Midnight Suns: Blood Hunt #2 - Marvel Comics

MIDNIGHT SONS: BLOOD HUNT No. 2, August 2024

Despite starting with a scene seemingly stolen straight out Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 psychological horror film “The Shining”, there’s arguably still plenty to enjoy with Bryan Hill’s narrative for Issue Two of “Midnight Sons: Blood Hunt”. Indeed, no sooner has the audience waded through Victoria Montesi’s blood-drenched nightmare, than they are whisked away to the vampire-stalked corridors of a partially-deserted hospital in Springfield, Illinois for an enjoyable, pulse-pounding confrontation with a skin-shredding revenant; “I have so much pain inside me… Pain I want to share… with you.”

This tense, adrenalin fuelled chase scene genuinely doesn’t look good for the poor female nurse who finds herself at the fanged fiend’s not-so-tender mercy, and right up until the flame-fuelled Ghost Rider makes an impressive last-minute appearance, everything penned by the American author appears to lead the understandably terrified woman towards a truly grisly demise. Likewise things look similarly glum for the titular characters when their former friend Eric Brooks shocking crashes into the middle of their latest congregation and appears on the verge of dispatching at least a couple of the super-powered protagonists with his deadly sharp sword.

Quite possibly this twenty-page periodical’s best moment however, doesn’t come until its very end, when it’s revealed that Blade was merely trying to lure his ex-team-mates away from the infirmary so that some unseen demonic “sleeper of Hell” could cross over into our dimension. So disconcerting a plot twist really is very well delivered by the Chicago-born writer, and debatably occurs just as the audience are probably expecting the supernatural troupe to somehow follow their one-time mentor straight out of the clinic’s smashed multi-storey window.

Proficiently pencilling all this action is German Peralta, whose sketches of the aforementioned vampire literally clawing his flesh off of his head are well worth a “parental advisory” warning alone. Furthermore, the Argentinian artist does a cracking job in making the reader drop their guard with the ‘quiet’ of the hospital’s empty canteen. This serene atmosphere is disconcertingly peaceful, and resultantly makes the Daywalker’s dramatic entrance all the impactive as it completely shatters the calm nature of the moment in an instant.

The regular cover art to "MIDNIGHT SONS: BLOOD HUNT" #2 by Ken Lashley & Juan Fernandez