I was starting to get really excited about this book. It seemed different, creative in a way that is lacking in modern Marvel comics, and not just because the art was different, the actual backbone of the storytelling appeared to be different as well. I was hoping, and I realise now how naïve I was, that Moon Knight would be a comic book that had some relevance to the world of 2014. Issue #1 had a wounded, used up and discarded veteran scarred by war and acting out his psychopathic impulses in civilian life, and issue #2 hinted at international banks and corporations sponsoring western backed ‘humanitarian interventions’ and faux revolutions. I was beginning to praise this book as being something different, and then it goes and takes the proverbial dump on all of the good will I had stored up for it.
Issue #3 digs up some 1980’s media fiction of English Punks as street villains, and makes me look like a fool for declaring this book to be in tune with contemporary concerns. Oh dear, is this the issue where Moon Knight declares like so many other comic books available today that it has absolutely no interest in the world going on around it? This is very disappointing to me personally, but I blame myself for getting my hopes up about it all in the first place. This is a Marvel book first, and last, so anything ‘revolutionary’ about it is going to be corporate sanctioned, and about as real world revolutionary as a Disney cartoon.
Have you ever noticed how comic book writers are afraid to portray real- life street criminals and so put their politically correct blinkers on and portray them as Mohawked punks from a bad 1980’s movie about the apocalypse? Do you find that annoying? Does it take you out of the moment when all of the street thugs look like television characters rather than the real thugs you actually see on the streets? Well call me a nit-picking reality junkie if you like, but it really annoys me that comic book writers are terrified of showing a bit of reality in their comics. If political correctness makes it impossible to portray things close to how they actually are, why bother at all? Just take all of your Marvel comic book heroes, ship them off to another dimension and leave Earth 2014 well alone.
I have an idea. Why not ship all of the Marvel comic book heroes to the planet 1984? On the planet 1984 you don’t have to deal with all of those pesky contemporary issues at all. Don’t worry about NSA spying, illegal foreign wars based on lies, banks laundering billions of dollars in drug money for drug cartels and US Government funded NGO’s starting fake revolutions to oust democratically elected governments and then signing them onto debt agreements designed to rape and pillage the countries resources. You don’t have to deal with any of those important contemporary concerns on the planet 1984. The big issues on planet 1984 are Mohawked Punk gangs and right wing Christian zealots who are sexist, racist, and homophobic and all of the other isms you want to add to the mix. If that’s what you want to do then just do it, but don’t pretend that your comic books are set in a 2014 world of Internet information where people don’t buy into the divide and conquer mainstream disinformation of the past. If you can’t deal with reality in 2014, then don’t insult your readers by pretending to.
Moon Knight #3 is so paper thin, plot-wise that I doubt you’ll see many long and detailed reviews on it. This review here will probably be the longest that you read, and that’s only because I’m so bloody annoyed with the book. There simply isn’t enough content in Moon Knight #3 to say a lot about it.
Here’s how the plot goes: Moon Knight is tracking the perpetuators of random street attacks in a city that looks like it’s been borrowed from a Daredevil comic. The perpetuators of the attacks are Mad Max/1980’s media stereotypes of street thugs. A gang that has only ever existed in the realms of comic book fantasy, with Mohawks, chains and studded belts. I remember the 1980’s and I lived in England. These gangs never really existed, and for the tiny number of people with Mohawks who hung around on street pavements looking bored in the mid 1980’s you could guarantee one thing from them. They’d be far more worried about their hair than attacking anybody, because if they did attack anybody their distinctive appearance would mean that they would be arrested and incarcerated almost immediately. It’s stupid, the whole thing is stupid and I don’t like to see it in my 2014 comics.
Did I forget to mention that this ridiculous gang of Punk stereotypes are spooky Scooby Doo inspired ghosts? I guess it would be taking things a bit too far to try to make the readers believe that this gang could actually exist today. I give Warren Ellis credit for that, but it’s a minor point and looking for crumbs of nourishment amongst the mounds of dust and waste. If you know your villains are woefully out of date, why bother with them at all?
Back to the plot and Moon Knight has problems punching the ghost punks because they don’t exist. How do they attack random people then if they don’t exist? Don’t worry, it’s all explained by a creepy looking guy in a Sandman inspired plague mask. My main problem with this story is that these chain swinging, Punk street gangs never did actually exist, but that doesn’t appear to be a problem to writer Warren Ellis.
The rest of the book explores how Moon Knight deals with the problem of not being able to punch the laughable Mad Max Ghost Punks. Buy the book if you want to find out if he managed to solve this small problem, and expect the Punks to have television names like ‘Johnny’ and to be sensitive souls in a rip-off from some old Sex-Pistols documentary about Sid Vicious.
Geesh, what a pile of crispy crunched crackers that was. What was the point? Has Warren Ellis already given up? Where’s the effortless creativity that marked the first two issues of this series? What happened? Why is he doing a 1980’s story, but substituting ghosts in place of real people because his out of date villains are no longer believable? I don’t get it.
So was there anything good about the book? Yeah, there were a couple of things that I liked. Artist Declan Shalvey works well with colourist Jordie Bellaire to create an uniformed and distinctive look that works really well. The writing is awful, and the character of Moon Knight is hardly explored at all, but it looks pretty good. I particularly liked the way that Moon Knight himself is drawn, with a lack of colour, in black and white as he fights against the swirling greens of the anachronistic ghost punks. That worked really well, but when the writing is so uniformly lazy, uninspired, and just dull, it’s not enough to save the comic by itself.
Moon Knight #3 takes a colossal backwards step, leaving the entire future of the series in doubt. The art and colouring is extremely distinctive, and it works very well to create an atmosphere unlike many of the other superhero comics out there today. Unfortunately though, the writing from Warren Ellis has hit a creative dead end this month. It was shockingly bad, very brief, unsatisfying and referencing tired old comic book clichés that are at least three decades out of date. A good book has gone bad. It has fallen, and I’m not sure if it can get back up.
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