Teen Titans №10

ARE YOU READY FOR

STEVE ORLANDO

THE WRITER BEHIND MIDNIGHTER?

What are you most excited about when it comes to writing MIDNIGHTER?

Steve: I’m most excited about the character’s unique blend, his unique style: the proto-masculine type of extreme action, the type of bad-assery that you normally see, all of those John McClane-esque traits applied to a character who is unabashedly gay. I think it’s what makes him unique. There is no one way to be LGBT, there is no one way to be queer. He can do all these things and command this respect without having to shield any part of his life. The character is out of the closet in every way-there is no hiding that he is a superhero, there is no hiding that he is a gay man, and I think that is something that is pretty powerful and unique about the character.

Where is MIDNIGHTER when we meet up with him? Steve: As we open up the book, he has no secret identity, he is out of the closet as a gay man, he is out of the closet as a superhero, and he is trying to figure out what that means, and part of that is getting back to who he was in the beginning. I mean that in a story sense, and I also mean that in a meta-textual sense-getting back to the roots of the character, which are helping real people, affecting change that he can see, as opposed to getting lost in these big-idea fights. Super-villain fisticuffs almost don’t interest him as much as, like, seeing a woman who has gotten her groceries stolen and taking that guy and putting him into a manhole. He wants to see real people and improve their livesbasically putting this itch he understands he has for ultra-violence to use in a way that is serviceable.

How dark, gritty, and violent is this book going to be? Steve: We’ll have our own brand of ridiculous hyper-violence and then also a sort of social exploration as he tries to see who he is out-of-costume. It’s not going to be the normal mix of things you see in a book, which hopefully will make it unique and people will gravitate toward it. There is so much of the character that is contradictory-I think that makes him unique. People will see him getting back to
who he was-1 mean, he was originally homeless! Like any person, he has flaws. His flaws just express themselves in the way of, Like, Michael Bay action scenes instead of chewing pencils or something.

DCYOU
Steve Orlando