This Fall is shaping up to be a strong one for fans of Marvel's premier supernatural superhero team, the Midnight Sons. With a video game coming from Firaxis, the company best known for the XCOM and Civilization series, and a 5-issue comic book miniseries (by Ethan Sacks and Luigi Zagaria), there's a lot to look forward to. Unfortunately, Midnight Suns is also another series following the general trend of getting a mere 5-issue miniseries timed to a multimedia project - a formula does not always lead to the strongest futures for a character or team in the comics.

The video game, Marvel's Midnight Suns, is a loose adaptation of the 90s comic book story which saw the team come together for the first time. In it, a variety of Marvel heroes will be forced to team up in order to defeat a being known as Lilith. New to the game, however, is the addition of a customable player avatar character, the child of Lilith, who is sure to add extra tension as they take a stand against their own mother to save the world.

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Art for the upcoming game Midnight Suns

The team line-up has also changed somewhat to add more recognizable mainstream heroes. While the original team was focused primarily on supernatural heroes and was founded by two different Ghost Riders - Johnny Blaze and Danny Ketch - the video game line-up includes a much wider array of characters from across the Marvel universe.

This includes some supernatural heroes not in the original team, as well as several major MCU heroes who are not remotely supernatural, such as Iron Man, Captain America, and Peter Parker's Spider-Man. Several comic book Midnight Sons characters are missing from the line-up as well, such as Moon Knight, Elsa Bloodstone, and Morbius. However, with one more hero unannounced and DLC on the way after that, it is very plausible that at least one of those heroes will be joining the game with time.

The new comic book series, meanwhile, overlaps with the video game somewhat while still focusing on supernatural characters. Its line-up includes Wolverine, Magik, Nico Minoru, Blade, and two characters not currently announced for the video game: Strange Academy student Zoe Laveau and Kushala/Spirit Rider. This story will focus on them taking on an unknown universe-alienating threat, teased as having history with a variety of the characters on the team.

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This pattern of giving a character or team receiving a high-profile adaptation a five-issue miniseries can and has resulted in great stories, but it is not always the best choice. These stories tend to be accessible to new fans by being relatively standalone, but they are also often functionally irrelevant to the larger universe, not being mentioned much before or after. As many are hoping for a larger ongoing series, with some fans even requesting an animated tie-in series, this latest story ending after only 5 issues may disappoint some audiences.

In another common motif, the comic book line-up is more diverse than the video game is. It is wonderful to see Marvel greenlighting more diverse stories in the comics, and it is nice to see Zoe getting a high-profile role outside of Strange Academy. That said, this also falls into Marvel's unfortunate pattern of the higher-budget higher-profile adaptations lacking the diversity of the modern books that connect to them. As DLC is confirmed, it is possible Zoe and Kushala will get into the video game eventually, but audiences will have to wait and see.

There's a lot to look forward to about the future of the Midnight Sons. Between a comic book revival, a video game, and the potential of an MCU incarnation of the team following-up on Moon Knight and the upcoming Untitled Marvel Halloween special, there are a lot of new projects confirmed and speculated about. Hopefully the team's return is a strong one and doesn't end at the end of this five-issue series.