Comics in Review: Moon Knight and Other Things

It’s been a while since I’ve done either a book review or anything substantial on comics, so while we’ve got a day free from craziness, let me tell you a little about what I’ve reading lately.  I’ll preface this by saying that I was in the Milford, CT, library last weekend when I discovered that they had a pretty well-stocked graphic novels shelf buried in the back of the Young Adult section.  They didn’t have a lot that was new, but they had a substantial selection of modern classics, and I grabbed big fistfuls of stuff I’d always meant to read but had never quite gotten around to.  Amongst those was Avengers Forever, Crisis on Infinite Earths, Teen Titans: A Kids’ Game, Ultimate Spider-Man Vol. 1, Ultimate Fantastic Four Vol. 1, and a digest-sized comic adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Avengers Forever

I started with Avengers Forever.  I’ve been on something of a Kurt Busiek kick since reading Trinity Vol. 1 a couple of months ago, and more to the point, I’ve been trying to bone up a little on the classic Avengers stories these past few months in anticipation of this summer’s movie.  As it turns out, AF is an incredibly cosmic story from 1998-99.  The story is about a war between Kang the Conqueror and Immortus, Kang’s future-self alter-ego, with Captain America, the Wasp, a couple of versions of Hank Pym, and a few others running around through time trying to alternately save Rick Jones’s life and prevent massive continuity problems in the time stream due to the war’s interference. 

It’s a cool enough story, and the art is very, very nice, but I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that it owed A LOT to Jim Starlin’s work on Adam Warlock even though the influence is never credited, and having met Mr. Starlin, I can only imagine that the success of this story—which is so clearly based on his long-ago story concepts—must have driven him crazy.  And then, too, what’s an Avenger’s story without either Thor or Iron Man?  Or even The Vision?  Those guys all make cameos, but the core cast here is a bunch of oddballs, and it’s a little off-putting.  That said, the Wasp has a leading role, and it works so nicely that it makes me wonder if the folks at Disney/Marvel haven’t made an error is keeping her out of this summer’s movie.

In any event, I liked Avengers Forever okay, but I certainly wouldn’t go out and buy it.  It’s definitely a library-type read.  The fighting-your-future-self thing is always cool—and in fact, I’m thinking about introducing it as an angle in my D&D campaign The Sellswords of Luskan once the heroes reach the Epic Tier—but as a story, I kind of thought this one was missing something.

So.  If Avengers Forever was good but not great, Crisis on Infinite Earths was a straight-up disappointment.  I remember it from when I was ten years old, and it was coming out at roughly the same time as Marvel’s also-classic Secret Wars.  But where Secret Wars is pretty much just a straight-up fanboy smackdown, Crisis, I thought, had delusions of grandeur.  The heroes never fight the villains, the series’ over-arching villain isn’t really established until near the close of the book, and most of the action is of the nebulous save-these-people-from-falling-rocks-and-burning-buildings variety.  Not what I was expecting at all.  I grant you that the sequence where Super Girl dies is pretty good, and the art is exceptional, especially for a book from the early 1980s.  Beyond that, however, there’s not a lot to like here, at least for me. 

Having been frustrated with trades, I headed to the local comic shop and picked up my usual stuff, along with a few other things.  I got the new Brian Wood/Becky Cloonan Conan, I got the two most recent issues ofAmazing Spider-Man, and I picked up issues 8, 9, and 10 of the new Brian Bendis/Alex Maleev Moon Knight.  Conan was disappointing while ASM—where Spidey and the Human Torch go into space together—was good, as always, but maybe not quite as good as the last couple of arcs have been.  So, more good but not great. 

The cover for a recent issue of
Moon Knight.  A groan-worthy
cover for a groan-worthy concept.
Amazingly, however, the book
itself is very good.

Thankfully, it was at this point that I read Moon Knight, and my faith in comics was restored.

I know what you’re thinking.  Moon Knight?  I was kind of thinking that, too, which is why I’ve been avoiding this book despite the fact that it’s done by my all-time favorite creative team.  But what are you gonna do?  I wanted something that wasn’t just good but was actually gonna be great, and bottom line, I trust Bendis and Maleev to deliver.  And they did.

The story here is that Moon Knight has developed multiple personality disorder, that the extra personalities think they are Spider-Man, Wolverine, and Captain America respectively, and that in addition to all that, Moon Knight has started dating Echo, who you might remember (but probably don’t) as one of Matt Murdock’s ex-girlfriends from right before Messrs. Bendis and Maleev took over Daredevil way back in, like, 2005.  All of that, at least in concept, is utterly groan-worthy.  And it only gets worse when you factor in that the book is set in Los Angeles, and that the big-bad is Count Nefaria.  Who the fuck is Count Nefaria?  Seriously, I have never heard of Count Nefaria, and I think of myself as something of a nerd about these things.

All of which just goes to show you that storytelling is all about execution.  Because this is—as expected—a four-star book.  I don’t want to get too far into how the story plays out, but I will say that the multiple personality thing is actually kind of a stroke of genius.  What we’re seeing here is a guy, albeit a superhero, having a nervous breakdown.  And it’s executed in such painful, agonizing detail that we can literally feel him failing apart around us.

Seriously: four-star book.  Not for nothing is Brian Michael Bendis my favorite comics writer.

Needless to say, after that experience, I skipped straight to Ultimate Spider-Man Volume 1.  Why?  Because it’s also a Bendis book, and in fact, it’s famous for being Bendis at his absolute best. 

Well.  Personally, I don’t know that I liked it better than I liked his grittier, more-classically-Bendis crime-fiction stuff, i.e. that Daredevil run I’m always talking about, but USM is definitely a good retelling of some of the classic Spider-Man stories.  For as much as I’m still not sure that the whole Ultimate Universe was actually good idea, this series, at least, is the best example of why they thought it might be.  Granted, the stories are recycled.  The execution is still absolutely first-rate here.

At this point, I’ve still got Ultimate Fantastic Four, that Dracula thing, and A Kids’ Game to read, as well as a single-issue comic based on the TV show Fringe that I picked up at the shop last week.  And if anybody’s got any suggestions, go ahead and give ‘em to me.  And thanks in advance!