Something creepy this way comes.
Let’s hear the facts. DC has been dominating the comic market with their Absolute line. Absolute was, in itself, a response to Marvel’s Ultimate line reboot. A reboot that ran its course early this year after dwindling sales and the controversial decision to just simply put it to rest. The clock is about to run on Marvel, and they simply had to respond. Good thing it was late anyway because, much like my teenage years, we are going horror.
Marvel Midnight is a new imprint reimagining the House of Ideas’ classic characters with disturbing, genre-specific horror elements. Much inspired by the rise of prestige filmmaker visionaries like Jordan Peele (Get Out), Zach Cregger (Weapons), and even newcomers Curry Barker (Obsession) and Kane Parsons (Backrooms), who truly took the world by storm in 2026, there’s an increasing perspective of horror as the perfect outlet for creative freedom.
Comics, of course, also have deep roots in the genre, with their initial pulpy suspenses even preceding superheroes. It’s a baked-in idea. Marvel is simply going the extra step and calling it a universe.
THE GIMMICK: Every cover has a clocked black stripe that hides the cover, with its full content only visible to readers who buy the book and turn the page.
Will this be what puts the publisher back into the zeitgeist? We’re bullish on it. But what they for sure have are strong creative teams with some insanely fun layouts. Let’s hear them before we all turn into pumpkins.
Midnight X-Men #1
If you need a reboot, call 0-800-HICKMAN. That’s right. 0-800.HICKMAN*
*this comic shop takes no responsibility for early cancellation
Jokes aside, Jonathan Hickman is the guy responsible for retooling the Avengers and for Marvel’s most successful line in decades, the Krakoa-era X-Men. His deep knowledge of the characters runs through a very methodical and precise writing process that connects previously scattered dots and, united with some character work, creates comics that are intriguing, expansive, and thought-forward in a way that rewards readers for their investment and pays off big time.
With Avengers, that led to 2015’s Secret Wars, an all-encompassing modern classic. With Krakoa, it peaked so hard with his Moira reinvention, only to die scaling up toward a top it could never really hit. In other cases, like last year’s Marvel cosmic retooling, Imperial, it was all cancelled so fast it might have been speed of light.
Here Hickman has another shot at his X-babies. A clean slate for him to splash blood and play with building blocks without any remorse. The pitch revolves around a gang-infested New York with a brewing war between mutants and vampires.
Nightcrawler seems to be at the forefront, with a vampire Storm being promised on the first cover. The pure dichotomy between mutants as a race always being compared to monsters and vampires is simply brilliant. Kurt’s first appearances always had him chased with pitchforks and called a demon. It’s just a delicious analogy in the making, and joined with mythology-building freedom, you can’t help but pick up this book.
Matteo Della Fonte, one of Marvel’s most promising upcoming stars, is doing the art.
Midnight Fantastic Four #1
For all the scientific and exploration fun and light we very much associate with Marvel’s first family, they have a horror core to their origins. There’s the mutating DNA that basically makes monsters out of them, mysterious portals to new dimensions, and their untold horrors.
Most of the time, authors approach it with awe and a sense of discovery that centers on their love and perseverance, even when things get too complicated. Benjamin Percy and Kev Walker are focusing on the warping, disfigurement, and self-described meanness of their core, citing Lovecraftian inspiration and banking on uncanny familiarity.
What I love about the pitch is how it taps into the uncomfortable feeling both the readers and the characters themselves can have with their predicament. It always goes back to Reed’s decisions to put his loved ones at risk and the fact they get punished way harder than he does.
In Jack Kirby’s pages in the first issue, there’s horror immediately, with lovable Ben Grimm being horrifically transformed into the Thing and Johnny simply combusting into flames. It’s an immediate despair that gets quietly washed away by Stan Lee’s Silver Age self-explanatory dialogue, but Kirby’s art always lingers in the background, with a book of horror being framed as a book of wonder.
We had that meanness manifest as The Maker in the original Ultimate Universe, with Millar’s Marvel Zombies coming to mind as a first foray into proper horror. We also had the 2015 vastly misguided movie adaptation that tried to touch on this territory and lost the characters to an unrecognizable degree.
Benjamin Percy’s writing always has heart, though, so not to worry. Heart is the only thing Fantastic Four can never lose, even when their outside bodies are surrounded by horror. Kirby got that with just a few panels. Let’s see how this book does it.
Midnight Spider-Man #1
Spidey is another character that has a built-in horror element. A kid bitten by a spider gets inconceivable body changes. Mostly, we lean into giving them a six-pack. (Are spiders the Marvel equivalent of Ozempic?) But we do have a Man-Spider from time to time to remind us of how disgusting the changes would have been in real life.
In the ’90s, James Cameron got close to adapting Spider-Man to the movies and got obsessed with the idea of making this a body-horror coming of age, writing a 57-page script that basically opened the door to Sam Raimi making the web-shooters organic when it got into his hands.
Recently, we saw some of that inspiration in the record-breaking smash hit Spider-Man: Brand New Day movie, with Peter waking up almost naked and full of webs. Hardly anyone in my screening was finding underwear Tom Holland disconcerting, though, for some reason…
Peter’s journey, the mutation, and puberty create such an obvious analogy and playing field that you almost think Silver Age comics were trying to give genre-specificity a new super-heroic language, aka the eureka everyone has when they read too much Silver Age. Puberty is disgusting, and so can be a spider bite; it’s an infinite playing field.
The book is headed by author Phillip Kennedy Johnson, coming off his ongoing Hulk series that continued Al Ewing’s Immortal Hulk trend of returning Hulk to a horror identity. His book was so good at exploring genre layouts while also creating an overarching story that expands into Lovecraft territory, complex and full of hidden monsters.
This has the potential to be an elite view into Spidey, especially if it brings back some elements of the sneakily horror-heavy book that was J. Michael Straczynski’s controversial period.
