Midnighter #14: A Medical Review
Midnighter #14 “Life Choices”
Keith Giffen, writer
Jon Landy, penciler
Apparently, part of having super-powered implants placed by Henry Bendix must involve getting your ribcage all screwed up, because that’s the only explanation I can come up with that would explain Midnighter’s grossly abnormal skeleton.
 The scene as it appears in the comic |
|
 A close up of Midnighter’s ribcage |
 How an actual human ribcage looks |
Not only is he missing half of his ribs (I count six pair instead of the normal 12), but he has some sort of extraneous posterior clavicle, he’s lacking the normal rib cage contour (though his body still conforms to it), and he’s missing the sternum (i.e breastbone) in its entirety. These are important bones: they protect the heart (or in Midnighter’s case, hearts) and lungs as well as provide a structure for muscles to attach to. They also form the basis of the shape of the chest and back. According to the image, Midnighter should be both barrel chested and sunken chested, and have the upper body strength of a fourth-grader.
(A quick look at the rest of the skeleton reveals abnormal elbow and knee joints, forearm bones that extend several inches too long, and an extra joint in the thumbs. It must be an old scan too because it shows him in full costume while in the scene in question he’s in a pair of prison scrubs.)
December 12th, 2007 at 6:28 am
Hahahahahaha!!! Upper body strength of a fourth grader.. hahahaha. Another nice photo of people not drawing correctly. I noticed the ribcage as well, but not until you pointed it out did I see the forearm bones and the extra thumb joint. Maybe he has his costume on under the prison scrubs? Y’know, just in case any crime breaks out in the streets of… prison.
December 12th, 2007 at 10:59 am
How would you take an apical pulse(s) on someone with 2 hearts?
December 12th, 2007 at 11:22 am
It seems he is just missing his false ribs, which aren’t real anyway.
December 13th, 2007 at 9:50 am
Obviously Midnighter’s nanites project a false image of his interior to any sensors, which also explains why he is in costume.
March 28th, 2009 at 7:20 am
Maybe he had a misexpression of Hox genes only at the stage of development and ONLY in the development of ribs. Seems unlikely though.
September 23rd, 2009 at 11:03 am
Huge fan of the comic, but as a wannabe artist even I noticed how… wrong that skeleton was. I think it’d be nice if Bendix’s improvements were more noticeable, but since it’s always going to be Science Fiction it’ll eventually have to look wrong.
I wish I could find the panel from their introduction into Stormwatch, first appearance. Much better art :D
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