For this spooky season, Marvel Comics is fully embracing horror. This week marks the launch of the highly anticipated Midnight Universe, a new imprint that brings together some of Marvel’s best artists and writers to envision a dark new reality where hope fades, and iconic heroes are transformed into monstrous new forms. All three of Midnight Spider-Man, Midnight X-Men, and Midnight Fantastic Four launch together on Wednesday, October 7, offering three distinct types of horror and endless possibilities for how the typical rules the House of Ideas has operated under for over 80 years can be bent and broken. Despite existing in separate sub-genres of the macabre, this is designed as an interconnected universe with “rich lore-building.”
However, with the launch of a new universe, there naturally needs to be some time taken to establish its corners. Phillip Kennedy Johnson and ScieTronc‘s Spider-Man story will first twist the origins of the web-slinger into a body-horror nightmare, altering Peter Parker’s mantra into “With great power comes something monstrous.” The Midnight debut of the Fantastic Four will have Benjamin Percy and Kev Walker take a cosmic approach to the First Family’s origins before Reed, Sue, Ben, and Johnny ever came together as a unit, sending them beyond to unleash intergalactic terror. Finally, the X-Men are reimagined as blood-sucking creatures of the night, thanks to Jonathan Hickman and Matteo Della Fonte. There’s so much to explore with each that, according to Hickman, a crossover isn’t a high priority at the moment.
In a recent appearance on the Battle of the Atom podcast, the fan-favorite Fantastic Four writer teased the timeline for the Midnight Universe. While he did share that the creators have already outlined how they’ll link the three stories, Marvel is in no rush for that big event to happen, opting to let each establish themselves before starting to lightly bring them together. “We have a plan for how the books are gonna touch,” he said. “I would not expect that in the first ten months, but sometime around then, perhaps we’re gonna do something that might be pretty cool and the books might start, you know, lightly touching each other.”
02
How do you handle being the centre of attention?
Every hero on this list answers this differently.
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What do your friends rely on you for?
They would all name the same thing about you.
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