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Columnist Thunder Mod
Super Moderator
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Denver Area, between Asgard and Krypton
Posts: 21,364
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From The Mighty Reviews Archives:
Wktf’s Trade Review
Midnight Nation
Top Cow Productions
Written by: J. Michael Straczynski
Drawn by: Gary Frank
One of the benefits of doing comic book reviews with two other guys is you get a chance to read about stuff you might not normally pick up or, for that matter, might never even have heard of. One of my fellow Mighty Reviewers has even joked on a few occasions that his trade library has grown exponentially because of my trade reviews! Well, this past July, there we Mighty Reviewers were owning the floor as we cruised SDCC when this same fellow Reviewer spotted the brand new slipcase HC edition of Midnight Nation at the Top Cow booth and, with great enthusiasm, made a B-line over there to pick it. When I mentioned I’d never heard of this story I was met with an incredulous stare and a promise to send me his older trade after the con. Sure enough, days later, there it was at my doorstep and a return promise on my part to read it now had to be fulfilled.
David Grey is a lieutenant in the LAPD and, in addition to falling into an ugly police case, has some pretty messy issues of his own. For reasons that are left unexplored, he’s never really recovered from the death of his father. And for more fully explored reasons, primarily having to do with the hours his job requires and the neglect that ensued, his wife Sarah left him. We learn through the course of this story that neither David nor Sarah have fully emotionally separated from each other. So, anyway, this hard edged homicide detective is carrying around some pretty gaping emotional wounds. And, as mentioned, he comes across a murder case that leads him into a stakeout that goes horribly, and unexpectedly, wrong as he enters an apartment and a scene of bloody dismemberment. Suddenly, he’s attacked by green Darth Maul-ish looking intangible wraiths called Walkers whose leader inserts his fingers into David’s chest, putting him in shock and sending him to the hospital. When he awakens, everyone around him seems to be an ethereal and incorporeal version of themselves. The world can’t see him but he can see them. In essence, two different segments or realities of people, but existing at the same time on the same plane of existence. And suddenly a stunning, but strangely reluctant dark haired woman named Laurel appears before him and explains he’s got one year to travel on foot, with her as his guide, to retrieve the soul that’s been taken from him or else he’ll turn into one of the mindless and savage Walkers who attacked him.
On one level, Midnight Nation is the story of a man struggling and fighting his way through insurmountable obstacles to retrieve his soul. On another level, it’s a story about commitments and relationships, whether about David and his ex-wife or his new and alluring traveling companion, Lauel. This trade collects the 12 issues of the Midnight Nation series and is over 300 pages of grueling strife for both David and also for Laurel who, we learn, has been down this road before and turns out to be every bit as capable in hand-to-hand combat as David. There are rules of the road David has to learn, there are countless Walkers with whom both must battle and run a terrible gauntlet before David can face the Walker’s master, a man with strange ties to Laurel, and before David can realize he’s fighting for more than just his own soul. But the world in between our reality and the Walkers’ world is called The Metaphor. Clearly, this is for a reason, and I believe David’s last name of “Grey” also was chosen for a reason. Grey is that amorphous color between white and black, neither one nor the other but also not intense enough to be as strong as either. So, this also is a story, as more fully explained in JMS’s Afterword, of two worlds that coexist on the same plane but, except in the most unusual circumstances, never intersect with each other. Like the daylight denizens of a city or a nation and the nighttime denizens, or midnight nation, of that same city. JMS’ very revealing and personal Afterword (which should be required reading for this book) on this topic hit home with me as I recounted my own experience in court in a small, middle class NJ town in which I once lived. There were people I saw in that court that not only had I never seen in the town, I could never have imagined they even lived in my town. People we learn, ultimately, from this work who also desperately need a voice. So that “in between” kind of experience JMS describes both in the graphic novel and in his Afterword was made real for me in a rush of memories that were about 20 years old. Finally, one word keeps coming up in this story, sometimes out of optimism and sometimes out of frustration, and that word is “hope.” It seems to me the entire story is a metaphor not only for the convergence of different segments and strata of our own society but of the power of hope as well, which is born out in this story’s surprising conclusion. But, make no mistake, all the allegories and symbolism and talk of hope aside, this is a brutal, action packed and tensely portrayed tale of survival that’s incredible fun to read.
Gary Frank was the perfect choice for the art on this series. His line work is so crisp, the emotions he draws on peoples’ faces makes use of every conceivable facial element to convey an incredible range of emotions, and the detail and power he brings to every single person and panel just makes each page jump out at you as you read it. Frank is one of the best comic book artists in the business. He’s proved it on Incredible Hulk, again on Action Comics, no doubt will so again in the upcoming Secret Origins: Superman, and he certainly proves it here. This book is © 2002, so it’s post-9/11, and in that context the hellish world of the Walkers that Frank draws, with their own set of nightmarish Twin Towers, was a particularly harrowing page. As for JMS, himself, I’m one of the many who has no place for this Amazing Spider-Man run (with the exception of the 9/11 issue, that is), but he’s staked his place with me as one of the pre-eminent comic book writers with his wonderful work on Thor. And, frankly, his Midnight Nation feels like a work in a completely different category. It’s a real masterpiece of plotting, character, dialogue, allegory, moral and story. He writes that it took him two decades to develop and complete Midnight Nation and because of the gestation period it took for this story to coalesce and the care he put into it, as the CINESCAPE reviewer on the back cover notes, this work is indeed a rare accomplishment.
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$100 Midnight Nation deluxe HC for $27.99!
