Moon Knight 1, Magneto 1

Moon Knight 1
W. Ellis (w) and Shalvey (a) and Bellaire (c)

Moon Knight, Marc Spector (or whatever name he may go by at any given time), is back in New York after a recent spell in LA that saw his personality, long thought to be Dissociative Identity Disorder, fractured into three separate entities on top of the Moon Knight one. These identities were, unlike the identities he'd taken on in the past, in the form of Captain America, Spider-Man, and Wolverine. He's started fresh in New York with a new style and new methods; he dresses in an all white suit and goes out at night helping the police solve crimes and going after the perpetrators himself. One such perpetrator is a murderer who has killed strong people all over the city and taken parts of them. Spector tracks him to the tunnels below Manhattan and quickly finds him. He hears him out, hears his story about being an old SHIELD agent wrecked by an IED and trying to put himself back together after being booted from SHIELD. The people he killed didn't matter to him because, in his opinion, they were wasting their strength. Before the killer can attack, Moon Knight reveals that he'd thrown one of his crescent knives into one of the machines keeping the man alive, avenging the travelers he'd killed. Smash cut to just before returning to New York, Spector learning from a doctor that he doesn't have DID, he has "brain damage." His brain was "colonized" by Khonshu, the Egyptian god that brought him back from the dead, and Khonshu has applied his own four aspects, Pathfinder, Embracer, Defender, and Watcher of overnight travelers (and, occasionally, Khonshu's violent aspect of "The One Who Lives On Hearts"), to Spector's brain. Spector's brain then tries to assign personalities to each aspect to make sense of the split. The issue ends as Spector, fresh off taking down the rogue SHIELD agent, returns home to his giant, empty house to see his other two personalities, Steven Grant and Jake Lockley, and Khonshu himself welcoming him home as his son.

Very interesting first issue. This is a tough character to really get into as a comic book writer, one who
differs from so many of the other Marvel heroes. Obviously you can break him down just like any other Marvel character and put him in a camp like "anti-hero" or "vigilante" or "violent mercenary" or "crazy" but that doesn't really get to the root of it. We don't read DAREDEVIL because we like "vigilante" books, we read DAREDEVIL because we like Daredevil and who he is and what he stands for. To that end, Moon Knight is one of those characters that's harder to ascribe a history to. He has a very clearly stated origin but even that is one that gets muddied up by everything that's come after it. Warren Ellis' first take on Moon Knight, then, is to fix that origin in place. He died. Khonshu brought him back. Khonshu's four aspects (five if we include the violent one that kind of pervades the rest when it comes out) have taken up space in Marc's mind. Moon Knight is born as a protector of travelers because that's what Khonshu's about. Period. I don't think it's the flashiest first issue or the most profound first issue I've ever read but I DO think it's possible that this is exactly what this series needs to start with. The last MOON KNIGHT series was Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev and had some really good bits to it but they definitely went for the flashier start, revealing that Moon Knight was talking to Cap, Wolverine, and Spidey but actually just talking to himself because he's CRAZY. Flashy but not too too far removed from who Moon Knight is. Now Ellis is here to say "this book is different than that one but HERE'S WHY that one fits in with this new definition." Very cool start. Good Shalvey art and great Bellaire colors. Should be a lot of fun going forward and now that our ground rules are kind of set, we should have a lot with which to press forward. Only sad I couldn't track down a Skottie Young variant cover (at right) today at my LCS.

Magneto 1
Bunn (w) and Walta (a) and Bellaire (c)

Magneto's left the X-Men and he's on a vengeance tour, tracking down and killing those who have hurt mutants. His first victim, as far as this book goes, is a Doctor Hatcher in Missouri, a man who donates regularly to groups like the Purifiers. He hunts down people like that or ones who kill mutants and he kills them to keep them from doing more harm and to make them answer for their crimes. So far he's kept quiet enough that SHIELD and any other faction that might be after him hasn't pinned him down yet but he knows they're on the lookout. He travels to a town in California that has seen three mutants killed in recent weeks and he manages to find the man responsible, though he's surprised to find that he's handed himself in prior to Magneto's arrival. Magneto isn't satisfied with this, though, sure that the man will slip through the cracks of the legal system and be back on the street in no time. He barges into the police station (where the man is being held) and attacks the police officers before coming upon the man himself. The man warns him to stay back but Magneto advances on him, causing the man to reveal that he's a somewhat crudely put-together Omega Sentinel, a Sentinel in the body of a person, and he attacks Magneto involuntarily. Magneto is able to rip the machinery from the man, though it deals fatal damage to the victim, who reveals that these things were put in him somewhere near Down Acres.

Neat little entrance to the world of Magneto here. As I mentioned in my pre-game this week, Magneto solo books tend not to last very long if they're launched at all. I think part of the problem with a villain-led book is that the villain has to be big enough to care about (which usually means they're pretty evil like Red Skull or Ultron), complex enough that we care about what happens to them (good luck finding too many of those beyond individual arcs), and they have to be trying to do something that isn't taking over the world (no one wants to read a full series where Ultron tries repeatedly to eliminate all human life, especially if the book's conceit is forcing us to route for Ultron in that situation). Magneto's tricky because he certainly fulfills the first two qualifications but he's rarely not trying to exterminate humans or take over the world so it's hard to be on his side. This issue is setting up a book where he's on a one-man war against other people, not mutants vs. humans on the large scale but mutants vs. humans on the small scale. More than that, even, it's mutants vs. genocidal and bigoted humans, humans who would kill or support killing mutants. Although it's an anti-hero book at its core, it makes Magneto pretty unequivocally understandable and it means that, even if you're not so into killing, you can see where he's coming from enough to care what happens to him. Pretty neat stuff. We'll have to see how this one goes in the long-term.