“Feel the misery of the world, David Grey. For one second, I’m going to open your mind to the song of pain, the song I have been forced to hear every day and every night to the last syllable of recorded time.

For just one, fleeting second, David, feel the totality of the suffering and pain and misery of a world made deliberately flawed.

And tell me thr truth. Tell me honestly.

Is this not a world that deserves to be put out of its misery?”

David Grey is a cop, working homicide cases with the LAPD. He is investigating a fairly brutal murder when he first hears of the Men, a gang of some kind. His witness is too scared to say much more than this at first, and later he is found ripped to shreds, spread out all over his appartment. However, David has a suspect, a certain Jaeker, and is about to arrest this Jaeker when he is attacked by green creatures with black tattoos.

When David wakes up, he is in a hospital bed. No one comes when he shouts, and no one seems to see him. Except Laurel, a young woman who tells him three things: Someone has stolen his soul. This has brought him to the world in-between. And he has a year, perhaps no more than eleven months, before he becomes one of the Men — the green guys.

There’s only one catch. The guy who’s stolen his soul is in New York. So David starts walking.

Midnight Nation is written by J. Michael Straczynski, and follows David and Laurel’s journey across America. They are continuously besieged by the Men, and often have to seek refuge with others who have fallen through the metaphorical cracks. These others have not been brought through the cracks by the soul stealer, but by being made and making themselves invisible in the material world. Now, they huddle in abandoned buildings, living off the waste of those on the other side, always afraid of the Men.

This motif reveals one of the main themes of Midnight Nation — the one the comic is named after. It is a fantasy comic concerned with the lives and fates of those who do not fit in daytime society, those who make bad choices and end up isolated, those who shied away from the “real” world. (A fun parallell both to Gaiman’s Neverwhere and Whedon’s “In the Dark”, by the way.) But its something more than this.

There’s also a religious aspect to Midnight Nation. In this one, the soul stealer wants David to become one of the Men (it’s the soul stealer I’ve quoted in the opening here) , to help him overthrow “the maker of everything” and create a new world, one without misery. The soul stealer is a really good depiction of the Devil, really; he’s obviously an idealist, which is a refreshing variation from all the usual portrayals of him as a cynical manipulator.

Anyhoo, all of this helps set up a nice little morality story, where the atheist Straczynski gets to work out what seems to be some of his issues with Christianity. There’s hardly anything new in these, but as I always say, originality doesn’t really matter, so long as the repetitions are done with skill. And that they are, here. As already mentioned, the depiction of the Devil is really good, and David’s journey through America works nicely as a set-up for the Devil’s arguments. Of course, while Straczynski does to a certain degree “do a Milton”, he doesn’t go all the way with this. Instead… well, in case anyone of you want to actually read this, I believe I will stop here. Wouldn’t do to spoil all of the plot, would it?

Suffice to say, it’s a really good comic. Could possibly have been better, but still really good.

8.0/10. (A weak one, though.)