Moon Knight Vol. 1: Lunatic

Marc Spector wakes up in a rather unreconstructed lunatic asylum complete with bullying orderlies and Electroshock Therapy as punishment. Moon Knight, Khonshu, all the rest, it's all delusion according to Dr. Emmett, who runs the place. So she should know, right? Frenchie, Marlene and some of his other few associates seem to be fellow inmates. But Khonshu visits him at night, tells him it's time to break out.

I've always enjoyed that Moon Knight is a superhero who undoubtedly is mentally ill, and even knows it (in this volume, Khonshu even implies that this is the reason It picked Spector). Most Moon Knight books leave you wondering just what *really* happened. This one goes a little far in pursuit of the 'crazy' narrative. Having an show more explicitly mad narrator is problematic, because most of the readers then cannot understand or trust the truth of what is told. However it was an OK Moon Knight tale.

Re-read this in 2022. The whole tale is very dream- (or nightmare-) like. Marc Spector shifts between his different personalities. Settings and people change arbitrarily. The end teases the 'it was all a dream' writers' cop-out. However Jeff Lemire is generally pretty good so hopefully the next volumes will improve things. show less

Moon Knight has always been a sad little Batman ripoff who Marvel trots out for a series every decade or so to preserve the trademark. Writers seem to have fun probing at this origin and goofy role-playing schtick to question his mental health. Lemire goes all in for this iteration, involuntarily committing Marc Spector to a mental hospital and diagnosing him with dissociative identity disorder.

There's a whole lot of what's real/what's delusional futzing around, but the art and dialogue kept the whole thing rolling along.

Jeff Lemire's Moon Knight is a fascinating superhero story steeped in Egyptian mythology that explores mental illness. Marc Spector's traumatic childhood experience, along with his mind getting fractured from Khonshu connecting with him, caused him to develop Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). In Lunatic Marc wakes up in an insane asylum with no powers and a lifetime's worth of medical records, and all of his identities are called into question. Can he figure out what's going on?

Read this for the twist at the end. The art is fantastic and the story is wild, and a bit tragic.

I'm excited about the Disney show.

I mostly thought this was a just-OK-take on the 'what is and isn't real when the hallucinating protagonist is locked in a mental asylum' trope, but the end twist is very satisfying and made me feel it had been worth my time. (Time will tell if I still think so when I have read the other two collections continuing and concluding Lemire's run on Moon Knight, but as I write this I've not read very far past the first collection.)

This incarnation of Moon Knight is a pleasant surprise. Jeff Lemire takes some points from Warren Ellis' (small) run and amplify them to the limit. The reader follows the uncertainty of Marc Spector, what is torturing at a certain time.

Greg Smallwood's art is awesome: for the psychic/ mystical plan he uses a Bill Sienkiewicz's art style and for the phisical plan, an art style that is more clean, like Chris Samnee's.

As the book ends in a David Lynch's way (or Brian De Palma's Body Double), it is assumed that it is a huge cliffhanger that begs you to follow the next book. It's worth to ride.

Weird. It was supposed to be, but maybe it wasn’t the best place for me to start on moon knight.