A member of Warren Ellis's comic-book superhero team, The Authority, and one of the few openly gay superheroes in comics.
The Midnighter is part of a close partnership with fellow team-member Apollo - both were engineered by Henry Bendix in the bad old days of Stormwatch, before Jackson King took over as weatherman. Apollo and The Midnighter lived on the streets for something like two years, fighting crime as an independent concern.
The pair were happy to join Jenny Sparks's Authority after Stormwatch was disbanded, having established a rapport when Sparks helped them out of a bit of a pickle a year or so earlier.
The Midnighter looks a lot like the Batman - his cowl thing doesn't have ears, and he has a leather coat (full of shiny blade weapons) instead of a cape, but the resemblance is inescapable, and almost certainly no accident. His coat even has trailing straps on the sleeves, which look remarkably Batman-ish in silhouette.
Super-powers-wise, The Midnighter has been engineered to be the perfect fighting machine. His main asset in this respect is his mind - he has typically played out every possible scenario for a given fight in his head, analysing the outcomes and probabilities before the ruck even kicks off. Personality-wise, he could be described as a sadistic Utopian. He loves to inflict pain on bad people, just like Batman does - except The Midnighter doesn't even try to hide his glee at the prospect.
Apollo and The Midnighter are the only members of the Authority who don't have 'real' names - their human identities having been discarded when they took on their Stormwatch roles.