Midnight Man 2 sparkles with moments like this. It’s like reading a script scattered with perfectly formed, faintly grumpy diamonds that make you laugh even as you’re wrapping your head around the profoundly disturbing script.
Midnight Man 2 and the first part (Both available here) are the story of a dead man resurrected by a mysterious group. He’s set loose to do what newly resurrected dead men do; wear a cool coat, fire guns, fight crime but as ever it’s never as simple as that. Because he keeps asking awkward questions. And, here, getting increasingly awkward answers…
Andy Bloor and Mo Ali are two of the shining lights of the UK indie scene and every page here shows why. The art is kinetic but never feels light or hurried. There’s muscle behind these punches, and people behind these masks and the book never lets us forget that. Better still it uses that to make the increasingly strange events of this volume feel grounded. MM reacts like we would even as the world around him looks and acts like nothing we’ve seen before.
But what really works here is the confidence. This is a book that never slows down but never abandons the reader for cheap spectacle. It’s a surreal, sometimes nightmarish sometimes hilarious story but it’s a story about people however weird it gets. The friendship that starts here is pragmatic, sweet and desperately needed. It also rounds off a story while setting up a third volume with laconic humor and surprising grace.
You can get Midnight Man 1 and 2 via Comichaus or over here. If you’re remotely interested in modern comics, you should check them out, as well as everything else these two have done. Action adventure doesn’t get smarter, cooler, odder or funnier than this.