Midnight Suns: Blood Hunt #1 - Marvel Comics

MIDNIGHT SONS: BLOOD HUNT No. 1, July 2024

It is difficult to imagine that many fans of action and terror were truly satisfied with Bryan Hill’s narrative for Issue One of “Midnight Sons: Blood Hunt”, no matter how hopeful the American Author was during this mini-series’ pre-publication launch interview in February 2024. True, the thirty-page periodical definitely contains some high-octane action sequences, alongside a disconcertingly dark journey into a haunted cave in El Fasha, Iraq. But considering that large chunks of this comic consist of little more than conversational pieces, a lot of the storytelling’s dynamism has arguably already been negated by the time Tulip encounters a warband of vampire mercenaries in the desert.

Indeed, so much of this book appears to simply depict Tamlyn Hamato just nonchalantly talking to the likes of Danny Ketch and Johnny Blaze as part of her recruitment drive to tackle an utterly villainous Blade, rather than the tale actually explaining just how the “clairvoyant Japanese arms dealer” knows where to find the former super-team’s members, or that the Daywalker has even turned treacherously rogue. Much of this legwork was presumably obtained ‘off-screen’ and through her numerous contacts in the underworld. However, this unwillingness on the part of the writer to even summarise any of this, and instead simply signpost that Eric Brooks has been empowered by Dracula, debatably smacks of an assumption on Hill’s part that the reader has already consumed the entirety of his run as writer on the recently cancelled 2023 “Blade” series.

Such a shortfall of context also somewhat seems to permeate the Ghost Rider’s subsequent demand that Tulip help him first before the Midnight Sons will help her. Just why the Spirit of Vengeance and his predecessor need the help of a ‘mortal’, no matter how large the bazooka she carries into combat, is never explained, nor the reason behind why Blaze and Ketch needed to specifically destroy a thing from the Darkforce Dimension in the first place..? Unless they simply felt it was too dangerous a living weapon for the vampires to own..?

Ultimately, quite a bit of this comic’s palpable lethargy disappointingly also seems to stem from German Peralta’s layouts, which even when crammed full of explosions, flesh-tearing bullets and deadly sword slashes, seemingly lack the raw energy which so attracted Stan Lee to Jim Steranko’s artwork in the Sixties. Indeed, despite the Argentinian illustrator prodigiously pencilling an incredibly violent splash page showing the Ghost Rider riding straight through the aforementioned tentacled beastie from elsewhere, the picture appears to be devoid of the ‘oomph’ a bibliophile might ordinarily expect from such a sense-shattering shenanigan.

The regular cover art to "MIDNIGHT SONS: BLOOD HUNT" #1 by Ken Lashley & Juan Fernandez