We finished off the first major Moon Knight arc the last time with #18. The next Moon Knight arc lasts all the way to #30. That would bring us to the 50th comic out of 91 in the Moon Knight reading list. I reached that point over a week ago and haven’t continued reading since. There are several reasons for that which we will sort of get into here. But this went quite (very) long so I’ve saved the second half for next time.
Ms. Marvel and Moon Knight #1, Murderworld: Moon Knight #1, Moon Knight Annual 2022
I think I mentioned in back in the first post about reading Moon Knight. But while I am following a suggestion to read this extended run the actual nitty gritty of reading it i.e. the issue by issue stuff is based on a reading list I found online. I had my doubts about the usefulness of that reading list after abandoning Moon Knight: Black, White and Red. But my trust for it was about to be completely shattered here. We left off on a high at the end of issue #18. It was the finale of the vampire arc so while there were extant plot threads I didn’t really mind that the next three comics on the reading list weren’t more issues of the mainline Moon Knight comic.
First on the reading block (that’s a historical thing, don’t look it up, just take my word for it) was “Ms. Marvel and Moon Knight”. It wasn’t written by the writer of the mainline Moon Knight comic nor was it drawn by the same artist. Though I did like the art. I don’t know anything about Ms. Marvel other than what she looks like. The comic was fine. It felt like a very by the numbers superhero team-up. One of them was investigating something (Ms Marvel) in this case and the other got pulled in. As I said I don’t know Ms. Marvel but the character felt distinct and fun. It was a different writer but Moon Knight (and Hunter’s Moon who showed up while getting beaten up because of course he did) felt consistent in character with the mainline comic version. The only thing that felt weird was that Moon Knight and Hunter’s Moon called on Khonshu to beat up a big robot rat monster.
It felt very out of place. Marc is at odds with Khonshu and only calls on him in extremis, which this wasn’t and also it’s been constantly pointed out how imprisonment weakens Khonshu so showing up to throw down with a big robot felt odd. I’ll give it this, it did look cool. Moon Knight is basically out of it now and the next team-up issue for the story is Ms. Marvel and Venom. It wasn’t on the reading list so I didn’t bother. Which is sort of funny because basically everything that happens in this issue is inconsequential to Moon Knight proper….apart from the stuff with Venom as I learn later.
Next up we have Murderworld: Moon Knight. As long time Marvel readers will know Murderworld is the name of the weird amusement park death-trap run by Arcade. Arcade being a super villain gameshow host who makes people run through his death-trap park? I’ll be honest. I was never a fan. He felt like a bad attempt at being a Batman style villain that never quite captured the right bit of darkness or madness that makes the good Batman villains compelling. Our protagonist for this comic is one of the contestants in Arcades “The Running Man” style gameshow. Her and three other contestants are trying to escape/survive. The twist is that she is in fact a Hydra badass sent into Murderworld to whack Arcade. It’s actually pretty enjoyable. But the time I’m two thirds through I am beginning to wonder where the fuck is Moon Knight. Then he shows up and gets destroyed. That isn’t a flowery turn of phrase. He get’s destroyed because he’s a fucking Life Model Decoy programmed to badly act (everyone comments on this in the story) like Moon Knight. If you don’t know what a Life Model Decoy is it’s just a fucking robot. Moon Knight isn’t in this fucking comic. None of the events link back to the main Moon Knight comic. Why the fuck was this in the reading list?
I wasn’t angry, as I said I enjoyed this. I am a sucker for game of death/running man style shit and the protagonist was interesting. But at this point any faith I had in the usefulness of the reading list I was using was shattered by the wayside. At least it’s next entry made sense. It was the Moon Knight Annual.
Look I’ll just get this out of the way now and try not to dwell on it. I have read Werewolf by Night in the past so I must have known his name. But I had clearly forgotten it. When it came up in the comic I nearly fucking just closed it and moved on. Jack Russell. Werewolf by Night’s name is Jack Fucking Russell. While we’re at it. Aren’t nearly all werewolf’s werewolves by night? Ok. I get it. 1972 was a simpler time. Out of curiosity I looked it up and the original creator maintains it wasn’t an intentional reference to the dog as he had never owned a dog nor was around dogs. Which seems like a really weird way to phrase it. Ok. Finally back to the comic. We open on the Midnight Mission where Marc’s ex-wife bursts in to tell them that his daughter has been kidnapped. I don’t think I mentioned it but Marc’s ex-wife and daughter have been mentioned several times so far. But only in a “Yeah I fucked my life and relationships e.g. my wife and kid” fashion.
I lied. We’re going on another sort of tangent. But this one is important as it will come up a lot going forward. So far nearly every issue of Moon Knight has been drawn by Alessandro Cappuccio. I love his style. It looks fucking great. It’s got a rough edge to it while still showing the action clearly and it effortlessly switches between mystic nonsense and street level grit. I didn’t realis how much of the load it was carrying until it was missing. For one or two of the mainline issues and for this annual Federico Sabbatani was the artist. I don’t know if their styles just happen to be similar or if he was instructed to ape Cappuccio’s style. His art is fine. But it’s just not as good. So with the art lacking the story has to carry more of the load. Sadly Jed MacKay is too wildly inconsistent for this to work. There will be a lot more on this later.
Ok, once more back to the story of the annual. Jack Russell kidnapped Marc’s daughter. We see him and his shitty looking moustache and bear combo ranting to his two henchmen about he is now rightfully king of the wolves and how he’s a badass who read the Darkhold and didn’t got mental and how he’s going to release them from the shackles of their master. The Darkhold for those who don’t know is basically the Marvel equivalent of The Evil Dead’s Necronomicon or one of the many Lovecraftian tomes mentioned in the eponymous authors work. Yes I am aware that Lovecraft created the Necronomicon but the Darkhold is much more akin to the Evil Dead one in terms of goofy looks and what happens when you read it. Russell kidnapped the kid, who has the painfully terrible name, Diatrice, to get Marc to show up. He needs Marc to show up so he can enact a prophecy where he kills Khonshu to free all werewolves.
Yeah, so apparently Khonshu created the curse of lycanthropy to use werewolves as shock troopers. Funny how that never came up before now and previously lycanthropy was caused by the Darkhold. It feels like clumsy revisionism. Marc goes and enlists the help of Dr Badr aka Hunters Moon. Hunters Moon says the prophecy is impossible because becoming a First of Khonsu renders the fist incapable of getting pregnant or getting someone else pregnant. Another new revelation. Though in fairness I can see why it didn’t come up as Marc has had a kid for quite a while. There was a lot of yapping and a lot of fighting. Some of the fighting was pretty cool. Hunters Moon has Khonshu in his head whispering that he should kill the kid because she’s a threat to Khonshu as long as she’s alive. The finale was incredibly anticlimactic. Russell whinging on about Khonshu. Hunters Moon obviously not killing the kid. The only good bit was the kid telling them all to cop the fuck on and not kill one another the prophecy wasn’t going to happen (because it also needed a planetary alignment that was over at that point). Then the wife and kid leave.
I don’t know. It had some nice ideas and some bits were good. But overall it felt incredibly artificial. I hate the feeling in comics that something was created just for now. Just for this storyline. One of the sole upsides of reading a Marvel or DC comic is the continuity. I have zero problem with deconstructing or recontextualising continuity. Nor do I have a problem with creating new stuff. But I do tend to dislike creating new stuff that is presented as retroactively always being true. Not even in the form of a big revelation. Just a sort of mundane facet of a characters existence. It feels cheap and unearned to me. After ragging on the reading list I will give it some props. According to the back page of the annual the next issues is Moon Knight #17. But this would have felt bizarrely out of place if you read it then and would have killed the momentum of that arc. It works much better here.
Moon Knight #19-21
Issue #19 starts the next big Moon Knight story arc that run’s for 11 issues until the comic ends in Moon Knight #30. We now run into the problem with typing these up retroactively. I find it very hard not to let my feelings about the story arc as a whole (which I have finished reading) affect me. I could try writing up my thoughts after each issue. But then that makes reading the comics miserable so this feels like the lesser evil. Also on the upside it does give me the chance to spot details I had missed initially. We have Sabbatini on Earth. It definitely feels like a step down. The entire issues consists of two things Plesko (Marc’s very old friend) talking to Zodiac in prison and Marc and Hunter’s Moon travelling into the subterranean land below New York. The conversation is frankly boring. Zodaic going on about how America’s only real export is super villains, and the psychopathic kind at that. I feels that’s an angle that might have some mileage but not here it was surface level stuff. We get into Plesko’s past working as a mercenary with Marc in the “third world with a Kalashnikov”. Weirdly Plesko is drawn identically in the flashback to his current self – its weird because he looks like an old man.
The conversation between Marc and Hunters Moon is much more relevant. Badr explains to Marc that he came back wrong this time because Khonshu is imprisoned and more pertinently Khonshu warned them that there are no more resurrections. The next time a Fist of Khonshu dies they die for real. You can hear Chekov’s gun being cocked from here. They eventually reach Subterranea and the mole people are being oppressed by guys dressed in sailor uniforms and working for Donald “Commodore” Planet. A super tough super strong guy with a Scottish accent and a penchant for sailors uniforms. It would be hard to get more Z-list than this guy. It smacks of the “Batman: But Worse” elements that have kept popping up all over this Moon Knight run. It doesn’t feel like a jarring juxtaposition or a sign of the villains psychosis given physical form. It doesn’t even feel goofy. It just feels stupid. The issues ends with two masked men loading guns while polaroid’s are spread on a table in front of them, one of whom is Plesko.
I think it should be fairly clear that I didn’t enjoy this issue. It wasn’t terrible it was just incredibly, artificial feeling? There was zero suspension of disbelief. The entire structure of the issue told you that you were in a story and that later in the story one or both of the Fists of Khonshu was going to be killed. It felt entirely artless.
Luckily in Issue #20 we had Alessandro Cappucio back doing the art and that goes a long way. The issue starts with the masked duo from Issue #19 gunning down some random guy and a shot of lots of polaroid’s again. Only this time several of them have a big red X through them. Marc, Hunters Moon and Tygra are individually rushing through the city trying to find more potential victims because it turns out that the people being killed are Marc’s “Shadow Cabinet”. They are his informants, his agents, who disbanded the last time he died. Which was in Marc Spector: Moon Knight Vol. 1 #60….in 19 fucking 94. Maybe this would hit differently if I was a Moon Knight super fan. But I honestly don’t think so. Characters that last appeared in a comic run in the early 90’s and who the current audience only get to see as they are gunned down really lack any emotional impact.
The three heroes meet with various level of success in protecting people. Hunters Moon finds his protection target already dead. Tygra manages to save hers and Marc shows up outside Dr Plesko’s building just in time to see it and the good doctor explode. This felt like the usual sort of rushed pacing that has plagued this run of Moon Knight. Plesko was a character that was introduced to this run only an issue or two ago. We mostly saw him having conversations with the terminally boring Zodiac and a little of his history with Marc. Then boom, he’s dead. It just makes me wonder why? I can perhaps academically appreciate that this is sad. But as a reader there is zero emotional response. The author put no effort into making Plesko feel like an important character nor any effort into trying to forge an emotional bond between Plesko and the readers. It just felt like a big nothing.
We then had a forced bit where Reese realises something and has Marc swap places with his Jake the taxi driver personality (the bit where he but on a fake moustache while switching was just sad). So he can figure out that the killers are following a list and a route…which anyone could have done by looking at a map. This bit felt entirely pointless. Anyway Marc finds the two masked killers and then rings 8-Ball to threaten him into telling him who they are. I am biased, as I’ve said I love 8-Ball. But even if you don’t the scene of 8-Ball in the bath – but still with his 8-Ball helmet on, is quality. Turns out they are the Harlequin Hitmen. Guys so bottom of the barrel that even 8-Ball looks down on them. We have the obligatory bit of fisticuffs where the Harlequins keep going on about it not being personal, how they are just weapons and the do what the “Voice on the Telephone” tells them to do. At this point I have a deeply held wish that isn’t some new villains name. Unsurprisingly Marc beats two guys who’s “super-power” is having harlequin masks and handguns. He calls in his shrink, who I forgot to mention is an expert in “superhuman menticide”. Long story short the Harlequins have been severely psychologically damaged, minds hollowed out, basically super brainwashed.
The issue ends with a short flashback story where you see Blade working with a previous Moon Knight and then agreeing to do a favour for Marc in the current day. That favour is to teach Reese how to be a vampire. The short story was almost offensively bad and the art was absolute dogshit. The only relevant bit of information is that Reese is getting trained by Blade.
Issue #21 was a bit of a departure. The majority of is framed as Reese relaying events to Marc and the therapist (Dr. Andrea Sterman) but it’s all from Reese’s point of view. I think this is only the second issue this run where Marc isn’t the main character. The story itself is about Reese and Soldier and two friends heading out clubbing. It wasn’t super clear if these were normal friends or two of the vampire friends of Reese from way back in issue one. It isn’t super important either way. There’s lots of “I, vampire” style bollocks about blood and predators and such. It wasn’t bad but it wasn’t exactly fresh or untrodden ground. Mid way through the night a guy wearing a Temu Dr Doom mask showed up and played some record that drove everyone in the club into a homicidal rage. It didn’t really strike me the first time I read it but reading back through it to refresh myself he literally had a record, as in a vinyl to put on the turn tables to drive people mad. I mean if he’s a sound based villain have a home record cutter isn’t beyond the bounds of possibility. But still, putting your killer mind control track on vinyl feels especially mental.
I now realise its very clear Reese’s friends were vampire as they, Soldier and Reese were immune to the sound. The Moon Knight bursts through the ceiling and starts punching civilians out. Then we get a full three pages about Reese turning into mist, a flashback on how Blade thought her and then her de-misting to punch Dr DJ in the face. Sadly his henchmen show up with shotguns and put Reese on the floor so he escapes. There’s then some yapping about how the attack was random but how its all related. Yeah no shit, you just got down with the victims of mind control last issue and now a guy with mind control vinyl’s shows up and you think it could be related. At least Moon Knight has the decency not to bill himself as a detective.