Batman is one of the deadliest heroes around, but the Authority’s Midnighter may just have him beat. The twisted super-team’s dark avenger has all of Batman’s skills, with the benefit of enhanced powers thanks to neural implants.
Created by Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch, Midnighter fills the role of tactician and master planner on the Authority. Considering that all the members of that team are variations on heroes from the Justice League, it’s easy to see Midnighter also filling the “Batman” role, but the character is far more than a replacement for Bruce Wayne. A former black ops agent enhanced with “neural-inductive implants,” Midnighter basically has a combat computer in his brain, able to cycle through every attack his opponents might use and effectively predict how the battle will play out before it happens.
The Authority’s Midnighter Wins Battles Before They Begin
Midnighter’s powers can be hard for a lot of readers to wrap their minds around, but one comic book from 2007 displayed his powers in a rather creative way. Midnighter #7, written by Brian K. Vaughan with art by Darick Robertson, takes a novel approach in depicting how Midnighter’s enhanced, supercomputer-like brain works. Taking a page out of Memento and telling the story in reverse chronological order, Vaughan and Robertson get the reader into the mindset of Midnighter during a mission. By starting at the end and ending at the beginning, the creators successfully portray how Midnighter has already won the fight before he even lands the first punch.
More than just a cheap gimmick, this reverse structure is key to understanding Midnighter’s superhuman abilities. As the reader turns each page to travel backwards through Midnighter’s mission to foil a shady oil conglomerate’s plan to eradicate most of the world’s fuel reserves, they can see Midnighter piecing together his plan before it happens; calculating the variables and eliminating the options until the mission ends with Midnighter successfully retrieving incriminating evidence and getting home in time to kiss his husband and fellow Authority teammate, Apollo. More importantly, this backwards structure acts as more than just a tool to better understand how Midnighter’s powers work, but also gives crucial insight to his character. The character is not unlike Watchmen’s Doctor Manhattan, able to remove himself from the orderly flow of time and perceive events outside strictly chronological terms. “The future’s already happened, Apollo,” Midnighter says at one point. “We just haven’t caught up to it yet.”
In that way, Midnighter’s unflappable cool and domineering arrogance aren’t just macho posturing, but the supreme confidence of a player who’s mastered the game, working out all the moves until he’s reached the final checkmate. Making use of his neural implants to become a tactical mastermind, Midnighter rises above being a mere Batman stand-in on the Authority.
