Midnighter (bio)This is a featured page

Midnighter sketch by Giuseppe Camuncoli"I'm what soldiers dream of growing into. I'm what children see when they first imagine what death is like. I'm the Midnighter."

Real Name: Unknown
Alias: Lucas Trent (a forged identity created by Jenny Quarx)
First Appearance: StormWatch Vol 2 #4
Affiliation: The Authority

Former Affiliation: StormWatch


Vital Stats
Species: Human Being/SPB
Height: 6'5"
Weight: 165 lbs
Date of Birth: unknown
Birthplace: unknown
Known Family:

Powers/Abilities:
The Midnighter's physical and neural enhancements allow him to play a million variations of a fight through his head before the fight's even started. He can detect what, if any, super powers his opponent may have. Though his physical durability remains intact, the technology that powers his 'fight-computers' can be tampered with, rendering his offense precognition useless.


SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT!
Bio:
StormWatch
Midnighter, alongside his future husband Apollo, was part of a top secret Stormwatch team created by the first Weatherman, Henry Bendix. Nobody but Bendix himself knew of the team's existence. Bendix built them as superhuman and, when they donned their costumes and spoke their codenames, their previous identities ceased to exist.

However, this secret team was all but destroyed during their first mission, Apollo and Midnighter being the only survivors. They went rogue and spent the next five years undercover fighting for a finer world in the alleyways of America. One mission took them to Britain, where they thwarted Bendix's attempts at experimenting on children to create superhumans, in the process developing links with MI5. They remained unknown to Stormwatch until Christine Trelane found the files about their team after Bendix's fall.


Jackson King, formerly Battalion, now the new Weatherman, ordered them found, not being sure whether they were heroes or villains. Midnighter and Apollo were after weapons made in the "Nevada Garden", a relic of the first Engineer. He ordered Fahrenheit and Hellstrike to tag them with fetishes so they could be transported into SkyWatch. Midnighter and Apollo first attacked the Stormwatch team, believing them under Bendix's orders. However, they ceased the attack once they were told Bendix was dead. With King's help, they violently retrieved the Garden from the U.S. Army, and King granted them what they asked for: new lives away from Stormwatch.


The Authority

After Stormwatch was destroyed, Jenny Sparks convinced both Midnighter and Apollo to come out of retirement and join her new group, The Authority. A formidable fighter with a sardonic attitude, Midnighter epitomised the new team's commitment to fighting for a finer world, including against vested interests and world governments. Midnighter and Apollo's relationship, though hinted in previous issues, was revealed in The Authority #8. He was the architect of the team's first significant victory, the defeat of autocratic dictator Kaizen Gamorra, which he achieved by dropping the 50-mile-long Carrier on to Gamorra's island base.

When the US government had the team attacked and replaced with manipulable substitutes, Midnighter was the only Authority member to evade capture . Presumed dead, Midnighter had in fact escaped the Carrier with baby Jenny Quantum. He returned to overthrow the puppet team and rescue Apollo from imprisonment and abuse at the hands of their replacements. Shortly thereafter Midnighter and Apollo were married and adopted Jenny.

Midnighter took a central role in Ed Brubaker and Dustin Nguyen's Revolution maxiseries. A visitation, apparently from a future Apollo, convinced Midnighter that he was on the path to becoming a malign dictator. To avoid this fate Midnighter quit the team, precipitating its break-up, and returned to life fighting solo on the streets. Raised alone by Apollo, Jenny exploited her powers to age herself to young adulthood and reformed the Authority. Having convinced Midnighter to rejoin the team Jenny discovered he was being manipulated by a dimension-hopping Henry Bendix, hitherto assumed dead. Midnighter fought for Bendix before the Engineer was able to break the mind-control; Midnighter then killed Bendix by ripping out his spine.


Kev
Circumstances have twice forced Midnighter, very much against his will, to team up with Kev Hawkins, a homophobic former-SAS soldier and eponymous protagonist of the Authority: Kev miniseries (written by Garth Ennis) - a relationship made worse by the fact that on their first meeting, Kev killed him, Apollo and the rest of the Authority, though the Carrier resurrected them. On their last meeting they took down MI5's Royal Oak project, an attempt at replicating Bendix's experiments.


Midnighter (ongoing series)

The first story arc saw Midnighter attacked and kidnapped by agents of a man named Paulus while passing through the Carrier's teleportation portal. Paulus told Midnighter that he had replaced Midnighter's secondary heart with a remote-detonated bomb, and challenged him on pain of death to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Time-travelling back to the First World War trenches, Midnighter encountered Hitler as a young corporal in the German army, but was apprehended by 'time police' officers from the 95th century before carrying out his mission. In his struggle to escape, he crashed the officers' time machine at the year 1945 -- shortly before Hitler's expected suicide. Eventually Midnighter allied himself with the police and returned to his own time, where he threatened to erase Paulus from history by killing his kidnapped younger self; it is unclear whether or not he would have executed the child, but ultimately he did not have to. Midnighter then returned to the Carrier, but was apparently just as listless as before, immediately sending himself on another mission in Iraq.


This first arc was followed by four single-issue stories. Midnighter #6 featured an apparent alternate-universe Samurai Midnighter. Midnighter #7, by Brian K. Vaughan and Darick Robertson, explored the way Midnighter's brain processes combat by running the story backwards. Midnighter #8, by Christos Gage and John Paul Leon, dealt with Midnighter's attempts to connect better with humans after a graphic and public battle with the Suicide King.


A second story arc (issues #10-16), under new creative team Keith Giffen and Jon Landry, with ChrisCross pencilling later issues), detailed Midnighter's attempts to rediscover his life before becoming superhuman. Files given to him by Jenny Quantum identified him as Lucas Trent, born July 14, 1967 (making him 40 years old in 2007), a native of Harmony, Indiana. On visiting the town he found it was the hub of a paramilitary patriotic organization named Anthem, with ambitions to take over the United States and provide the country with the conscience they felt it had lost. While battling Anthem and its superpowered operatives, including Dawn (a reference to the phrase "dawn's early light" in the "Star-Spangled Banner"), and Rosie (patterned after Rosie the Riveter), he discovered that Jenny had falsified the documents she gave him, and that he had never been Trent - but decided to stay on in Harmony nonetheless.

World's End
The 2008 Number of the Beast Wildstorm miniseries described the devastation of Earth, and set the scene for a new Authority ongoing series, World's End, by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning. In this series Midnighter appears as one of the last Authority members still able to act in the ruins of London, now called Unlondon. Separated from Apollo, who is confined to the upper atmosphere by sunlight-blocking fog over the planet's surface, Midnighter helps civilians to reach the ruins of the Carrier, now a stronghold for survivors.



Alternate Versions
  • Alternative 838: In this gender-reversed universe, a female superhero known as The Nightshade is a member of the Meritocracy.
  • The Authoriteens: In Gen¹³ (volume 4) #11, a teenage version of Midnighter is a part of a team called "The Authori-teens" named Daybreaker. While he and the Apollo analogue Kid Apollo would not appear to be openly gay, their feelings for one another are apparent; Kid Apollo is said to be "overly protective" of Daybreaker.
  • Daylighter (WildStorm Winter Special): In Wildstorm Winter Special 2005, a story called Apollo & Midnighter: Two Dangerous Ideas features their alternate reality analogues, Pluto and Daylighter, with inverted color schemes to match. At first the real Apollo and Midnighter believed that they were their homophobic counterparts, but later learned that they were a former couple and had broken up.
  • Flowers for the Sun: A deadly killer with no knowledge of his past, set in a world very similar to feudal Japan. He falls in love with this world's version of Apollo. The couple are ambushed by ninjas and Apollo is killed. After killing the man responsible for the ambush, Midnighter visits Apollo's grave once a year and offers the hearts of the men he's killed as a tribute to his fallen love.

Trivia:
  • The Midnighter is loosely based upon the archetype of the DC Comics character, Batman. However, unlike Batman, the Midnighter possesses superhuman powers.
  • The Midnighter is one of the few openly-gay characters in North American mainstream comics.

Appearances:
Sources:

Categories:

List of Authority CharactersList of Midnighter CharactersList of StormWatch Vol 2 Characters



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