Last year Jeff Lemire launched the latest Moon Knight series, and I had a look and it was absolutely brilliant. I mean, one-of-my-favorite-comics-of-2016 brilliant. I read the opening arc, and...that was it, until a few days ago.
It was nothing against the series, obviously. But as you can probably tell I haven't been spending huge amounts of coinage on comics these days. I figured, I'd read one genius Jeff Lemire Moon Knight story, and that was good enough. Well, I finally reconsidered that policy. I'm missing three issues of the run to date at this point, but otherwise I think I've caught up nicely. Apparently the next issue is released on Wednesday, and it's the last issue. But what a powerful creative legacy Lemire and pals will have left behind. This really has become one of my all-time favorite comics.
I'm not a Moon Knight fan. I mean, I've never sat down and read the character in any dedicated fashion, until Lemire. I've dabbled in back issues (and have a few more queued up), but as far as I'm concerned right now, I've just been reading the definitive Moon Knight. I don't see the point of humoring a wildly different approach, any approach that treats him as just another superhero.
Because Lemire writes a very specific version, one that completely embraces Moon Knight's given idiosyncrasies, his multiple personalities (paging fans of M. Night Shyamalan's 2017 blockbuster comeback Split), and spends the entire series keeping readers guessing about how much of it is mental illness and how much the poor guy being screwed around with.
But never for a minute does Lemire slack on keeping the focus incredibly tight. It's always very specifically about Marc Spector's perspective, which plays so well to Lemire's strengths as a writer, his perennial interest in isolated people constantly having the rug pulled out from them, new information being revealed, the story constantly being elevated and never diverging from the original vision...
It's good stuff. It really, really is. And the art, from Lemire's many collaborators, is astounding. As far as Marvel is concerned, I have to wonder if anyone has done anything this stellar recently. I mean, I loved Matt Fraction's Hawkeye, which was a master class in exploring superheroes at a casual level, and Tom King's Vision, which was a master class in total character deconstruction, but Moon Knight goes well, well beyond them both, Lemire (and company) in total creative control. King's Vision, I can never quite equate with his DC stuff because the whole story is inevitable. Fraction's Hawkeye, it's so casual it never feels like it has any weight. But Lemire's Moon Knight, it's both unpredictable and heavy storytelling. I mean, you know Lemire will keep you guessing, but in a really, really good way.
Well, apparently one issue remaining...
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