Marvel is turning some of its best-known characters into horror stories on Oct. 7, when Midnight X-Men, Midnight Spider-Man and Midnight Fantastic Four go on sale as the first books in its new Midnight Universe imprint. Jonathan Hickman, one of the writers shaping the line, said the idea was to start with Marvel’s biggest names and build outward from there.
That makes Hickman the face readers are likely to search for now, because he is not just attached to the project — he helped frame what Marvel wants the imprint to be. He said the line came out of a brainstorming session with outgoing president Dan Buckley and described it as a “true horror line” built the Marvel way, with the biggest pieces coming first.
Hickman’s own contribution is Midnight X-Men, created with artist Matteo Della Fonte, and it pushes the mutant book into a darker register. In that story, the central threat is empyres, a nocturnal, blood-sucking hybrid of mutants and vampires. The other launch titles take different paths into the same idea. Philip Kennedy Johnson said Midnight Spider-Man reinvents Peter Parker’s origin through “a [David] Cronenberg or John Carpenter lens,” while Benjamin Percy said Midnight Fantastic Four leans toward “a A24 horror movie.” Percy also cited H.P. Lovecraft as part of that book’s inspiration.
The mix is notable because Hickman admitted he is “not the best horror writer or anything like that,” even as he helped develop the imprint’s direction. That is the friction inside the launch: Marvel is betting on a horror label built around familiar characters, but the architecture of the line depends on writers who are more interested in genre reinvention than in repeating the kind of spooky formulas readers may already know from Blade, Marvel Zombies, Werewolf By Night or Man-Thing. Benjamin Percy said that is exactly the point.
Marvel first announced the Midnight Universe in May 2026, and Hickman, Johnson and Percy discussed the imprint during this year’s San Diego Comic-Con. What is still not clear is how far Marvel intends to take it after the opening three books. For now, the company has answered the launch question cleanly: the Midnight Universe begins on Oct. 7, with three titles, and Marvel is treating them as the start of a much larger horror line rather than a one-off experiment.
