Midnighter #7

Posted by Graig on May 3, 2007

Wildstorm

In the recent film The Lookout, Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a character still recovering from a head trauma received four years earlier in a car accident. As a result he has issues with his memory, often forgetting to do things or where he left things, and has difficulty remembering how his day progressed. His room mate, played by Jeff Daniels, probes him, and tells him to start from the end and work his way back, rather than start at the beginning. He tries and he does. He can sequence properly, but only in this fashion. Later in the film, by envisioning the end result he manages to devise a fool-proof scheme for getting himself out of the huge trouble he winds up in (it involves a heist… it’s a smart movie, give it a shot when it hits DVD).

I’m not saying Brian K. Vaughan was influenced by The Lookout for his one-off issue of Midnighter (as no doubt his script was in well before the release of that film) but the parallels are there. What could ostensibly be considered a “fill-in” issue also happens to be enjoyably clever without being overtly smug about it, and a fascinating read. If your familiar with Vaughan’s work, this should come as no surprise, and yet each page in this book is a grin-inducing reveal.

The opening page features the caption “The End” in bold in the upper left corner, the full-page spread a picture of Midnighter and his lover, Apollo, in a romantic, lip-locked embrace. Each page that follows steps, well, one page back in time. Vaughn doesn’t go existentially creative, instead he’s essentially written an issue and released it’s pages in backwards order. You can start the issue at the last page and read it forward without any storytelling glitches, but it’s infinitely more exciting and it works just a little better because of it’s reverse-paging order. The story is almost irrelevant, with the climax of the action happening on page 4 working its way back to the first page at the end which is really the middle of the story (makes your head hurt a little doesn’t it). There is no real beginning to the story, because, by starting at the end, the beginning is irrelevant.

The point being made is Midnighter, like Gordon-Levitt’s character from the Lookout pictures where he wants to wind up and envisions all the possibilities between that destination and where he is. In his mind, he’s already won. And by presenting the story in such a manner, Vaughan lets us experience, ever so slightly, the Midnighter’s thought process. One could think that the last page (which is the first) is actually the origin, and everything leading to it is just the fantasy… so simple, and yet genius in its simplicity.

I didn’t even touch on Darick Robetson and Karl Story’s art, but just know that you wont find a more enjoyable M.O.D.O.K/C-free stand-alone issue of any mainstream comic this year.

5 out of 5 Vikings