Doctor Midnite

44 years ago - Pieter Anton Cross is born in Norway.

36 years ago - 8-year-old Pieter begins studying Kung Fu.

29 years ago - 15-year-old Pieter begins practicing Parkour.

26 years ago - 18-year-old Pieter goes to college in America where he studies Pre-Med.

23 years ago - 21-year-old Pieter goes to medical school.

19 years ago - 25-year-old Pieter begins his medical residency.

15 years ago - 29-year-old Pieter's mother is killed by a mugger. He steps down from his residency and uses his inheritance to build his own clinic, focusing on social justice and actively tracking threats to his patients, building networks of informants and street-level assistants

14 years ago - 30-year-old Pieter's advanced medical research leads to collaboration with Starlabs metahuman medical facility. He works with several members of the Justice League & begins corresponding with Michael Holt.

11 years ago - 33-year-old Pieter investigates the designer street drug A39. His clinic is bombed by the pharmaceutical company manufacturing the drug, blinding and nearly killing him. His massive dose of the drug mutates his vision, and he constructs equipment to weaponize his handicap and bring his attackers to justice, his street assistants giving him the name Doctor Midnite.

9 years ago - 35-year-old Pieter becomes Michael Holt's first recruit to his new Justice Society.

6 years ago - 38-year-old Pieter consults on a new cure for Kirk Langstrom's Man-Bat formula.

4 years ago - 40-year-old Pieter's definitive metahuman medical guide is published. He begins communicating with Nia Nal, discussing the specific complications of her gender reassignment surgery.

2 years ago - 43-year-old Pieter performs gender reassignment surgery on Nia Nal.

1 years ago - 43-year-old Pieter begins seeing Dinah Lance.

While there are many Golden Age heroes with modern age equivalents, very few of them are actually improvements on the original. For the most part we've left those new characters out of our timeline entirely, but for two characters that actually manage to surpass the original; Mister Terrific & Doctor Mid-Nite. Mister Terrific is obviously one of the most innovative characters in modern comics, but the new Doctor Mid-Nite has had some really interesting stories of his own.

Doctor Midnite's Comic History

The original Doctor Mid-Nite (misspelling & all) was created in 1941 by prolific Golden Age writer Bill O'Connor in issue #25 of All-American Comics. Charles McNider was a pretty basic superhero concept; a young surgeon blinded in an explosion who invents technology that lets him see in darkness, so he can fight crime. It's kind of a clumsy take on what would eventually work really well with Daredevil, but it was a unique enough premise that Doctor Mid-Nite stories appeared in every single issue of All-American Comics, as well as almost every appearance of the Justice Society from their earliest appearances in '41 onward. He's essentially one of the most consistently appearing characters of that era, which is pretty impressive for a character whose main power is seeing in the dark.

The first new take on Doctor Midnight (correct spelling this time) was introduced in the pages of Infinity Inc. in 1985 as the series tried to navigate the changes to the Justice Society wrought by the Crisis of Infinite Earths, creating new versions of several Society characters. Beth Chapel was essentially the same story told over again, but this time the character was a young black woman. The book specifically referenced the fact that the original Doctor Mid-Nite was still active, but of course even that fact was up-in-the-air given the ongoing Crisis, which left Beth in a weird middle-space. She would appear in other stories for the next decade or so, but never really found her footing as a new character.

Charles McNider finally died along with a LOT of the existing Justice Society in 1994's Zero Hour, a crossover that attempted to clean up DC's continuity with only middling success at best. Without all that backstory, the field was open for a new version of the character to be introduced, but this time there was a very deliberate attempt to modernize the concept for readers in the 90's. This was accomplished pretty spectacularly, largely by relying on 90's Wunderkind comic creator Matt Wagner, the creator of mega series Grendel & Mage, and his regular collaborator, Eisner-nominated artist John K Snyder III.

Their three-issue 1999 miniseries Doctor Mid-Nite (back to the classic misspelling) introduced Pieter Cross, a strange young surgeon who again underwent similar story beats to the classic Doctor Mid-Nite, but whose story unfolded in a far more complex, almost labyrinthian noir comicscape. He read like a blend of Daredevil, Batman, and Moon Knight all at once.

In the same year, James Robinson's JSA series started re-imagining the world of the Justice Society. Cross first appeared in that book in issue #7, quickly joining the team and becoming a hugely prolific character across DC as the main medical practitioner for the entire superhero population.

Our Doctor Midnite Story

The first decision with Doctor Midnite was actually a long discussion about the spelling of the name. (We finally decided to keep the original spelling, but to lose the hyphen.) Once that was done, we had to work out which version of the character to use. The original character was certainly prolific, but it's really hard to argue with the super-fun work done by Wagner and Snyder in their miniseries. A character that's really only defined by a limited set of powers suddenly reads like a weird post-noir 60's spy thriller where the hero regularly wields drugs as an offensive weapon. The tightrope the character has to walk is to avoid appearing unhinged, but instead hyper-disciplined and dedicated to the practice of medicine even as he's jumping off rooftops throwing hypodermic needles at people.

Bizarrely, Cross actually never really managed to achieve this cool just-this-side-of-sanity vibe again. Appearing so quickly in JSA, his role quickly became 'resident medical professional'. This role was insanely useful, so this is his main purpose in most of his future appearances. We really do want to make sure that our take on the character, even if we're going to take advantage of his role as the guy everyone goes to for medical help, still feels like he knows exactly how much pressure it takes to snap a kneecap.

During the early issues of JSA Black Canary was single, because Oliver Queen was dead. The series introduced the idea that she and Cross were starting to see each other. Since we're ending the Dinah / Ollie relationship in our timeline, This feels like an interesting new direction to try.

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