Moon Knight #1-15

Just like last time, the Marvel Unlimited subscription has put me on a binge read Charlie Huston’s run on Moon Knight was bloody fun. Over the last year or so, I’ve really started paying attention to the character, thanks to cheap back issue sets and paperbacks.

Moon Knight really feels like it flew under the radar at Marvel. Huston is best known for being a crime novelist, and at the time Moon Knight was a largely forgotten character in the Marvel pantheon. The 2006-2007 series was a lot of dark fun, so why should you read it?

• Gore factor. Now usually I don’t go for that sort of thing. But somehow Huston’s script and the way that David Finch illustrated it is just so gross, creepy and welcoming at the same time. I know I’ve said it before, but Finch really reminds me of Todd McFarlane with how he draws. And his art is so on in this series.
• Khonshu. If you remember, the premise of Moon Knight is that he’s an avatar of the Egyptian god Khonshu and that by worshiping this god (or just generally poor mental health) he has been slowly driving him nuts. Khonshu has taken the form of the late super villain the Bushman, whom Moon Knight literally defaced and killed. This vision appears, tormenting the hero from the side.
• Call backs. I don’t know if Huston was a fan of the original Moon Knight series but he certainly references a lot of the older comics, even down to the supporting characters. His former pilot Frenchie (who reveals that he has put up with Moon Knight’s crap for so long only because he had a crush on the masked vigilante), love interest Marlene and his supporting cast are all there. He even finds himself feuding with the current incarnation of the villainous the Committee and is faced to fight his former sidekick Midnight (now a villain) to the death.
• The second six issues. The main part of this arc is Moon Knight dealing with Midnight, but the subplot involves both Iron Man and Captain America trying to recruit him to their respective sides during the Civil War period. Moon Knight has his own views which happen to not go along with each side and he finds a way to express them clearly.
• It feels like an indie super hero book. This doesn’t feel like anything Marvel would put out. It’s just really different.

So there you have it. Read Moon Knight immediately. It’s dark, brooding and gory, but still a light and fun (if that’s possible with a hero that’s cutting up people) read. It certainly makes me want to see more super hero stuff written by Huston.

 

Batman The Dark Knight: Golden Dawn

It might be because I’ve read a lot of early 1990s Spider-Man books lately, but David Finch really reminds me of a modern Todd McFarlane, as far as being a superstar artist who gets to write his books as well as dark, more horror-tinged artistic stylings. Not to mention, they’re both Canadian. That said, Batman The Dark Knight: Golden Dawn really reminded me of something that McFarlane might have done.

The main story in this collection is from Batman: The Dark Knight  #1-5 and focuses on a new character named Dawn Golden (which if you flip her name around, becomes a really cool title for the story…get it?). Bruce was friends with her as a child and has turned up missing. Anyway, her disappearance was due for her jilting the affection of the Penguin who with the help of Killer Croc has her kidnapped. It read like there was some sort of ‘dinner with schmucks’ kind of a thing between Dawn and the Penguin. This part I get and then it becomes really confusing.

It turns out that Dawn’s father was a longtime occultist who for some reason needed to kill Dawn so he could open the gates of hell as part of a plan to demonically rule the earth. He’s come back from the dead to murder her. Somehow Ragman gets possessed twice in this story; the first time by underworld queen Lady Blaze to recruit Etrigan the Demon to her side. Batman wounds up talking Etrigan out of this, and the two are in a race to stop Dawn’s father Aleister (who is using Ragman as a conduit to return to the Earth and kill his daughter in part of some sort of demonic ritual). Dawn gets killed as part of this but Aleister doesn’t succeed in bringing hell to earth and Batman is sad that Dawn is dead. Not to mention there was some other subplots going on, including Commissioner Gordon dealing with an upstart detective, as well as another with a child named Mira who was trying to steal the Batmobile as collateral to rescue her father.

So what did I think?

Well on the art side of things, Finch is great at drawing the more supernatural/horror style super hero comics. He draws monsters, demons and even Killer Croc in a monstrous way. At times his depictions of Lady Blaze and Dawn veered to far into the cheesecake realm. But on a whole, he knows how to render a dark and scary world for Batman to explore.

On the writing side, I’m pretty sure that this was Finch’s first project. His concepts made sense, but I really think he needed a co-writer for this. At times, the pacing was off and felt like he was trying to have too much going on.  I guess the good thing about him writing and drawing the book is that he knows what to script to play to his artistic strengths. I wonder if his future projects involve in that regard.

Since this was a collected volume, they threw in some extras. Finch teamed up with Grant Morrison for Batman: The Return which is a great story of Batman setting up his Batman, Inc. super hero franchise. Now that I think about it, I would really like to see more Morrison/Finch Batman stuff. The final extra is a two-page story from Superman/Batman #75 with Conner Kent and Daman Wayne in the future paying tribute to the men who preceded them as Superman and Batman.

Golden Dawn is beautifully rendered; there is no questioning that. But I think the audience of this is a little narrow, mostly to Finch fans. So if you’re one of his fans–or appreciate dark, horror comic art you will love this.