Midnight Son

One of my favorite odds and ends is Steve Miller's Midnight Son. I picked this up at a library sale in 1986. To call it a comic book would be misinterpreting it. It doesn't feel like a graphic novel either. It's something else entirely. With sequential panels of artwork - crafty B&W images of Pogo-like anthropomorphic animals - and short blocks of text in calligraphy, the Midnight Son tells the story of a visitor to an alien planet (that looks surprisingly like Steam-punk England lorded over by cute Wind in the Willows characters) who descends into its many-tunneled bowels. There he finds a monster and well, himself. The ending of the book has beguiled me since I was a kid - it's both religious and oddly unaffecting. I'm sure there's a story behind it. Or maybe there really never was one. For a long while I assumed I was the only person on Earth who had this book. That's not true, sadly.

Steve Miller's website says, "The Midnight Son tells the archetypal tale of the eternal child of light -- and his pursuit of that ultimate mystery, the source of life itself." There you have it. Jodorowsky eat your heart out.

Four Winds Press, New York, 1981.