Midnight X-Men #1 Review: Mutants, Monsters, and a Whole Lotta Blood!

Yo, fam, somebody at Marvel looked at the X-Men and said, “You know what these mutants need? Less therapy, more blood!” Welcome to Midnight X-Men #1, where Jonathan Hickman takes the mutant family into straight-up horror territory, and nobody’s handing out participation trophies for peaceful coexistence. These ain’t your Saturday morning X-Men, people. This is what happens when the dream gets buried, the nightmares take over, and the folks who were supposed to protect humanity start looking at everybody like they’re on the dinner menu. Ay bendito, Charles Xavier would’ve needed a whole new insurance policy for this madness!

Hickman opens with a funeral inside a church, and right away you can tell something ain’t sitting right. There’s religion, authority, grief, and a room full of people who seem to know considerably more than they’re saying. The conversations have that familiar Hickman flavor, everybody speaking politely while quietly measuring where to stick the knife. The story eventually pulls us into a world where mutant power has become something grotesque, with familiar faces operating under circumstances that make the usual superhero rules feel completely useless. The church material moves deliberately, perhaps a little too deliberately, but it establishes the rotten foundation underneath this entire universe.

Once we get into the mutant side of the equation, things get considerably more interesting. There’s a fascinating tension between the people trying to maintain order and the creatures who have already embraced what they’ve become. Hickman treats this less like a superhero team book and more like a supernatural political thriller with teeth. The characters aren’t simply evil versions of their regular counterparts. They’re operating inside a different system of power, survival, and control. That distinction gives the concept some weight beyond the obvious shock of watching familiar mutants do horrific things.

Matteo Della Fonte’s artwork is where this book starts showing its fangs. His compositions shift from restrained conversations and imposing architecture into ugly, explosive violence without making the transition feel random. The church interiors have a grounded, almost oppressive stillness, while the supernatural sequences turn bodies into nightmares. There’s one especially vicious stretch involving distorted faces, glowing energy, and mutants tearing through their enemies that looks like somebody unleashed a horror movie inside an X-Men crossover. The action gets wild, but Della Fonte generally keeps the movement understandable. That’s no small accomplishment when everybody on the page is losing their minds.

Arthur Hesli’s colors bring another layer of nastiness to the proceedings. The early scenes lean into muted browns, cold stone, and washed-out daylight, making the world feel tired before the real horror even begins. Once the supernatural action erupts, the palette changes dramatically. Sickly blues, radioactive pinks, and violent oranges dominate the page. The contrast works beautifully, especially when a character’s powers illuminate an otherwise suffocating environment. Hesli doesn’t just color the violence. He makes it feel contaminated.

VC’s Cory Petit handles the lettering, and there’s a lot of dialogue to manage here. Hickman loves building complicated worlds through conversations, briefings, and ominous declarations, which means the letterer has to keep the pages from turning into somebody’s classified government paperwork. Petit maintains a clean reading order, while the louder action sequences get the visual punch they need. The sound effects have personality without swallowing the artwork. Even when the book starts throwing bodies and mutant abilities around like furniture at a Brooklyn house party, the storytelling stays readable.

Now, I gotta check Hickman on something. This first issue spends a considerable amount of time explaining the political and supernatural situation instead of letting us experience more of it directly. I understand the assignment. We’re entering a completely different Marvel reality, and somebody has to establish the rules. Still, several conversations feel like they’re preparing us for a story that’s waiting around the corner rather than delivering the full meal right now. The characters are intriguing, the horror is effective, and the world has potential, but the pacing occasionally gets bogged down in its own mythology. Come on, hermano, let these monsters loose!

The bigger picture is where Midnight X-Men earns its place in Marvel’s expanding horror experiment. The mutant metaphor has always revolved around fear, persecution, identity, and the struggle for acceptance. Here, that familiar tension gets twisted into something far uglier. What happens when the people society feared actually become the nightmare everybody accused them of being? Hickman doesn’t offer an easy answer, and that’s part of the fun. There’s also a wicked little irony in watching a franchise built around protecting a world that hates and fears mutants transform into a story where humanity has very good reasons to be terrified.

By the time the issue reaches its final pages, the political maneuvering and supernatural carnage have begun setting up a conflict that could get gloriously ugly. This isn’t a perfect debut, and the exposition could’ve used a little trimming, but the creative team delivers enough atmosphere, menace, and twisted mutant energy to keep me interested. Della Fonte and Hesli make this universe look properly diseased, while Hickman plants the seeds for something bigger than a simple horror gimmick. The X-Men have survived Sentinels, genocidal maniacs, and enough alternate timelines to give anybody a migraine. This time, they might be the monsters. WEPAAAA! Welcome to Midnight, familia.

CRUSADERS SCORE:
4/5