Broken Frontier

After years away from the game, Marc Spector wants to be a superhero again. He’s more than willing to pay the price, but how high will it be?

The crack of bone and cartilage against a spiked fist. The crescent moon that strikes fear in the hearts of New York’s criminals. And all that white, brilliant and spectral, lighting up the night so that they see him coming, so that they know what’s in store...and can only feel childlike, primal fear in the face of it. They thought he’d disappeared forever, that their schemes were a little safer now though their dreams never were. But the nightmare known as Moon Knight is real again. Or is he?

An observation about comics fans: Because many if not most of us first discovered our passion as kids, characters who made their first appearance around the time that we first started reading comics hold a special place for us. For me, it was Moon Knight and the second generation of X-Men. I wasn’t able to put my finger on it then, but looking back, Moon Knight’s appeal was that he was what Batman should have been and would become in Frank Miller’s hands—someone who didn’t have jaw-dropping powers, but was one of the most relentless and dangerous men on the planet because of it. I ignored the horror angle in the Werewolf By Night stories he appeared in, and didn’t realize until I was much older the depths of camp he and virtually every other 70s hero could sink to at times. Instead, from my first Moon Knight story I was overwhelmed with how cool, mysterious, and troubled he was, despite the fact that he was a white man running outside the law in a white hood, often beating up more than his fair share of black people. Nostalgia and childhood are often funny that way.

Moon Knight #1 evokes then demolishes my childhood imaginings of the character, as well as what little nostalgia I feel for that time, thanks to some strong writing by novelist Charlie Huston. I’m sure there are some (hopefully a shrinking minority) who will bemoan another writer from outside the medium writing comics, but Huston may be the best sort of writer from "outside" to script this sort of comic. He’s crossed more than a few genres in his time, but his novels are all noir, constructed out of spare, simple prose that hits like a hard right to the jaw and lingers like jilted love, progressing by a ruthless scene logic and a clarity of voice that gives his work a cinematic quality. Pick up Caught Stealing or Already Dead and you’ll see what I mean. He brings these tools and a little bit more to Moon Knight, and the result is a shot in the arm for a character that’s been gone too long.

Think of what it must be like to love being a masked vigilante, to have being a hero the thing you never asked for, but the one thing you most want to be, even when you’ve hit the rockiest of bottoms. The bottom is where we find Marc Spector now, and Huston, having stripped everything away, finds Spector’s essence and core there, the lowest of low ebbs, where the difference between what he wants to be and what he has become is shocking, moving, and dramatic. With this approach, Huston transforms Moon Knight into something more than a comic book hero—he’s now a man on a personal, spiritual journey along which everything matters—and the script nails it because he now has a voice. Even from long-time pros, first person narration can sound canned, the writer’s more than the character’s words, meant to reveal character traits more than character itself and push the story forward because there might only be 22 pages to work with. Huston’s first person is clear and direct, but singular. It’s Marc Spector talking, not Huston, and the reader can sit back and actually hear a real person saying the words. The narration establishes a dark and dangerous mood, but the voice we hear so clearly engages us by humanizing a disturbed, obsessed man for whom ruthlessness, vengeance, and madness are all in a day’s work.

Every scribe should be so lucky as to have his first comics script illustrated by the likes of the incomparable David Finch, the third piece of the trifecta that is Moon Knight #1. Together, the three—character, writer, and artist—are a seamless fit, the artist taking the many textless panels the writer has given him and doing more than words could, portraying the character and his world as we’ve never seen and will not soon forget. The cinematic quality of Huston’s prose? The singular voice he gives Moon Knight? It’s there in Finch’s hyper-realistic pencils, Danny Miki’s finely detailed inks, Frank D’Armata’s brooding colors, Moon Knight #1 a visual spectacle that would cost at least a hundred million to even approximate on film. For Finch’s part, the opening action sequence is a tour-de-force of composition, angle, energy, visual depth, and sequential framing. The shadows envelop us, and the tight shots that capture every line of expression and movement put us right there, while the long and establishing shots command our eyes and take our breath away at the same time. But then the art shifts gears in the second half of the story and gets intimate, Finch revealing a side of Marc Spector us long-time fans never thought we could stand to see. Artistically, the two halves of this issue balance the visceral rush of violence with a heart-rending pathos, dramatizing on the page the deep psychological war within Marc Spector himself, a conflict which makes him one of the most troubled and interesting characters in Marvel’s stable of superheroes.

A great character has once again been brought to life by a great creative team, and the result is so much more than the Moon Knight I remember. After reading this first issue, I didn’t know that I missed him so much.