Review: Captain Midnight #0

Captain Midnight #0 (written by Joshua Williamson, illustrated by Victor Ibanez and Pere Perez) is very obviously a superhero book. Specifically, it feels heavily inspired by Captain America. These are not bad things, they’re just there and actually help you know what you’re getting into when starting the book. Despite the cynicism. That seems from that, it’s actually a fun, if occasionally disjointed, introduction to a world that can hopefully live up to its potential.

From the moment it starts, you’re dropped right into the middle of the story. They don’t stop to explain what is going on to the reader or the characters. A few people know what’s going on, while everyone else is just trying to catch up. There’s nothing resembling an origin story given except in small snippets, which is where its resemblance to Captain America actually helps instead of being a drawback. You can easily fill in the broad strokes of the backstory and correct the details as they’re covered in the comic, allowing you to jump right in. I can’t be sure if that’s intentional, but it manages to make the otherwise rather standard superhero setup work in a slightly different way than I expected.

Probably because of the speed at which everything moves in the story, I don’t feel like I have a good grasp of who the characters are. The characterization is pretty thin, and there are quite a few characters who either go unnamed or are named so briefly that I didn’t even notice. I really don’t think I know who Captain Midnight is yet, which is a big problem to start off. I think this is the negative side of pulling so much inspiration from Captain America: that’s what I go in expecting, but when they give little indications that he’s very different from that but don’t fill in the details, you end up with a protagonist without any defined character. This is a zero issue, so I guess that it’s to be expected, but that doesn’t mean that I like it.

The root of the problem I have I’d that this appears to be made up of several separate stories, and it really shows. Even though they’re all written and drawn by the same people, the fact that they’re all separate stories deprive this of a sense of coherence. There is continuity, but it doesn’t add up to more than little details in a bigger picture quite yet. I think that this would’ve probably worked better had I read them separately rather than being presented as one issue laying out some scattered backstory

I never noticed the art too much – it’s not great, but it’s also not bad. The only thing I really noticed is that Captain Midnight’s costume is quite generic – I really don’t know what they could do to make it more distinct from all the other superhero costumes out there without looking ridiculous, but it seems that they didn’t either. It’s admittedly not a huge issue, but it is there.

There is one good visual gag that I have to mention while trying not to give all of it away. Since a lot of this issue is about military intelligence and classified information, most of the characters can’t be told everything that they want to or feel that they should know. At one point, while a character is telling part of the story, a flashback panel is shown… with all of the interesting bits literally redacted. All that information is revealed eventually, but I loved that joke regardless.

Overall, I’ll give this issue a tentative recommendation. Sure, it plays out like a mostly standard superhero story for the time being, but things like that joke and a few of the ideas that have been barely explored make me think that this series has the potential to be something more than just your standard superhero book. So far, I like what I see.

Zac Kandell (known mostly on the internet as Mischlings) is a staff writer for Red Shirt Crew, and only says that because he doesn’t really know what to say in this blurb at the end. If you find what he says interesting, follow him on Twitter at @Mischlings for more thoughts occasionally.