Review: Vengeance of The Moon Knight Vol. 2: Killed, Not Dead

The second trade collection of the Gregg Hurwitz-written Moon Knight monthly, Vengeance of The Moon Knight is on much surer footing than the previous one, with shorter, sharper stories, each of which features at least one more-popular-than-The Moon Knight guest star, and each of which pull a little further back from the Moon Knight Is A Bloodthirsty Lunatic Trying Not To Kill plot line.

If the first six issues of the series made for a tradepaperback of Moon Knight comic books about other Moon Knight comics, than the next four issues, collected in this second volume, were Moon Knight comic books about action adventure in the Marvel Universe, a marked improvement (I think that’s one of the reasons the Bendis/Maleev Moon Knight comic was more palatable to me than the first Vengeance of...; it was a Moon Knight comic about the Marvel Universe setting as seen through one character’s experiences, and not a Moon Knight comic about old Moon Knight comics).

I think it also helps that here Hurwitz is paired with two different artists than his first partner, both with clearer, cleaner styles, and both markedly better about some of the basics of telling stories in comic book form. At least this time out, I’ve seen clear shots of some of the character’s faces, and could now identify Samuels and Frenchie on sight. Still not sure about Marc Spector/Jake Lockley, Moon Knight’s secret identity/-ies. There’s only two panels in this featuring his face, I think. (Which is better and more panel-time than his girlfriend, what’s-her-face, gets; she only appears in a single panel, as a pair of naked legs rising out of the soapy water of a bubble-bath, and a come-on line of dialogue, coming from a head somewhere off-panel.)

The first two issues, which tell the story from which the collection takes its sub-title, are drawn by Tan Eng Huat. His style has changed quite a bit since editor Andrew Helfer introduced him the North American direct market in one of the (many) doomed Doom Patrol launches way back in 2001, but even as he grows more experienced and comfortable drawing superheroes and tuning his style closer to the standard superhero wave-length, his artwork retains a sense of weird, awkward energy.

The guest-star in these Huat issues is Deadpool, and he’s taken a contract on a very old man dying of stage four colon cancer in a hospital; the lady who hired Deadpool wants the man killed violently, not dying peacefully, in revenge for his ordering the kidnapping and murder of her child (Thus the story and collection title, "Killed, Not Dead"). It is something this terrible very old man has done a lot of over the years and, in fact, he has a kidnapped child waiting to be ordered killed as the story takes place.

In traditional Marvel style, Moon Knight and Deadpool meet and fight. But instead of teaming up, they simply continue to fight. Oddly, neither character seems to know who the other is. Neither are at the top of the heap of Marvel’s character hierarchy obviously, but they’re not the most obscure characters either. I guess I just assumed every character had met every other character, by this point.

Huat

The art’s a little weird here, with some of the action not quite working right, and Deadpool somehow managing to beat blood out of The Moon Knight’s face without getting any on the face mask it must have come through, but it’s a better-looking couple of issues than those in the first volume, and one that manage to retain the same level of darkness and gritty, over-lined work.

The last two issues are drawn by Juan Jose Ryp, a better artist still. His is the smoothest, cleanest art we’ve seen on the series so far, and he has the strongest, clearest figurework and design of the three. His The Moon Knight gives readers the best look at The Moon Knight and his new, over-armored The Moon Knight costume we’ve seen (and really the ninth issue of an ongoing monthly series probably isn’t the ideal time to have a good artist start introducing the character visually).

Ryp

Ryp also uses a lot of lines, including that almost pointillist form of cross-hatching he does to imply texture and shadow. But his lines are careful, giving every panel a really remarkable amount of detail and breakground, without subsuming the figures into it. A Hurwitz/Ryp series would have really been something to see.

Ryp draws two done-in-one issues. The first of these is a Spider-Man team-up (where the cover comes from), and the second is a Secret Avengers team-up (Moon Knight joined the Secret Avengers, after all; this issue opens with former Captain America Commander Rogers, who had taken over Norman Osborn’s job as Boss Of All Superheroes after the events of Siege, and takes us along on a mission with them, as seen through The Moon Knight’s eyes and read through his narration.

The Spider-Man team-up has the pair trying to stop a robbery by The Sandman, who makes his escape in a gigantic form. I can’t think of an artist better suited to drawing the Sandman, a character literally made up of the little, grainy dots Ryp likes to dapple his work with, and there is just scene after scene of Sandman moving like a sandstorm and reforming. There’s a particularly cool scene set in a museum, where the heroes quietly stalk through taxidermied animals, seeking the hidden and disguised Sandman.

For the Secret Avengers issue, we see Rogers approach Moon Knight, then flashforward to a mission briefing and an attempt to rescue hostages from modern pirates, the leader of which is armed with a pair of super-weapons, one of which they were expecting and one of which they were not. Unlike the later Warren Ellis-written Secret Avengers stories, there’ s no science or espionage really needed on this mission, and nothing clever about its construction or what it asks of the heroes. They basically function as a superhero SWAT or SEAL team, dropping onto the boat and non-lethally but extremely violently dealing with the pirates.

This gives us an opportunity to see Ryp draw not only The Moon Knight and Commander Rogers, but also an Ant-Man, Beast, Valkyrie, War Machine and Black Widow.

Ryp

Ryp comes up with a nice solution to the zipped or unzipped question when it comes to Black Widow, first drawing her almost completely unzipped, but in the act of zipping up, as she will remain for the rest of the story. Cake and eating!

There’s not a whole lot to this aside from a big fight scene, of course, but it sure is a well-drawn fight scene, and The Moon Knight takes a weird shot with a bow and arrow that I didn’t think anyone in the Marvel Universe outside of Hawkeye would or should be able to make.

When speculating on possible reasons for the relative not-very-good-ness of Vengeance of The Moon Knight Vol. 1, I mentioned that it launched as part of the “Dark Reign” status quo, and thus had to tie itself into the overall Marvel Universe mega-story of the time. Here, “The Heroic Age” branding initiative started during the Deadpool team-up.

Like “Dark Reign,” “The Heroic Age” wasn’t a storyline so much as a branding initiative, a temporary dawn after the dark, stormy night of the previous cycle of crossover stories. During "The Heroic Age," Captain America Steve Rogers came back to life, helped the heroes defeat the villains that were running the world, and then became The Boss, replacing Osborn (who had replaced Iron Man, who had replaced Maria Hill, who had replaced Nick Fury I). The idea was to get back to basics, back to business-as-usual super-heroing, which is why I think we see a story as simple as Spider-Man and Moon Knight team-up to stop The Sandman from stealing a diamond, or even The Secret Avengers beat the shit out of some bad guys and that's the whole story kind of story.

Review: Moon Knight by Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev Vol. 2

Reading that first collection of Gregg Hurwitz's attempt at a Moon Knight series reminded me that I never read the second (and final) volume of the Brian Michael Bendis/Alex Maleev attempt, a book so short-lived that it might as well have been planned as a limited series rather than an ongoing. In fact, the second volume of the series, which collects issues #8-12, so completely wrap up every thing, it sort of felt like the book was planned as a 12-issue series from the outset, with Bendis perhaps leaving a little flexibility for himself in the last few issues should the book prove popular enough to keep going; as it wasn't, he seems to have written those last few scripts to tie everything up.

For a Bendis-written book then, it's incredibly tightly plotted, with no real loose ends and actual conclusions to the various conflicts raised (That said, the final issue, published in early 2012, does end teasing Bendis' 2013 event series Age of Ultron, both in its plot, which involves a pair of Marvel villains trying to reanimate Ultron to get on his good side before he does what he's going to do, and in a big, fat text banner in the final panel, reading "Moon Knight Will Return In...The Age of Ultron.")

The bigger surprise than how well-constructed the narrative ultimately ended up being—long-term plotting and endings being two particular weaknesses of Bendis'—was the fate of Echo, which I hope it's cool to discuss here, since this book ended almost three years ago now.

To recap the plot of the first volume, Moon Knight Marc Spector has moved from New York to Las Angeles. By day, Spector is consulting on a cheesy TV show about his adventures as a soldier of fortune called Legends of the Khonshu. By night, he's fighting crime, with the help of former (New) Avenger Echo and former SHIELD Agent Buck Lime, the latter of whom builds tech for Moon Knight.

More specifically, the crime he fights is that organized by the new Kingpin of L.A., Avengers-class super-villain Count Nefaria, who I had never heard of until I looked him up on Wikipedia after reading the first volume. Apparently, he's got Superman's powers—super-speed, super-strength, invulnerability, red eyebeams—and started out as a Thor villain. He also dresses like Bela Lugosi's Dracula for mysterious but awesome reasons. Well, Bela Lugosi's Dracula, but with a monocle. So I guess he actually dresses more like The Count from Sesame Street. He was trying to buy an Ultron robot on the black market, so that's two Avengers level issues that Moon Knight really oughta call the Avengers in on, but he's sort of stubborn, perhaps because he is literally, clinically insane.

Bendis' rather inspired—at least from a marketing angle—take on Moon Knights lunacy was to have the character seeing things and hearing voices, but for those things to be Captain America, Spider-Man and Wolverine, and those voices to be their voices. So although this is a Moon Knight comic, it's also sort of an Avengers comic, with every issue co-starring the most popular of the Avengers characters (It obviously didn't work at convincing enough people to buy the book every month to keep it going past 12 issues, but it was a good idea and a nice try).

In the first volume, when Bendis and Maleev were being rather coy about just how crazy Moon Knight was, it seemed at times that he had developed split personalities that just so happened to be these three Avengers. By this issue, though, they sort of appear like the ghosts of dead Jedi, advising him as disembodied voices or see-through figures. And, as with the Jedi in the Star Wars movie, when a character dies, they join the other ghostly advisors. So when Count Nefaria totally kills Echo, she appears with the other three, and Moon Knight starts hearing her voice as well.

That was pretty surprising. To learn that not only were Bendis and Maleev using Echo in this series, but they actually went ahead and killed her off in a fight with Count Nefaria, essentially "fridging" her (Although arguments could be made regarding how pure a fridging this was).

It surprised me because a random issue of a Moon Knight comic seems an even weirder place for an Avenger to die than for her to appear at all, and because she was a David Mack (and Joe Quesada) creation, first appearing in a 1999 issue of Daredevil. Sure, Marvel owned her, and Bendis made a lot more comics with her in them than Mack ever did—she was in New Avengers as Ronin when Bendis launched at book—but it still seems somewhat uncouth to kill-off a fellow creator's character (Additionally, she was 1) A woman, 2) Native America and 3) deaf, so that's three different groups that don't exactly have a great deal of representation in superhero comics that she represented; also, I'm just not a real big fan of killing off characters, as there's always more to be done with a living character than a dead one).

It also surprised me because Bendis also killed off The Sentry, another new-ish Marvel character he didn't create, but wrote extensively.

But, more than anything, it surprised me because this was literally the first I heard of Echo dying at all. Usually the death of a superhero, or supporting character in a superhero comic, makes some waves, but if this was heavily reported on among the people who report upon such things, I completely missed it and/or forgot ever hearing about it when it happened.

Which I guess is an argument for why killing her off isn't really a bad thing, if no one missed her, even when she was gone. (She could also have been brought back to life since then. I have no idea).

Anyway, Nefaria eyebeams her through the torso during the first of two big fights between Moon Knight and Nefaria. In that one, the voices in his head advise Moon Knight to run and/or call in the Avengers, and he refuses. He tries keeping Echo out of the suicidal fight, but in the end he lives and she dies.

Perhaps because so much of the set-up was handled in the first volume, or because the book was winding down already, this volume read much more smoothly than the first, and with few if any of the tiresome, trademark Bendis monologues. It's actually quite action-packed, and it's sort of a shame that Nefaria is in many of those action scenes, as Maleev often draws his fighting in longshot, and it's not all that clear what's going on. He and Moon Knight are posed in the air, and there's red light and explosions. From his eyebeams, I guess...?

Maleev continues to make liquids look really, really weird (Also, airborne bullets, blood splatter, laser-shields and, most especially, Spider-Man's webbing), and the collection format draws attention to some shortcuts he took that one might not have noticed with a month between seeing this on the last page of one comic...

...and this on an early page from the next issue...

He recycles art repeatedly throughout, but its never so obvious as on the cliffhanger/opening splashes like the ones above and below, which are just a turn of the page away from each other in the collection.

Despite some relative weakness in the art, Maleev's Moon Knight work is head-and-shoulders above that of David Finch and Jerome Opena. If one were to ask me for a recommendation regarding a Moon Knight comic, I'd definitely recommend these two collections over the Hurwitz-written Vengeance of The Moon Knight series, in large part because of how much more accessible and new reader friendly the Bendis/Maleev take is. Whether it is a Moon Knight series in the same way that the Hurwitz one was (or if it was Bendis and Maleev re-creating the character into something they hoped would be more marketable), well, I'm not Moon Knight fan enough to say. I do plan on trying all the other Moon Knight volumes I can find in trade though...eventually.

Review: The Vengeance of The Moon Knight Vol. 1: Shock and Awe

As I've recently been reading some Gregg Hurwitz Batman comics that have ranged in quality from not-too-terrible to too terrible, I thought maybe I should look at some other comics Hurwitz has written. Maybe it's not Hurwitz, I thought. Maybe it's not even me, I thought further. Maybe it's Batman.

So I went looking for some other comic books Hurwitz, whose day job is apparently a fairly successful writer of prose mysteries or thrillers, and found this collection of one of the recent-ish attempts at a new Moon Knight ongoing, a 2009 series entitled Vengeance of The Moon Knight. Not the vengeance of Moon Knight, damn it, or a Moon Knight, but The Moon Knight. There's only one Moon Knight! And this is his vengeance!

(For those of you who are not super well-versed in superheroes, Moon Knight is a very rich, obviously quite eccentric man who wears a cape, mask and costume to fight urban crime; he compensates for his lack of super-powers with superb fighting ability and a variety of elaborate and expensive gadgets, vehicles and weapons designed around his chosen nocturnal theme. So he's basically Batman, but instead of dressing like a bat, he dresses like the moon. A crescent moon, of course, not a full moon—that would just be silly.)

This fifth try at an ongoing Moon Knight series followed the 30-issue 2006 attempt, simply titled Moon Knight, which had a rather similar creative team: It's writer, Charlie Huston, also had a day job writing not-comic books, and its artist David Finch (who Hurwitz worked on Batman: The Dark Knight with) has a great deal in common with Vengeance of The... artist Jerome Opena. This Hurwitz/Opena effort only lasted a little more than half as long as the Huston/Finch one (18 issues), but it did outlast the sixth volume, by artist Alex Mallev and writer BRIAN MICHAEL FUCKING BENDIS, by six issues. So maybe Moon Knight's just not cut out for an ongoing monthly series any more? (Marvel's set to launch volume seven, by Warren Ellis and Declan Shalvey, any day now, as part of their "All-New Marvel NOW!" branding initiative).

It is not a very good book, but it's not all Hurwitz's fault. The scripts are functional, and at this earlier point in his career the man obviously has the writing of comic books down pat in a way that eludes some professional writers-who-are-new-to-writing-comics for a while.

The main problem with the story side of this particular book seems to be that it is so heavily reliant on The Moon Knight's byzantine origin and continuity (I was mostly kidding when I compared him to Batman, who he is quite derivative of; one notable difference is that Batman's a pretty straightforward, easy-to-get character, whereas Moon Knight has a large supporting cast of characters who aren't as iconic and instantly distinguishable as "sassy British butler" and "smart-mouthed teenage sidekick").

The Moon Knight Marc Spector has returned to New York after being elsewhere (he mentions the West Coast, although this pre-dates his relocation to the West Coast in his next, Bendis-written monthly), now intent on being a proper superhero, and not killing or mutilating his enemies the way he used to (Oh, that's another thing that separates him from Batman; Moon Knight is really for-real insane, with, like, multiple personalities and hallucinations and suchlike. I guess he cut the face off of his archenemy at some point in the past. I know The Joker recently had his face cut off, but it wasn't Batman who cut it off; a third party cut off The Joker's face.).

No one believes in The Moon Knight though, and they're unsure if he's a villain or a Punisher-like anti-hero or what.

He foils a robbery with several million dollars worth of weird vehicles and weapons, including a white motorcycle that emerges from a white meteor that crashes into the street, a white moon-shaped flying device and a pair of pistols that shoots bolos.

The Sentry, Marvel's Superman analogue that, like the Batman analogue whose book this is, has severe mental problems, shows up to to tell The Moon Knight he's watching him (Jeph Loeb beat Hurwtiz to the Moon Knight/Sentry team-up by about ten months, during his Hulk run, in which he had Moon Knight, Sentry and Ms. Marvel team-up against Red Hulk and Wendigos in an issue entitled "World's Finest").

Norman Osborn, The Hood and some other villains menace The Moon Knight, going so far as to to hire a Scarecrow to break everyone out of Arkham Ravencroft Asylum, lobotomize all the inmates with an ice pick  and unleash them on the city, lead by the magically resurrected archenemy of The Moon Knight, the one who had his face cut off in the past.

Spider-Man shows up—Hurwitz writes a nice scene where a chatty Spider-Man talks a criminal's ear off while he's swinging him to the police station, like an over-eager taxi driver who keeps turning around to talk to you while driving—to let The Moon Knight know that he doesn't believe in The Moon Knight either.

Meanwhile, The Moon Kngiht's craziness now manifests itself as the bird-skull headed Egyptian god Khonshu who, I don't really want to get into all that, but Khonshu is the god of vengeance and the moon that is kind of key to The Moon Knight's origin. Hurwitz touches on it here. And Moon Knight's supporting cast—ex-girlfriend, butler, ex-Moon Copter pilot, etc—show up, talking about past events from past comic books, each of them poorly introduced by Opena.

I think Opena's art might actually be a bigger problem with this book than the scripting, something that surprised me, given that Opena has done other (later) work I really rather liked, and he's not David Finch, who I did compare him to some paragraphs back.

What Opena shares with Finch is a rather dark, gritty style, with lots of blacks and lots of lines; there's not a lot of actual grit—I didn't get much of a sense of texture from the work—but the illusion of grit. This may be because Opena was trying to emulate Finch's work on the previous Moon Knight series a bit, or it may be simply because Opena felt the material called for it.

It's not that clear, though. It's rather frustrating in that this isn't Batman, so better introductions to the characters—I don't know what The Moon Knight looks like when he's not wearing his costume, as Marc Spector's face is always in shadow or tilted away or nondescript and devoid of individual characteristic or expression. I know he has brown hair, but that's about it. If he beat me up and stole my copy of The Vengeance of Moon Knight Vol. 1: Shock and Awe—No, wait, that's a library book!—I wouldn't know what to tell the police sketch artist. "He had brown hair, Officer, so I know it definitely wasn't Bruce Wayne."

All of the characters are drawn like that. Frenchie, the ex-pilot, looks a little like Silver Age Tony Stark. The girl is a girl. Spider-Man, The Sentry, The Hood, The Scarecrow—their costumes tell me who they are. Osborn has that Osborn hair (to be fair to Opena, during this period of Marvel Comics' output, Norman Osborn was in every single issue of every single comic, and no two artists drew him anything alike; you just knew it was Osborn because he had that hair that looks so damn weird when drawn in a modern, realistic style, and he was wearing a suit and yelling and people were calling him "Osborn" in the dialogue).

Similarly, a lot of the vehicles and Moon stuff aren't really introduced visually. The first time I see Moon Knight walk into the new Moon Cave or whatever he calls it, I'd kinda like to see all his Moon shit, not just the corner of a Moon Copter or Moon Plane or whatever that big, silver, curved thing just off-panel is supposed to be.

And then there's the action, which doesn't flow, and is confusing and hard to read. There's a brutal fight between Moon Knight and his foe, the undead Bushman, at the climax, and it's the sort of fight scene one needs to read repeatedly to make sense of. Little crescent moon-shaped shuriken or darts appear in Bushman's forehead without Moon Knight ever actually throwing them at him, then they disappear—Opena having forgotten to draw them or the colorist having colored over them—and then two of them are back. Like that.

But hey, let's not blame everything on the creators. Another problem with the book may have been the premise. Set during the post-Secret Invasion, pre-Siege period branded "Dark Reign," when Norman "Green Goblin" Osborn was the Boss Of The Superheroes, and his Dark Avengers (and other villains) were regarded as heroes and the real heroes all regarded as villains, a large part of this book seems to be the marriage of The Moon Knight's personal struggles with killing—his past, pre-The Moon Knight history as a paid assassin, his connection to a god of vengeance, his The Moon Knighting that killed people—to the up-is-down, down-is-up world of "Dark Reign," when villains are heroes and heroes are villains. As an anti-hero, what's that make The Moon Knight now? An anti-villain?

The status quo the book launched in was a temporary one, and perhaps it was just too closely tied to it...I'd have to read the rest of the series to know for sure, but reading these early issues collected in this trade, much of the plot seemed very dated. In fact, the entire conflict outside of The Moon Knight's head is Osborn and his lieutenant and his lieutenant's lieutenants efforts to stop Moon Knight from setting up shop as an honest-to-goodness superhero in New York City during the "Dark Reign."

Review: Moon Knight By Brian Michael Bendis & Alex Maleev Vol. 1 (No seriously, that's what they called it)

Last year Brian Michael Bendis began writing the newest volume of a Moon Knight series for Marvel, teaming with artist Alex Maleev, with whom he had enjoyed a long and popular run on the title of another of Marvel’s gritty, street-level urban crime-fighter characters.

The particular tack Bendis took was a somewhat familiar one he had honed over the years of his writing New Avengers; in order to help ensure the popularity of a character he liked, he made him an Avenger. Now the Moon Knight character has had some affiliation with the team before and, in fact, was currently on an Avengers team at the time the book launched—the black ops version of the team in Secret Avengers, one of the few Avengers books Bendis doesn’t write—but here Bendis gives his star an Avengers-developed and approved mission, and he puts the three most popular Avengers in every issue.

The twist, which is telegraphed on the cover, and which I’m about to spoil since this is a six-month-old storyline, is that all of this Avengers business is simply in Moon Knight’s head. The character began life as a Werewolf By Night villain who then transitioned to a clumsy Batman knock-off, but his defining trait over the last decade or so has been that he’s a literal crazy person, someone suffering from a variety of fairly severe mental illnesses. Yes, quite edgy.

Exactly how mentally ill Moon Knight is becomes part of the story, and something his non-hallucinatory allies like an ex-SHIELD agent-turned-Hollywood prop man and New Avengers cast-off Echo try to figure out while helping him. Is he, perhaps, mentally ill like a fox?

Bendis at least suggests this may be the case, when the character talks about some new techniques he’s been trying out, and it does provide some background tension…as well as at least one really weird set-piece, in which Moon Knight wears a Spider-Man costume over his Moon Knight costume and breaks into a brothel to fight hookers in his version of the Spider-Man persona (he also wears fake Wolverine claws, which he unsheathes when he goes into a fake Wolverine berserker rage during the same fight).

It’s a welcome bit of unpredictability in an otherwise somnambulistic Bendis plot. If you’ve read any half-dozen of his Marvel story arcs, you’ll recognize all of the familiar, grating tics: Everyone talks the same, as if they’re reading a spec script for a 10 p.m. hour-long cable drama, everyone has the same sense of humor, the plot is told primarily through explanatory dialogue, favorite Marvel characters and concepts get dropped in or just name-dropped, etc.

Moon Knight has moved from New York to L.A. because, as has been pointed out in a score of other Marvel comics, all the superheroes live in New York City. Moon Knight’s in town to try and stop a mysterious villain from setting himself up as the Kingpin of L.A. (It’s teased throughout that it’s someone familiar and powerful; when the final reveal is made, I must confess I have no idea who the character actually is, although he is on Wikipedia).

While there, he’s also producing a crappy television show based on the soldier-of-fortune adventures of his secret identity, Marc Spector. The star of a Bendis comic, written like a pitch for a TV series actually producing his own TV series within the comic seemed kind of clever, and in this case Bendis is definitely in on the joke, as he has a character in the show-within-the-comic melodramatically repeat one of Bendis’ most oft-mocked lines.

Maleev is particularly well-suited to drawing Bendis scripts. In a more perfect world, perhaps Maleev would be the only artist allowed to draw Bendis scripts (Well, aside from Bendis himself, although he seems to have given up professional cartooning since enlisting with Marvel).

He draws in a photorealistic style, but he does seem to be drawing in it, rather than dropping in photos. A lot of the characters look heavily photo-referenced, but expertly and organically so: I couldn’t, like, identify movie stills within the DNA of the panels, or recognize actors or models in the character designs.

The only real flourish of expressionstic, more superhero-like art is in Moon Knight’s occasionally moon-shaped, almost-luminescent white cloak, which is over long, and a nice, sharp, dramatic break with the more realistic settings and character designs.Maleev also handles typical Bendis scenes of Person Monologueing for 1-3 pages quite well…certainly quite a bit better than many of the other artists who have drawn Bendis scripts at Marvel over the last decade. I was curious about this book prior to finding this volume, which collects the first seven issues of the monthly series, and serves as a satisfying enough chunk, resolving one mystery (the identity of the villain planning on becoming the Kingpin of L.A.) and ramping up the other (seriously, how crazy is Moon Knight?) by the end of the seventh issue.

I had noticed from Paul O’Brien’s regular analysis of Marvel’s month-to-month figure at The Beat that Moon Knight was pretty far down the chart, and moving far, far fewer copies than most Bendis-written Marvel Universe books do (in December, for example, it was #78 on the chart, and moved 24,626 units, while Avengers and New Avengers were #17/57,000-ish and #25/53,000-ish respectively).

From the contents of the first seven issues, I can’t tell why the market is less interested in this Bendis books than it is in some of his others, but it’s worth noting that even his more popular books are falling down the charts, with the X-Men retaking their traditional spot of Marvel’s top franchise from the Avengers, and DC’s “New 52” experiment dominating the top ten.

Looking at the covers for the individual issues, however, I see that Marvel was charging $4 a pop for this book, which might explain it’s relatively poor placement on the charts. I imagine even fans willing to shell out 33% more for Avengers or Spider-Man than they might if DC were publishing those books becoming more reluctant to do so when it’s a Moon Knight book.

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Oh, but I hate, hate, hate, hate the way Maleev draws liquids:
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I thought this scene was really weird. It involves Marc "Moon Knight" Spector (that's him on the left) and super-martial arts expert Echo (on the right). He tries to kiss her, and does, I guess because she let him (her being a super-martial artists with wicked reflexes and what not). And then, instead of, like pushing him or slapping him, she decks him so hard that blood explodes out of his face.

And then she does it a few more times:Pretty weird, right? But maybe that's what Bendis and Maleev were going for: These two people are both totally insane.

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Finally, may favorite part of the whole book was the last chapter, in which the mystery villain is finally revealed (stop reading if you don't wanna know who it is, yo). Like I said, I didn't recognize him or his name, but he looks totally awesome: Oh ish, look! It's...it's...it's...a guy cosplaying Bela Lugosi's Dracula...?

Not pictured: He totally wears a monocle, too.

Do you recognize this dude? He's apparently a Thor villain named Count Nefaria.