Moon Knight by Jeff Lemire, Greg Smallwood (2016)

I’m not really all that into the Marvel Universe, ubiquitous as it is. I believe this might be one of their latest cinematic characters, but really it wasn’t the draw here – the draw was Lemire himself, a terrific comic writer.
Until now, I’d only read his original fiction and I must say I strongly prefer that. What Lemire does with characters, superheroes or not, is awesome. What he does with a stock character is considerably less awesome.
Is Moon Knight an inherently interesting character? Well, sure, Marvel tries. It gave him a multiple personality disorder, for one.
That can be very exciting. M. Night Shyamalan’ Split was very exciting. Moon Knight doesn’t have the same appeal. Which is sad. Because it’s different enough and there’s even Greek mythology mixed in as a bonus and all that, but ultimately it kind of falls flat and you’re just left wondering what sort of a person goes crime fighting wearing all white? So freaking impractical.

Completist by nature, I ended up continuing this trilogy without being impressed by book one. I found this one even less impressive.
Stylistically, it was interesting in that there was a different artist for every personality, but a. I didn’t especially care for the guest artists, preferring the main style of the book ,and b. it made for such a mess.
The story is already inherently messy with a classic unreliable narrator struggling to juggle realities and personalities. The style of this volume just spotlighted it.
And then they included an original Moon Knight story at the end all the way back from Stan Lee’s Marvel days, with those stupid bangs and those garish colors and those tediously overwritten and overexplained scripts. Which is…you know, nifty. For comparison’s sake. And it is interesting to see how much comics evolved as a genre, but other than that…more mess.
Ok, let’s finish this. One more volume.

​Ok, good enough. A solid finish to a mess of a story about a messed-up character. Considering the entire trilogy now, I can appreciate what Lemire tried to do with the story. It is, in fact, a sloid story about coherency of self, coherency of purpose in spite of the odds.
There were some exciting moment, the teetering and the triumph. And yes, I’m sure, eventually I’ll watch the cinematic reincarnation of the white-clad Moon Knight because a. you can’t avoid Marvel and b. I love, love, love the lead actor.
But overall, this was something of a disappointment. Not in the Marvel Universe – that never really wowed me, but in Lemire who always does.
It kind of made me think of all the actors, talented, terrific actors who end up steamrolled into the Marvel machine and don’t always do their best, competing with CGI, the way they might in their other ventures. Lemire, it seems, is best as doing his own thing. Though this must have been an interesting, commercially viable, experiment for the author.
Ok, done. Moving on.