There are a lot of really great reasons to read DC's Midnighter ongoing series, but on the offchance that you needed a little extra push to get started, Steve Orlando and David Messina have provided a moment of pure, perfect beauty in the latest issue. When he's called in to investigate (read: punch) mysterious gigantic animals showing up in Rochester, New York --- apparently a burgeoning hub of super-crime --- our hero encounters a gigantic tusked leopard the size of an elephant.

And in case you missed it, he throws an engine block right into its face. It's beautiful.

 

Midnighter #8, DC Comics
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Admittedly, this might not be as appealing to everyone else as it is to me. My favorite comic from my childhood, after all, was Batman #425, which features Batman fighting a bunch of dudes in a junkyard and just wrecking one of them by throwing a car battery straight into his gut. It's my definitive image of the Caped Crusader, and as a result, I'm way more into auto-part based violence in superhero comics than the average person. Still, even without that personal connection, chucking an engine block at a monster is pretty cool.

The thing is, it's actually not the most surprising thing to happen in the issue. That honor would go to the shocking return of Dominic Mndawe, alias Freedom Beast:

 

Midnighter #8, DC Comics
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See, it turns out that the villains of the issue are using a knock-off of the Beast's ability to chimerically combine animals for hunting purposes, leading to a series of giant, horrifying monsters that we as readers actually don't want to see the Midnighter punch.

And that's the real reason you should be checking out Midnighter. More than anyone else, he's benefitting from the Wildstorm characters being folded into the main-line DC Universe thanks to stories like this, which amplify the weirdness around him and keep him moving forward in surprising, engaging adventures that set him apart from just being "Batman But Better At Punching." Between this and his appearances in Grayson, he's becoming one of DC's best most enjoyable characters.

Really though, that thing with the engine block was awesome.

 

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