Mike Carey's other major project this week is Crossing Midnight, a new ongoing series from Vertigo.

It's a strange one.  On the strength of one issue, it's difficult to sum up, and hard to know quite where it's going.  Usually when I write something like that, it's because the first issue was quite slow.  That's certainly not the case here, as the lead character races through fifteen years or so at top speed.

Kai and Toshi are teenage twins living in Nagasaki, who were born either side of midnight.  The significance of that last bit isn't quite apparent yet, but given the title, it's got to be worth mentioning.  As kids they have some sort of mystical experience where they're briefly transported to a surreal parallel dimension, and as they get older, Toshi turns out to be mystically invulnerable from harm.  Then a guy named Aratsu turns up and lays claim to Toshi on the basis of a contract allegedly made inadvertantly by her father in the form of a prayer back before she was born.  She says no, nasty reprisals ensue.

Well, that's what happens, but what's it actually about? I'm not terribly sure at this stage; there's a number of different themes swimming around, none of them quite coming to the foreground.  There's a bit of old-style folklore, there's a bit of bloody horror.  There's an interesting device of telling the story from Kai's perspective even though it's really about his twin sister, and following as the teenage Toshi drifts in her own way and Kai is increasingly excluded from the plot.  In short, there are a lot of individually interesting ideas in here, but it's hard to identify how they all fit together.

Of course, it's only issue #1, and as I say, there's certainly no shortage of content here.  That suggests one of two things: either Carey has a much longer-term plan here which he's willing to reveal slowly, commercial pressures be damned, or it's just a story that doesn't click.  Either way, it's unlikely to be one of Vertigo's big hits, since they tend to be the ones with more easily grasped concepts.

We'll have to come back to this in a few months time and see how it's getting along, but for now I'm prepared to give Carey the benefit of the doubt.  I remember thinking that early issues of Carey's Lucifer were similarly slow off the mark.  That series eventually gathered pace into something very good, so he deserves the chance to deliver again.  Mind you, without the benefit of a Sandman connection, this is going to be a much tougher sell.  Hopefully it gets, and takes, the chance to gather pace.

Rating: B

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