Midknight #2
Written By Paul Ens
Art by Tom Hodges
Colors by L Jamal Walton
Letters by Troy Peteri
Red 5 Comics
Cover price: $2.95; Available now

Red 5 Comics continues to impress me with the wide range of titles they’re publishing, and the skill they put into every title. They’ve got a pulp adventure comic (Atomic Robo), a fantasy-action comic (Neozoic), and now a straight up superhero comic in Midknight. What impressed me most with this is the unique hook that this series has, which I have never really seen before in a comic.

David and Tarilyn D’ville are what you might call a modern power couple. He’s an ER doctor and she’s an assistant D.A., at least by day. By night they fight crime as Midknight and Knightingale. The pair run into the villainous Daybreak, who can control people’s emotions with some kind of light on his chest. Last issue found Daybreak using his mind control over a bunch of civilians and causing chaos in the city. This issue picks up where that left off with the heroic pair tracking him down and fighting several times.

Writer Paul Ens has created an interesting concept for the series, in the husband and wife crimefighting team. It’s something that isn’t used too often, outside the Fantastic Four, but even that is more about the whole family, and not just Reed and Sue. It’s nice to see a pair in comics that are equally effective when it comes to the fisticuffs and not a story where one (usually male) is constantly saving the other (usually female). With some further exploration it could create an interesting dynamic to tell more stories. My chief complaint is that there are a lot of things left unexplained, including main character relationships, key plot points, and characters’ names (is the main character’s name “D’ville” as the story recap would tell you, or is it “Deville” as the characters in the story say?). There’s no explanation of how the characters got the money to start their crimefighting, what their skills or powers are, or what their motivation is. These are fairly important plot points that should be explained fairly early. I can see doing a full flashback in later issues to spell things out, but I can’t buy into the fantasy if I’m not given some basic info.

The art by Tom Hodges looks like the work of many animation style artists, such as Darwyn Cooke or Mike Avon Oeming. It’s not quite as polished as those two, but there’s the start of a promising artist. His layouts are exciting and his action scenes have a lot of energy, there’s just some work to be done on character expressions, and his backgrounds are a bit plain. And while I liked the art, I wasn’t too thrilled with the coloring, which was a bit flat and made the action less intense. The color palette was fine, and fit the mood of the book, just the way it was applied didn’t appeal to me. With more practice and experience, both the art and the color will come along though. There’s just that one little bit lacking that will take it from well done and make it outstanding.

So, we’ve got a fun concept with some interesting, if a bit cliché (I mean, the title character is a glorified Batman rip-off), characters with some fairly stylish art. With a bit improvement in script and coloring, the series could become really special. As it stands, it’s still fairly enjoyable and is worth checking out.