Crossing Midnight #1

"The Shrine"
(Part 1 of 3)
written by Mike Carey
pencils by Jim Fern
inks by Rob Hunter

After their father prays, at the insistence of his mother, a survivor of the Nagasaki bomb, to a family shrine of a forgotten Kami for the healthy birth of his child, Kai and his entirely unanticipated twin sister Toshi are born, just on either side of midnight.  As the children grow older, magic seems to find them.  As young children, they lose their comrade Saburo in a magic world on the other side of the Torii Arch before it unexpectedly seals.  And a few years later, Toshi discovers her immunity to blades, which try as she might, will not pierce her.  Then, as a teen, a master of blades Aratsu, a figure Kai remembers from the magic world, appears to claim Toshi as payment for their father's prayer and promise.  Because she refuses him, he eviscerates the family dog, and favorite of Toshi, Sen, before warning her he will return.

Few comics writers show as much storytelling verve as Carey, and Crossing Midnight is no exception.  Make no mistake, issue #1 is mostly exposition, the story of their birth and childhood as told by elder twin Kai.  Until its final pages, it's all foundation, but it's a foundation that gestures at a detailed and nuanced mythology of battling Kami, humans stolen into magic worlds, and twins born into different worlds, with different powers and on either side of midnight.  Largely because Kai is our narrator, he is far and away the more sympathetic of the siblings, and if the other members of the Hara family are sensitive to the moods and feelings of the others, none seem to show it.  Yasuo's trouble at work, and it seems to be quite dangerous, makes him withdrawn, continually anxious, and subsequently dismissive of others.  Miya's frustration at her husband's withdrawal and apparent apathy makes her shrewish.  Toshi's physical invulnerability makes her edgy, aggressive, and defiant.  They are, in other words, a family, and recognizably such.

The relative success of Crossing Midnight's opening chapter will, as a consequence of its exposition-heavy storytelling, be dependent on how the details of its opening bear out in the next few issues.  As an art team, Fern and Hunter aren't particularly impressive in this one.  Faces are rendered beautifully, with fine and graceful lines, but backgrounds are flat and washed out.  The exception is the world through the Torii Arch, which is strange, expansive and with a depth not otherwise found in issue #1.  If, as I suspect, subsequent episodes of the series take place in this or other alternate worlds, the drabness of the human world may be as much as aesthetic choice as not.  Either way, the interior art is faced with the unenviable task of matching J. H. Williams III's wonderfully layered and colorfully lush cover illustration, which is daring in its perfect symmetry.

[January 2007]