Review: Captain Midnight #0

By Reboot
 

Today I'm reviewing the first of Dark Horse Comics' new wave of super hero titles, Captain Midnight #0 written by Joshua WIlliams with art by Victor Ibanez and Pere Perez.  Dark Horse had announced not long ago that it would be launching more super hero titles, despite the fact that they were starting to focus more on horror comics again and doing them fairly well.  I was not excited about this shift for them and think they shouldn't be doing this at all, but I thought that it was important to give it a shot.

To start, have you heard about that Captain America guy?  That Jack Kirby creation many decades ago that later went on to join The Avengers and star in two terrible movies followed by two movies that were much better?  Well, it turns out the people behind Captain Midnight at Dark Horse are pretty familiar with the Captain America mythos too.  A super hero type with vague powers involving his combat abilities who was displaced in time after a fight with Nazis and now is looking to continue a fight with another Nazi who was displaced too.  I'm not trying to imply that Captain America is entirely original (ex: Cap's original shield had to be changed because of how similar it was to an already existing character's shield).  However, this is so close to the Captain America story that it distracted me from the comic.  If you're Dark Horse, you want me, the customer, to think about other Dark Horse books while I read, not Marvel Comics.

Honestly, it was pretty hard to look past this for the rest of the review.  The dialogue was mostly fine, but a few moments popped up that suck you out of it.  A perfect example is towards the end of the issue, two agents are getting a story from an elderly woman and interrupt her multiple times to show that they are trying to get her to move the story along.  The way it's executed left me feeling like they were not only bullies, but they weren't nearly as interested in getting the information they came for as they should have been.  It actually doesn't take up too many pages for her to tell the story, so let her finish it.  Some people just have no manners.

One thing that does work for this book, for the most part, is the art.  Unfortunately, I think some of the page designs try a little too hard without too much flare being there and don't really improve the story.  And since this is a super hero comic anyway, why not pick up an actual Captain America comic instead?

Overall, while this wasn't a bad experience to read and it did have some good qualities, I can't recommend Captain Midnight.  I really do wish the team on this success and I hope they are able to make something more out of this book and go on to bigger projects from here, and I mean that.  Unfortunately, this project just doesn't offer us anything new or interesting.  This is exactly what I feared Dark Horse was going to do when they said they were going to focus on putting out some more super hero comics.  I may attempt some of the other titles when they come out, but as it stands now, my original opinion hasn't been swayed.
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