ALL NEW MARVEL NOW MOON KNIGHT reviewed

Marvel’s Moon Knight character has been around nearly 40 years, since being introduced in WEREWOLF BY NIGHT #32 back in 1975. Over the years, he has starred in six series for over 150 issues. He has been superhero, super man of mystery and has died…including faking his death once or twice. He’s Marc Spector, millionaire Steven Grant, taxicab driver Jake Lockley and even Wolverine, Captain America and Spider-Man. In his newest incarnation, courtesy of Warren Ellis, Declan Shalvey and  Jordie Bellaire, he has narrowed it down to two: Moon Knight and Mr. Knight.

The series begins with Mr. Knight battling a rogue S.H.I.E.L.D. agent who has gone insane after being blown up by an I.E.D. and has decided to become a mad slasher to replace his broken body parts. Our hero stops the bad guy after several minutes of him monologuing away about his back story. Later we learn that Spector had recently learned he didn’t have Dissociative Identity Disorder. He has brain damage and, as his doctor tells him, his brain “has been colonized by an ancient consciousness from beyond space-time. In issue #2, Moon Knight is featured as he takes out a sniper who has been responsible for taking out most of a special ops group that he had been left out of.

In issue #3, Mr. Knight battles a punk gang of ghosts and loses badly. Going home, he consults Grant, Lockley and Khonshu and discovers he has a room full of artifacts from ancient Egypt, most of which he doesn’t remember buying. That night, flying in a special glider and dressed like Khonshu, he defeats the ghosts before going to the place where the gang members died and finds their skeletal remians.

Issue #4 introduces us to Dr. Skeleton who is doing sleep research and needs Mr. Knight’s help.Mr. Knight goes under in the research lab and finds that one of the original test subjects died in his dream state and was buried under the floor. It seems a fungal infection in his brain grew out of his head post mortem and produced spores that Dr. Skeleton breathed in and thus was living in the deceased’s dream.

Issue #5 had Mr. Knight rescuing a young kidnapped victim who recognized that Mr. Knight’s face is not a mask at all…but it’s his true face. And he leaves a threatening message for one of the kidnappers.

As you may be able to tell, this is one whacked out series from the twisted genius known as Warren Ellis. How whacked out and twisted? Pages 2-9 in issue #2 is bare bones with 8 panels reducing to one as the eight members of the special ops team get assassinated. And there are 9 lines of dialogue over the next 10 pages. It’s visual story telling at it’s best. And this is how most of the series thus far goes. Issue #5 features fight scene after fight scene as Mr. Knight runs the gauntlet to save his kidnap victim. But 5 issues in and Ellis hasn’t addressed the whole brain damage issue except at the end of the first issue.

I love the bizarre feel of the book and hopefully that won’t go away after Ellis and  Shalvey depart with issue #6(colorist and  Jordie Bellaire remains). It would be a shame to add this great air of mystery to this character and then tear it all down with the change of a creative team to Brian Wood and Greg Smallwood.