Those who followed our reviews this week will surely have noticed me covering a brand new Moon Knight series entitled Vengeance of the Moon Knight. I gave it a pretty positive review and stated how much I enjoyed the character, and that a Spotlight was in order. Well, here’s the Spotlight! I figured it can’t hurt to take a few minute out of your day and read about quite possibly the craziest character in the Marvel U. And when I say crazy, I don’t mean like Deadpool crazy. Moon Knight is certifiable and somewhat a paranoid schizophrenic (Deadpool suffers from schizophrenia too, but in a much more comical way). So allow me to tell you a bit about one of Marvels more darker and less used characters: Moon Knight.
Moon Knight’s origin has been retconned and tweeked for bits and pieces of his past, but the main things you need to know are that he was born Marc Spector, a rabbi’s son, and he’s always been a troubled person. He was a first a boxer, then a soldier, and finally a mercenary before the events leading up to his transformation as a vigilante. While acting as a mercenary, Spector was teamed up with a man named Jean-Paul DuChamp, also known as “Frenchie.” The two of them began to work for a man named Raoul Bushman, a mercenary and rather angry/evil man who would later grow to become Spector’s main antagonist. While doing work in Egypt, the three came across a dig in an Egyptian tomb revealing artifacts belonging to the god Khonshu, the moon god. Bushman kills the scientist in charge of the dig with the intent of looting the dig, but Spector challenges him to personal combat. In return, Bushman beats Spector to near death and leaves him to die. Nice guy, huh? Luckily for Spector, a group of Egyptians who worship Khonshu find Spector and bring him inside Khonshu’s inner temple and place him before an altar. Spector dies, and Khonshu appears before him, allowing him life again if he will be Khonshu’s avatar on Earth. Spector accepts and comes back to life, taking the silver shroud off of Khonshu’s statue and proceeding to find Bushman. He defeats Bushman in the desert and he, the scientist’s daughter, and Frenchie all return to America with the Khonshu statue in tow. And that, boys and girls, is how Moon Knight was born and decided to fight crime!
When Spector returns to America, he proceeds to take all the money he made as a merc and invest it into himself. He creates a new personality, Steven Grant, a millionaire, and through this he funds all his crime fighting. Think of Bruce Wayne, and that’s Steven Grant. On top of that, he made an additional identity as Jake Lockley in order to stay in touch with the average man, and took a job as a taxi driver. It wouldn’t be for another few years that Moon Knight would really lose touch with reality and become a schizophrenic however. That major addition to the character came in 2006 with the launch of volume 4 of Moon Knight. In between this time, there wasn’t a lot of huge changes to the character. He existed as many characters did in the ’90s, jumping in and out of the West Coast Avengers, battling opposing Egyptian god cults, traveling to the past and future, and of course changing his costume. However, after attacking Dr. Doom in an unlawful manner (this was pre-SRA), he quit from the Avengers and, in a big act of self sacrifice, dies in order to save his loved ones. Fortunately for us, Moon Knight was resurrected by Khonshu once again… and then the bad times came.
As I said before, Bushman was and is Moon Knight’s oldest antagonist. During a brutal battle between the two, Bushman repeatedly taunted Moon Knight beyond Spector’s breaking point, and Spector took one of his Crescent Moon-shaped darts and cut his face off. This led Spector to deciding to retire from vigilantism and living in a small apartment with nothing but the Khonshu statue (and he grew out an awesome beard). We also saw the return of the Commitee, one of the first Moon Knight “villains,” which consisted of a group of people trying to control the world who initially gave Moon Knight a lot of his equipment (and then, of course, it turned out Moon Knight had faked being part of the group to infiltrate and destroy them). Moon Knight, of course, kicks there ass and crashes his brand new Moon-copter through the window of their building and beating the crap out of everyone. It was around this time that the psychosis of Moon Knight really came into question as he lost the ability to tell the difference between his personalities. On top of that, a figment of his imagination in the appearance of faceless Bushman began to appear to him and give him advice. By advice, I mean Bushman told Moon Knight to kill people and claimed to be the voice of Khonshu. 
Moon Knight’s morality became a major point of contention for the book as he couldn’t decide if he was a hero or a villain, although not in the traditional sense. He just wasn’t sure how far he’d go to bring justice. You see, Moon Knight’s whole shtick is that he was the vengeance of the moon and he was here to bring the hurt to those that deserved it. Since Spector had been a former soldier and mercenary, his forms of vigilantism were much more brutal than the average super hero, and this eventually led to his alienation from the super hero community.
And then came Civil War. Moon Knight didn’t pick either side of the battle initially as he felt so far removed from the entire world of superhero-dom that he didn’t care. He’s visited by Spider-man on Iron Man’s behalf and by Captain America, both of whom try to “recruit” him at his reluctance. As the war ends, Moon Knight decides to register and use that registration to his advantage. The idea is that, since Moon Knight is so crazy at this point, if he can just get a card he’ll be left alone. No one will hound him to register, but no one will want him to do any missions for them because he’s crazy. In a really great issue of the last volume of Moon Knight, he appears in front of a doctor who calls out his different personalities (Grant and Lockley) before deeming Moon Knight too crazy to get the registration card. However, as soon as the doctor announces this, the voice of Khonshu comes out of Moon Knight, taking over Spector and commanding the doctor to give him the card. Needless to say, Spector walks out of there with his new registration card and is left alone.
This doesn’t last, though. As I mentioned before, a big issue was how far Moon Knight felt he could go when taking down villains. And in one case, Moon Knight fought Black Spectre. Spectre was doing his best to kill Moon Knight and and destroy the city (as he always does) when Moon Knight decided he had had enough and pushed him off a building. Iron Man, still in charge at this point, kicked Moon Knight out of the Initiatve and receeded his registration (in the only case of this happening ever), and the Norman Osborn led Thunderbolt’s are let loose on him. The battle is costly and extremely violent, and Bullseye is very intent on killing Marc Spector. Of course, since Moon Knight has multiple personalities, when Bullseye does apparently kill Spector, the Jake Lockley personality and he runs away to Mexico, leaving Marc Spector officially dead. It is never quite clear wether or not Spector’s personality is in fact dead and gone because throughout the remaining issues of the book, Moon Knight is very much aware of his whole past and his actions as Spector. It’s more probably that Lockley is now the primary identity that he is using for all intents and purposes. It doesn’t really matter though because the last few issues of Moon Knight were really bad anyway.
So that’s Moon Knight’s origin in a nutshell. Why do I like the character so damn much? To be honest, it’s all in the last series. The way that it started was so awesome, with the Bushman fight and all that followed up until Benson took over. I originally picked up Moon Knight to check out the Death of Marc Spector arc, and in turn spent time reading all that had led up to it, and I just thought the books were so well written I couldn’t help but fall for the character. The art in it was really great. Really, the whole book up until the change in artist and author was just absolutely phenomenal. Now I really enjoy the Moon Knight character a lot and have some high hopes for the new series. Moon Knight appears to be a bit more tame then he was before, holding back on a lot of the violent aspects of the story, but that comes into play as we still have imaginary Bushman taunting him. On top of that, I know from solicits that Bushman is somehow returning to the series, so that is definitely something to look forward to. Moon Knight is an odd character, but he is most definitely a highly entertaining one, and one I very much enjoy reading.
