There is a great preview of the upcoming Moon Knight comic launch on Newsarama, including a great peak at the first few pages of the opening issue, which makes it look like this will be a comic worth picking up. This comic rides on the recent trend of novelists and authors moonlighting as comic book writers, which is a great thing, as it gets new styles of scripting and has a much stronger focus on plot, character development, and everything that has been raped and expunged from the industry since Claremont’s ideas became cliché.
For those of you, and I imagine most of you, who do not know who Moon Knight is, he is most readily described as the “Batman of Marvel”. This may seem to be selling any character short as a simple rip-off, but when you think of Batman as one of the two staples of DC Comics to the public eye, as a compelling character, action hero, and best known for his supporting cast, then it really becomes clear that Moon Knight is being over-sold. He is, however, one of the best designed characters to come out of Marvel, with a costume that any super hero would kill for. Moon Knight is Marc Spector, a man who has found spirituality and power in an Egyptian god named “Khonshu”. Marc Spector is not just a tortured soul who witnessed his parent’s death at a young age; he has created several separate identities which he attempts to live in order to keep in touch with the different aspects of his life. A taxi-cab driver or a millionaire playboy, he could never really decide who he really wanted to be, and all of the changing eventually took a toll on his mental health. Needless to say, add in the idea of being a mercenary crime-fighter in a white cloak and you get a very deranged and troubled individual.
Charlie Huston, not a well known author, has a number of novels to his name, which the comic companies are hoping will pique the interests of their established fan-base and help dissolve the stigma that comes along with reading comic books. Other similar endeavors include Marvel’s upcoming collaborations with Stephen King and DC’s use of Brad Meltzer for Identity Crisis which worked out swimmingly, using a mystery writer to write a mystery story arc was surprisingly brilliant for how common sense it seems. As far as how successful these names are at bringing new readers into comics, I have yet to see a study to confirm or disprove it as the comics industry is doing better then it was in the 90’s yet is still not a universally accepted form of art and expression.
The other half of the creative team on Moon Knight is where attention should be gathered, the one and only David Finch. Since the early days of his career on Aphrodite IX he has been a powerhouse in realism and grittiness, and in 2003 he moved on to Ultimate X-Men and became the defining artist of the New Avengers. Originally only known for his female spreads and deliciously statuesque figure work, he has obviously expanded his reputation as he moves on to Moon Knight. Even from the 11 page preview provided, you should be able to tell that the art is the shining feature of the comic. Using an unknown and fresh author was a great move as it allows the writing to stand apart from the art and define itself, as people will pay more attention and be caught off guard more readily then if a known name had tackled the scripting.
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