The Night Man II

1-24, Vol. 2: 1-4, The Night Man vs Wolverine

This page: 12-24

THE NIGHT MAN began his second year as he'd begun his first, in an Ultraverse crossover - this time with three other series. Later he'd be involved in the Rafferty Saga, I would write THE NIGHT MAN ANNUAL as part 1 of a 100-page event with THE STRANGERS ANNUAL, and then we'd end the year with the influx of Marvel and Black September. Through it all, the guy just got more and more popular.

As we began the year, Marvel had collapsed the entire industry with its policy of ditching its innovators - when it went down, it took everybody with it. But of all the companies out there, Malibu fell less fast than anyone else. Marvel took a look at that and, evidently unable to conclude that it was because Malibu now had a number of their innovators, decided they needed Malibu's coloring staff (I'm not making this up). So they bought Malibu, put the colorists to work on X-Men, and decreed that the two universes would mix. Oddly enough, no Marvel editor wanted to be involved in this, so Malibu ended up getting the semi-big Loki and a bunch of lesser characters. The storyline then led up to Black September, when all the (surviving) characters were to be radically changed.

In later years, when I've watched the creators of shows like Homicide or Roswell or Alias be told by their Powers That be to radically change their storylines, I've had a great deal of empathy. You do what you have to do but hope that because it's still you doing it, you can make the transition appear smooth. In this case, the Night Man was going to become more magickal (thereby negating his entire premise) - but I had my eye on the fact that there were now two universes in play (at least in theory)... [To Be Concluded on the following page]

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IWritten by Gerard Jones
Written by James Hudnall
IWritten by Len Strazewski
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IWritten by James Robinson
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COMICS

THE NIGHT MAN Vol 2: 1-4


NOTES:

14: Dean Zachary took over the art and soon became the regular guy.

16: A fill-in on the NIGHT MAN side, but it had a flip side with the ULTRAVERSE PREMIERE series and that had a solo RHIANNON story.

17-21: Your covers have less copy on them because Malibu was experimenting.

19: The ending is the one I proposed for the Batman movie in my treatments; a more cost-effective version was filmed.

22: The Night Man splits in two, then four, then eight, and on and on, and each has a distinct personality. Great fun for a writer. At the end he's all back together - or is he?

24: Also known as Number Infinity, all Malibu issues this month had the solid black cover - and then they hedged their bets with alternate covers as shown below it.