We are the Knights who say… Moon! MOON! MOON!
I’m a big fan of Jacen Burrows who, up til now, I think only drew fucked up comics for small publisher Avatar Press by the likes of Alan Moore, Garth Ennis and Warren Ellis. So I was excited to see him finally making it into the big leagues with Marvel - and I wasn’t disappointed here. Lordy, this is a good-looking comic! Obviously it’s more restrained than his usual Avatar output - no Lovecraftian monsters are raping anyone (yet)! - but it’s no less accomplished and eye-catching. Unfortunately though the art is basically the only thing I really enjoyed about this one.
Moon Knight. Dude, who’da thunk that this character, out of all under the Marvel banner, would be the one to get some of the most interesting superhero stories of the last few years? Ever since Warren Ellis relaunched the character, he’s appeared in one imaginatively experimental book after another from writers like Brian Wood, Cullen Bunn and Jeff Lemire - though I felt that towards the end of Lemire’s run, things went in the crapper. And there the quality remains under Max Bemis’ watch.
What little I’ve read of Bemis’ stuff is… fine. Polarity (another comic featuring a mentally unstable protagonist so I can see the thinking behind putting him on Moon Knight) was decent, as was Worst X-Man Ever. He’s nowhere near as talented as the many writers preceding him on this character though.
The story is no great shakes: buncha lame villains want to hurt Moon Knight ‘cos that’s what needs to happen for this book to exist. Generic story, bland villains with feeble motivations, and clunky, overly wordy writing make for a crummy read. I mean, I’m not gonna quote the entire page of writing but, if you pick this up, take a look at page 2, issue 2, which starts “My name is Khonshu, Moon God of Egypt” and tell me what part of that tedious, useless monologue added anything to the scene of Moon Knight kicking the crap out of some nobodies in a bar. What was the point of the scene at all? And there are pages and pages of this unnecessary, boring rubbish!
The occasional turn of phrase sounds cool like when Bemis describes Moon Knight as the “Inspector Holmes of kung fu madmen”, though Sherlock Holmes was never an Inspector - he was a private detective (the London Police was just one of his clients).
Moon Knight is a great character, especially given that he’s an actual lunatic with multiple personalities (though, bizarrely, here he can switch between personalities at will?! Pretty sure that’s not how mental illness works!) but he’s let down by a common superhero problem: crap villains. Bemis throws a few baddies his way but none are at all compelling. Ra is derivative, The Truth is pointless and silly, and Bushman is a joke. Their motives are sorely lacking too - Ra, the main Big Bad, just wants Moon Knight to bow before him. That’s the best you could come up with, eh?
The family angle felt cliched and the plodding, tension-less story ends predictably. No part of the writing or story impressed me very much and I was bored pretty much most of the time - Crazy Runs in the Family is definitely not among Moon Knight’s better outings. I’m still a fan of the character and will continue reading Moon Knight, especially if Jacen Burrows continues drawing him, but I’d like to see a different, more capable writer take over the series.
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