"Darkness Falls Across The Land..."

Can YOU

Name This Marvel Villain??

Those of us who were early Bronze Age readers (in this case, circa 1974) no doubt would remember this villain a little differently than the man pictured here. And to muddy the waters a little more, our villain isn't quite the same man. Nevertheless, Midnight Sun is, for all intents and purposes, the dark-garbed martial artist who premiered fifteen years earlier, using an abridged version of his current name:

Aside from the style of their appearance, which appears to draw substantially from that of The Man With No Face, both characters have two notable things in common: Each is a creation of Steve Englehart, and both men were conscripted into the service of others who sought to use them as assassins.

Midnight had a brief but memorable history, meeting his end in his conflict with Shang-Chi but finding new life (so to speak) as a pawn of Kang the Conqueror. Rescued by Fu Manchu when British forces destroyed an African village where the mastermind conducted his operations, the boy named M'Nai was adopted by Manchu and raised/trained along with Shang-Chi, the two becoming fast friends. When Shang-Chi turned against Manchu after being ordered to kill Dr. James Petrie, Manchu sent M'Nai to New York to find him, though he would be compelled to take one further step.

Now totally committed to ending Shang-Chi's life, M'Nai and his brother engage in a hard-fought battle through the streets--until ending up at a construction site, where tragedy strikes.

A year later, however, Englehart brings his character back as one of the Legion of the Unliving in order to secure for him the guest of the Avengers known as Mantis, whom Kang believes will gain for him the rule of Earth through their son. (Of course, Kang already rules the Earth in the future, but you can never have enough Earths under your belt.) The first meeting between the two doesn't settle much, though mostly because Mantis essentially declines the challenge.

The second time around, however, M'Nai isn't so lucky--because it becomes clear that Mantis outclasses this foe completely, dead man walking or not.

Over a decade later, Englehart again taps Midnight for a new appearance--though to get around that death thing, he enlists the Kree to bring back Midnight without necessarily bringing back M'Nai. And voilà--meet Midnight Sun (with apologies to Lionel Hampton and Sonny Burke), a new enhanced Kree agent ready to sic on the Silver Surfer.

(Beats me why the Kree would bother repairing the original body's spinal cord, if they were just going to clone a new body for the reanimated brain. They probably employed a lab tech with too much time on his hands.)

You might think assigning a martial artist to operate in space is a little like dropping a tap dancer in the ocean and telling him to do his best Fred Astaire, but the Kree think of everything--Midnight Sun is equipped with special discs on his hands and feet which allow him the same range of movement he would enjoy in any gravitic environment. Unfortunately, despite Midnight Sun's ability to trap his opponent in an area of total darkness, it's his discs which betray his location to the Surfer and lead to his defeat.

Midnight Sun would would clash with the Surfer again, and even stayed with the Inhumans for a time--eventually reclaiming much of his identity (along with, regrettably, his fanatical loyalty and devotion to Fu Manchu), before being condemned to a dismal fate in the underworld in a series which revives The Deadly Hands of Kung Fu. The grim scene concludes the saga of the character forty years after his debut as Midnight.