. Other publishers joined the midnight opening, including Oni’s Sabrina the Teenage Witch #1 and Rob Liefeld’s Avengelyne #1, which, depending on your feelings about drawn feet, is a horror comic in its own right.
A million copies on opening night is a strong start. The test of any horror franchise, as Hammer discovered somewhere around Dracula A.D. 1972, is whether anyone still turns up for the sequels.
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