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Welcome, dear readers, to another week of comics and commentary at Comics! The Blog! We kick things off, as always, by handing out awards for the Best of the Week – beginning with two Award postings, followed closely by the past week’s Best.
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It’s funny; no matter how much I enjoyed Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev‘s Moon Knight series (because it was awesome), I still wouldn’t have called myself a Moon Knight Guy. It was more the run I was fan of than the character, per se, or so I thought. All of a sudden, a new Moon Knight book was announced and not only was I excited for it, but I found myself wondering how the book’s team would reconcile the status quo at the end of the previous run with the new one, centering on Marc Spector investigating crime in New York, working with police as the consultant “Mr. Knight.” As it turns out, Warren Ellis, Declan Shalvey and Jordie Bellaire meet the challenge of reintroducing a lesser-known hero with a vocal fanbase, and they do it in style.
That visual style is front and centre in Moon Knight, where Shalvey and Bellaire work together to give the book an unmistakably unique look. It’s accomplished with an ingenious trick: everything other than “Mr. Knight” receives full colouring and grey washes, but Moon Knight himself is presented in stark black and white. All the shading on him comes from deep black inks, which creates a clear visual distinction between him and the rest of the book. A big accomplishment is that it all feels unified; the two styles work well together and, instead of making it seem like a collage, the dissonance it creates is capitalized on by Ellis‘ script. Moon Knight is a character whose violent approach and mental instability is meant to unsettle people, so when a character treats the character in that manner, the visual style feeds into it. Moon Knight stands out, but the combination of that much white space in the middle of darker panels gives the sense of a vacuum around the character, sucking in attention and turning it into a sense of dread. It dares you to try looking away.
Of course, in a story where Moon Knight explicity savours the attention his costume gets him, that’s the perfect reaction. A lot will be justifiably made of Ellis‘ spin on Moon Knight’s origin and the supernatural element of Konshu – in part because of that spectacular final page full of unsettling dread – but the entire book is just three great creators running on all cylinders, creating a visual style that works with textual characterization, providing a consistent, innovative approach to a character I’m not used to caring so much about. Bendis and Maleev got me ready to be a long-term Moon Knight fan, and Ellis, Shalvey and Bellaire reeled me in.
