GHL 261 - Midnighter The Complete Wildstorm Series (Book Club)

Love that you adopted our rating system. You also make a really interesting observation about the Introduction. Intros are really tricky (we're having one written for us right now!), because you want them to entice the reader. Perhaps Ennis' intro was more effective when it was initially published?

Honestly, I bought this book at the beginning of the month super excited that I'd be all up in this and ready by the time the podcast came out...and then I decided to buy a lot more Wild Storm books and just marathon through it all and...well I'm here now! First off, I love Midnighter and Apollo. What Wild Storm does well is give their characters fascinating ideas. My introduction to them was "Oh, they're Batman and Superman if they were gay," and I was like YES!! That said, I don't think any of their stories are actually interesting until Steve Orlando took a crack at them. And in my marathon of Stormwatch, The Athority and this little thing I realized that I only liked Wild Storm when Warren Ellis was writing it. Even though Midnighter and Apollo really do...nothing except punch things since their inception Ellis gave the stories something...more. I'm not quite sure what it is, maybe it's a veil of mystique, but he has something ingrained into his writing that made them interesting and when I read Garth Ennis' intro story in this collection (whom I love) I thought it was fine...just fine. It had moments and a great concept (like most WS) but I didn't get anything other than surface level teenage violent glee out of it (which I don't think Ellis uses in his stories but everybody else, especially Millar, does). Ennis' single issue set in Japan, now that was fantastic, but for the most part everything else in this collection felt very middle of the road. Like that issue that's just after Ennis' run is formated backwards to capture how Midnighter thinks. Great concept...not so much in the execution. So for me I'd give this collection a 2.5 breggos.

Cody Enos