World Comic Book Review

28th March 2024

Happy Twentieth Birthday, Apollo and Midnighter

The year 2018 marks the seventieth anniversary of the creation of Superman, a globally famous superhero character owned by American publisher DC Comics. It would be a remarkable milestone of longevity for any creative work. The character has been continuously published since 1938, has spawned, amongst other things, countless motion pictures, cartoons, action figures, t-shirts, … Read more

Charisma, fetishism, homosexuality, and violence: Midnighter #1 [review]

Midnighter # 1 (DC Comics, 2015), written by Steve Orlando and with art by Aco and Hugo Petrus, features a character who is very different from most of its superhero peers.

By way of example, Midnighter’s Grindr profile, set out on the fourth page of the first issue, is most amusing:

Name: M
Currently: Single
Looking for: Dates, friends, sparring
Interests: Violence (inventive)
Chronically new in town.
Computer in brain.
Superhumanly flexible.
Generally uses flexibility for justice.
Looking for other uses.
Have head butted an alien.
Whatever you are thinking the answer is most likely yes.
But with punching.

The American superhero scene is engorged with muscle-bound heterosexual altruists. This has been a state of affairs dating back to the late 1930s. Aside from a influx of militaristic cyborgs in the 1990s, superhero comics have generally featured straight bachelors, wearing clinging acrobat tights adorned with capes, with superpowers.

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