Welcome to XOXO, Popverse! Our Valentines gift to you this year is a week-long celebration of all things love and romance in pop culture, from our favorite couples to which superheroes would make the worst dates. (It's the X-Men.) Find our love notes to you right here. 

A couple that fights tyrants together stays together. 

The DC Universe has no shortage of couples who fit this description (Big Barda and Mister Miracle! Green Arrow and Black Canary! Jon Kent and Jay Nakamura!). Maybe it's because I'm a '90s baby forged in the fires of late 20th century edginess, but my favorite of these DC Comics couples is The Authority's Midnighter and Apollo. Okay, I might be a bit biased because Midnighter happens to also be one of my favorite DC characters, period (I mean, he has a fight computer in his brain that lets him calculate every possible outcome of a fight before it happens), but let's talk about how great they are, shall we? 

Another World's Finest

Midnighter and Apollo have always been a "real ones know" pair of characters in that they were initially created for DC's separate Wildstorm universe back in 1998 (they debuted in Stormwatch #4), but later made the jump into the mainline DC Universe proper. (That happened in 2011's Stormwatch #1, as part of the New 52 reboot of the entire DCU.) However, because they were conceived as darker versions of Batman and Superman, they've sadly only had sporadic chances to shine in DC's biggest titles. This is all to say that my love for this couple was sustained in part from re-reading Steve Orlando and ACO's Midnighter series ad infinitum, as so many other queer nerds have before me. 

But thanks to the events of Grant Morrison and Mikel Janín's 2021 Superman and the Authority miniseries, Midnighter and Apollo were placed on a new Authority team with the Man of Steel himself. And during the epic Warworld Saga in Action Comics by Phillip Kennedy Johnson, Daniel Sampere, and Riccardo Federici, Midnighter and Apollo were brought to new heights as they fought to liberate Warworld from the tyrannical rule of Mongul. The Warworld Saga wasn't just another great story for the characters. It also evidenced that Midnighter and Apollo could be champions of the oppressed in DC Comics just as much as Superman. 

Warworld's Finest

Of course, freeing an entire planet of people from various cultures around the universe from a warlord like Mongul isn't easy. After Apollo was taken captive and brainwashed by Mongul and his henchpeople, it was up to Midnighter, Superman, and their remaining Authority members to bring Andrew back and take down Mongul. In typical fashion, Midnighter's love for his husband led him to start his own revolution within the depths of Warworld, turning the local Warzoons - people kidnapped from their own planets - against their oppressors. And that's part of why I love Midnighter and Apollo so much: their care and devotion to each other is also expressed through their dedication to ending oppression. 

It also doesn't hurt that, being the edgy '90s characters that they are, Midnighter and Apollo do things that Batman and Superman never would. During the course of his uprising on Warworld, Midnighter pops an enemy's head off as if it were a wine cork. He also frees a group of children by bursting through the stone walls like the Kool-Aid Man. And when Midnighter and Apollo finally reunite to stop Mongul for good, Apollo asks his husband, "What took you so long?" Midnighter replies, "Oh c'mon man, seriously?! I spent months and killed like a hundred people looking for your ass!"

Truly, no one else in the DC Universe does romance quite like Midnighter and Apollo. 

Over the course of their publication histories, Midnighter and Apollo have defied stereotypes of gay men through their battle-hardened spirits and commitment to one another. The superhero genre has never had a shortage of homoeroticism [gestures at the X-Men], and Midnighter and Apollo have been a vessel for making subtext, well, text. Their existence would have pissed a lot of people in the 1940s off, and that's how you know creators at DC Comics have been doing the right thing all these years. 

It's time to let love rule. Click here to find out who and what else in the worlds of pop culture romance we're in love with.