Sounds easy
enough, right? He made his first appearance in
Werewolf by Night 32 back in 1975 (WBN is
another of my favorite Marvel characters) and
since then, he's been an off-the-cuff, slightly
below the radar character.
Probably has a lot to do with his split
personalities.
He creates two identities to hide from his past
as a mercenary. He becomes Steven Grant the
millionaire and Jake Lockley the taxi driver as
well as Marc Spector the Moon Knight. So three
identities, four if you count Moon Knight as a
separate one and five if you count Khonshu as
another (I'll get to that later).
So he's nutso. He's like Batman, only he wears
silver while fighting at night so that he can be
an easy target (or at least seem like one) and
he's bat-shit crazy. These are the things that
make him just a little more insane and more fun
to follow than Batman, the fact that his feet
are made of clay, similar to the other Marvel
heroes over the years.
To add to that, Charlie Huston added a few more
layers in what started as a quite great
reimagining of Moon Knight. He added the broken
down hero, the man popping pills just to
survive, scarred, broken-down, beaten and
defeated. The man who defeated his greatest
enemy in a most gruesome way, and because of it,
his god Khonshu turned his back on him as there
was no more use to him.
But
that's where things faltered.
Charlie Huston is a great writer,
but after the initial story arc, it
seemed like there was no more oomph
to the story.
It seemed like the steam was gone.
All the ideas went out the window.
The idea that Marc is really
bat-shit insane and maybe Khonshu
had never come back was all but
gone. And this is how we fix Marc
Spector, the Moon Knight.
Embrace his insanity. Khonshu never
existed. He was always just
something that Marc threw his hat on
to blame for his problems, his
mistakes, his faults, and whenever
he killed someone or doled out some
really nasty punishment, he could
say it was because of this god
figure he fought for. Embrace this
part, and you've got yourself a good
start.
Beyond
that, keep the three to four
entities alive and well. In recent
months, there has been no Jake, no
Steven, only Marc/Moon Knight.
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Bring back Jake
Lockley. Bring back Steven Grant. That is what
made the character so different and radical and
astonishing to read. He would go out as the taxi
driver and beat someone's skull in two seconds
later as Moon Knight, and the reader, and the
characters interacting with him, would never
know what to expect or who to expect.
He changes his mood and his inner self as he saw
fit, as the moons changed. Find a way to
struggle through that, and you've got yourself a
redeeming character, one that can thrive in a
world that doesn't care for characters that are
just exactly the same as everybody else.
And that is why Moon Knight is bad right now.
He's a paltry excuse for Marvel's Batman. He's
trying too hard to be MAX-ish like the Punisher
MAX, but without the cursing, blood, gore,
nudity, and all the best parts of the MAX book
(not to mention Garth Ennis), that's all he is.
He's like Robocop 3 against Robocop. A really
horrible follow-up to something utterly amazing.
The character is completely redeemable. If they
had stuck to a noir backdrop for the character,
one where his changing personalities could fit
in among dames and bullets and car chases and
detective drama and women with guns, then this
character could thrive. He'd be slightly
different from the other characters in the
universe, not just because of his personality
disorder.
But the character, as he is now (as of issue
19), is a whiny pussy with no backbone and
absolutely looks and acts nothing like the
character we all so dearly love (or want). He's
not Marvel's Batman, he's like some jerkoff on
some MTV reality show who drinks too much,
fights too much, and bitches about his terrible
life.
When a comic can have Werewolf by Night come in
as a guest star and I still don't buy it,
there's a problem.
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Take
it another route and separate him
from the regular Marvel Universe.
Instead of trying to make him
Marvel's answer to Batman (and
failing, miserably), put him in the
MAX universe and let him enact all
kinds of hell on all kinds of
scumbags. Let him take down rapists,
murderers, pedophiles, and all the
scum of the universe, and let him do
it in a nasty fashion befitting his
god.
Give him a creator who will stand
the test of time. Someone like Garth
Ennis. Or Jason Aaron. Someone who
can put him up against the ropes,
beat him down sufficiently, and
bring him back up from the depths so
that he wants to kick some ass.
Give him
an artist that will hang onto the
book and give it a distinct flavor
like David Finch did. Someone with
sufficient use of the shadows like
Chris Samnee. Someone that can make
this character feel like Daredevil
in Born Again or Batman in Year One.
Someone that can just take this
character and put him in a real
world and make him gritty,
disgusting, and just plain right. |
Give him a
hardcore kick-ass run that takes the character
where he's supposed to be. He's supposed to be
the dirty, rotten, no-good step-brother to
Batman. The one that will just as easily break
your legs in 15 places as he will save you. The
one that will throw you in a vat of acid because
you mocked his costume. The one that will upset
the regular order of the Marvel Universe for his
own personal gain or just to put the other
heroes through hell.
The hero that the Marvel universe needs. Just
like Punisher, the hero that will go into the
Kingpin's meeting room, bust some skulls and
break some bones on all of his best men, and
slam a helicopter against it, just to take one
man down or to prove a point. That was the
greatest thing to happen in the current ongoing,
when he had the Moon-Copter crash against the
Company. Brilliant.
Make this character scare the shit out of the
villains around him, because he's not scared of
anything. He's faced death and resurrection so
many times that another wouldn't mean anything.
And he might not even have a god behind him
anymore, which would just make him all the
crazier.
Or keep him as the whiny bitch that he is right
now with the false swear words like @$$ or $#!%
or whatever the hell else they use, and give him
the chance to be a good hero. A good anti-hero.
Give him the chance to rage back against the
world, the way the character was meant to. |
