There weren’t any X-books to review last week, so\u00a0let’s take a (belated) look at another\u00a0title that did\u00a0complete\u00a0its first\u00a0trade paperback.<\/p>\n
Moon Knight is\u00a0the sort of bubble character who hasn’t really been able to sustain an ongoing title in years, but who keeps getting relaunched regardless. \u00a0This happens partly because of Marvel (and DC)’s conviction that everything in their back catalogue is a masterpiece merely awaiting the right\u00a0take,\u00a0but also because people look at Moon Knight and think to themselves, surely this ought to work. \u00a0It’s the book Bill Sienkiewicz made his name on. \u00a0It’s\u00a0been interesting in the past. \u00a0Surely it can\u00a0be\u00a0interesting again.<\/p>\n
Enter Warren Ellis and Declan Shalvey, to kick off the latest relaunch with six issues – before handing over to a different creative team entirely. \u00a0It’s a very good six issues, well worth picking up. \u00a0Whether it\u00a0provides something that\u00a0Brian Wood and Greg Smallwood can usefully build on is another matter entirely,\u00a0as I’ll explain. \u00a0But that’s not Ellis and Shalvey’s problem.<\/p>\n
The temptation in relaunching a series is to search for a fresh angle. \u00a0This is presumably how we previously wound up with\u00a0“Moon Knight thinks he’s the Avengers”,\u00a0which is a cute gimmick, but ultimately just a gimmick. \u00a0Ellis quietly\u00a0writes it off as a passing phase and says no more about it.<\/p>\n
Ellis establishes the\u00a0set-up for an ongoing series, and tinkers a bit with the character. \u00a0He’s back in New York. \u00a0He\u00a0patrols the city in a drone helicopter\u00a0(in his traditional costume) and\u00a0in a white limousine (wearing an all-white suit and mask). \u00a0He’s got a police contact, Detective Flint, who\u00a0turns a blind eye to the rules and calls him in when he’s needed. \u00a0And\u00a0he’s styling himself as a protector of travellers by night, since that’s one of the roles of his sponsor god Khonshu.<\/p>\n
But there are no radical new ideas here. \u00a0Rather, this relaunch is all about rearranging existing elements to maximum effect,\u00a0and stripping the character back to a central palette of core ideas that all work together to the same end. \u00a0(Flint is not a new character; he’s an obscure supporting character from the 1980s run.) \u00a0A long running problem with the series\u00a0has been that\u00a0while writers can all agree that Moon Knight needs to be something more than just the Batman knock-off he’s often accused of being, they can’t quite agree\u00a0whether this is a comic\u00a0about a mercenary touched by an Egyptian god, or a comic about Batman with multiple personality disorder. \u00a0Ellis neatly squares that circle by tying\u00a0Moon Knight’s multiple personalities (in whatever iteration)\u00a0to the aspects of Khonshu and the phases of the moon, so that both ideas are pulling in the same direction.<\/p>\n
More fundamentally,\u00a0what Ellis and Shalvey are doing here is to come up with an aesthetic for Moon Knight stories, and to make that aesthetic the point of the book. \u00a0This is not a plot-heavy comic. \u00a0The six issues are self-contained – issue #6 springboards off a minor character in issue #1, but\u00a0the stories aren’t linked beyond that. \u00a0What’s more,\u00a0viewed purely in plot terms, the stories are extremely minimal. \u00a0Issue #5 is an extreme case, with a plot that pretty much boils down to “Moon Knight fights his way through a building\u00a0to rescue a girl; she comments\u00a0that his mask is really his face.” \u00a0Vastly more sophisticated plots can be found in the typical episode of\u00a0Waybuloo<\/em><\/a>. \u00a0But that’s\u00a0not the point.<\/p>\n The minimalism\u00a0works; it’s part of the package in itself. \u00a0In this interpretation,\u00a0Moon Knight<\/em> is\u00a0essentially a nocturnal comic. \u00a0It features weird things happening in the dead of night. \u00a0A certain dream-like isolation is precisely the desired tone. \u00a0They shouldn’t be busy. \u00a0There shouldn’t be anything around, besides what is truly essential to the plot. \u00a0(Issue #6, again, is the exception here, because it’s told from the perspective of an outsider trying and failing to become Moon Knight; and so it needs to break the tone for part of the issue.)\u00a0\u00a0By keeping the plot mechanics extremely basic, the series leaves itself plenty of\u00a0space to tell\u00a0its stories with maximum effect, and allow them to be subtly off-kilter. \u00a0And it often is subtle; it’s\u00a0easy to write Moon Knight as a raving maniac, but he’s all the more effective when, as here, he’s 90% calm, level-headed and rational.<\/p>\n There’s\u00a0memorable artwork in these issues. \u00a0A measured pace and\u00a0generally subdued colours establish a baseline that other moments can stand out against. \u00a0When the visuals turn lurid in an extended dream scene, it’s all the more effective thanks to the book’s prevailing air of restraint, at times even a deliberate over-formality in Moon Knight himself. \u00a0Moon Knight\u00a0is a slightly weird\u00a0presence on the page generally; not only is his costume white, but it seems\u00a0to be completely without shadow,\u00a0making him stylistically at odds with the art around him. \u00a0If you want to be literal about it, this might\u00a0be intended to indicate that the suit is not merely white but actually luminous; but it’s the sense that there’s something slightly off in the way that it’s rendered that makes\u00a0the real impact. \u00a0Few\u00a0creators these days can pull off an issue long\u00a0fight scene such as issue #5 and make it work; this book does. \u00a0The first half of issue #2 (which follows eight characters at once,\u00a0their panels vanishing as a sniper picks them off) is\u00a0a truly excellent\u00a0use of the medium – albeit that the second half\u00a0comes as a bit of an anticlimax after such a bravura display.<\/p>\n So this is very good. \u00a0But it’s also very difficult to carry over to another creative team. \u00a0The idea of\u00a0not merely establishing a plot set-up, but defining an aesthetic for others to follow\u2026\u00a0it’s not something we see often these days. \u00a0The modern assumption is that\u00a0creators are supposed to bring their own style to a title. \u00a0It might be influenced by an earlier run, but it’s not likely to be an outright imitation. \u00a0The big idea of these six issues is not a plot set-up but an\u00a0aesthetic for\u00a0Moon Knight<\/em> stories – but “incoming creative team X do Ellis and Shalvey’s\u00a0Moon Knight<\/em>” is not\u00a0an easy sell. \u00a0Unsurprisingly, the preview pages for issue #7 show a comic that looks entirely\u00a0different, with angular panels quite unlike anything\u00a0in Shalvey’s work; it’s a different comic working within the same\u00a0basic plot set-up, which is to say, it’s a different comic in every respect that really matters. \u00a0So we’re not going to get a modern experiment in trying to define a house style for later creators to emulate. \u00a0I suspect it would have been a tough sell even if the creators had been up for it.<\/p>\n That makes the presentation of these six issues as the start of an ongoing series – rather than a self-contained mini –\u00a0more than a little awkward. \u00a0But they are worth your time, simply as a highly successful display of how to strip a concept down to a set of core ideas\u00a0– not just plot ideas, but storytelling ideas – that are all working in harmony to an extent we rarely see in superhero comics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There weren’t any X-books to review last week, so\u00a0let’s take a (belated) look at another\u00a0title that did\u00a0complete\u00a0its first\u00a0trade paperback. Moon Knight is\u00a0the sort of bubble character who hasn’t really been able to sustain an ongoing title in years, but who keeps getting relaunched regardless. \u00a0This happens partly because of Marvel (and DC)’s conviction that everything […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2689"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2689\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2690,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2689\/revisions\/2690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}