Part of me thinks that Midnight Nation, with its lateness problems and how that has affected the story, is one of the best arguments for "original graphic novels" that I've heard. The rest of me doesn't much care, because even though I now really want to go and reread the whole thing and see how it resonates when it's all together, this is one hell of an ending with an emotional payoff, the kind of thing Straczynski has always done well. Frank and Sibal and the rest of the art team meet the occasion with their usual level of quality, and the result is a nice capstone on what has been arguably Straczynski's best contribution to comics to date.
It's funny, but in the beginning, I complained that while I liked the high concept of the series, I couldn't really identify with the characters. I felt that they needed fleshing out. However, the central relationship between David Grey and Laurel really shaped up nicely throughout the twelve issue run, and the payoff this issue, for David and Laurel separately and together, has a nice emotional resonance that I wasn't expecting. It's hard to imagine someone who has been reading this book not getting a little charge, or an emotional reaction, from the last couple of pages.
In addition, Straczynski has always specialized in giving us endings that weren't what you would expect. Rather than closing out the series with the climax, the last issue, he gives us something of an epilogue, showing what happens after the big decision of the series is made. Seeing how David's life changes after his journey, how he has to fit back in after an extraordinary event, was fascinating, and I honestly found myself wishing that there were more issues in the series so we could see what he was up to between his return to Los Angeles and his fateful meeting in the epilogue. Midnight Nation might be a limited series, but there is potential for plenty more stories in this idea and these characters.
Another worry I had from the start of the series, and sporadically throughout, was that Gary Frank's artwork was a bit too bright for the tone of the book. I still think that the darker aspects of the series would have been better served by a more shadowy, slightly more abstract style, but Frank's command of human expressions has served him well and really serves him well in this issue. The despair and confusion in David's eyes, the concern his ex-wife feels for him, the roguish demeanor of Lazarus and the spark of life in young Laurel all speak volumes, indicating things in the art that are left out of the script. Though I'm a writer-driven fan, a good script is nothing without a good artist, and Frank proves himself one of the best with this finale.
In the end, I suspect that Midnight Nation will find a long and happy life as a graphic novel, and that it will undoubtedly read better in that form. However, even with the delays, the occasional loss of faith and the uncertainty that the series would ever end, much less end in such a satisfactory manner, I'm happy that I stuck around until the end, and very pleased with the results of the story.
