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Captain Midnight – A Little Cultural Archaeology

03/28/2014 1:33pm

Posted on March 28, 2014 by Hannah Means Shannon on BleedingCool.com

Batton Lash wrote an introduction to the second volume of collected classic Captain Midnight comics published by Dark Horse, stating that in his childhood, “certain characters were so popular in their day that they were still referenced long after they dropped off the pop culture”, and his experience is in some ways similar to my own. I’m one generation later in the cultural swim, so hearing about Captain Midnight is a little more like hearing rumors and details through a tin-can phone, garbled, with plenty of room for interpretation and not much to help me out in deciphering exactly what is being said.

Lash heard echoes of Captain Midnight in the cultural zeitgest, like a receding tide carrying scattered artifacts, and heard contradictory experiences from relatives, from those who had read the comics, to those who knew him from the radio days. For me, I became interested in Captain Midnight through the new comics produced by Dark Horse, now in its first collection, and talking in an interview to series writer Joshua Williamson, then seeing the reprint of the old comics. But I wouldn’t say I know a lot about Captain Midnight. I like his strange costume, with a winged clock in the center of a red suit. I like the fact that he’s a genius inventor influencing industry (like Tony Stark). I like the fact that he’s a contradiction between an often quite two dimensional man of action and the moments when he’s called out for being so simplistic (a little like Tom Strong), and I watch closely to see what he’ll do when he’s challenged to see the grey areas in real life between heroic action and the best of possible worlds frequently based on compromise. I also like the fact that he can fly (well, glide like a flying squirrel really), since the Rocketeer was my first hero obsession as a kid. For the same reason that Superman captured the imagination when he first broke onto the cultural scene, and still does, I imagine: the spectacle of a man breaking the aery bonds is enough to make us stop and stare and speaks to the early days of flight as well as of exploration.

I took two volumes of Captain Midnight, one old, one new, with me on spring break from teaching to visit my family in the South. My family has been in many ways old fashioned, with lots of sitting around in parlors and being polite as a kid, especially around my grandparents, who certainly were scions of the radio age. Out of the blue, while driving through the countryside this spring, I asked my mother, “Have you ever heard of Captain Midnight?” The result was so far different than I expected that it inspired me to write this piece. My mother is a retired English teacher, and when I’ve asked her about her knowledge of comics in the past, it wasn’t exactly an area that inspired her interest. She recalled Archie, and the odd funny animal comic strip, but when I first gave some comics to my niece, there was a little pause, a hint of disapproval as if I should be giving her “real” books instead. But I have gotten used to talking about comics anyway, throwing the subject out there around people who aren’t familiar with them, on the off chance of converting someone by accident. So asking about Captain Midnight was one of those random talking-to-myself about comics moments and I didn’t expect an answer.

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Captain Midnight – A Little Cultural Archaeology

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Captain Midnight – A Little Cultural Archaeology

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