Moon Knight: From the Dead Is Complex Comic Action In Pure Form

Moon Knight: From the Dead is a fractured story about a fractured character, a six-part series of vignettes about a man who died and came back as four. Mark Spector is cut from the same Byronic cloth as Batman, but where Bruce Wayne chooses to bandage himself up in darkness, wealth, and distance, Spector weaponizes his misfortune and turns it outward, transforming the shards of his broken psyche into tools that, sometimes, cut both ways.

The Batman/Moon Knight comparisons hardly end there, as they are both vastly over-rich people who carry out their particular brands of heroism by night in big cities, the differences only a bunt apart on the spectrum of realism. Batman has Gotham; Moon Knight has New York City. Batman has a butler and a surrogate family of sidekicks; Moon Knight has multiple personalities which correlate to the four “aspects” of the Egyptian moon god Khonshu. Another wrinkle in Spector’s cape meant to differentiate it from Wayne’s: Batman has a borderline-supernatural intellect and prescience for danger, whereas Spector is indeed aided by the supernatural. There’s an entire school of thought devoted to Venn diagramming these nightbred vigilantes, but perhaps the most salient distinction to make is this:

Batman is the night. Moon Knight is, you know, the moon.

In one of the earliest episodes of Batman: The Animated Series, Batman (Kevin Conroy) links a few simple ideas together and makes Bat history: “I am vengeance. I am the night. I am Batman.” It’s a declaration that sticks, cutting straight to the core of the character in a way not yet duplicated, even by The Dark Knight. If there’s an analogous phrase in the more burgeoning Moon Knight property, it’s found here in From the Dead — but not, I think, in the oft-quoted “I’ve died before. It was boring, so I stood up.” That is Mark Spector’s psychology speaking, a man of sharp wit and dogged perseverance who found a purpose after trauma. There’s plenty to unpack there. But he is only a fourth (perhaps a fifth) of the collective Moon Knight, whose vaster mystery is better mapped by another declarative:

“I’m the one you see coming.”

Moon Knight is a dynamic force of the night, whose power is found in the night, but is not the night itself. He is not darkness, but what the darkness makes stronger, just as he is not vengeance, but the cold realization of it — the act and its consequences. His mission is to protect those who travel by night, and he is unstoppable, imperturbable, and focused, using his multiple personalities, as well as the deity for whom he is a vessel, like a Swiss army knife to complete that mission as efficiently as possible. This stripped approach bleeds over into the phenomenal work by Warren Ellis and Declan Shalvey, a crack team of storytellers whose craft radiates on each page of From the Dead. I’m adding my voice to the chorus of praise, and singing some of the same words, too: this is a comic like an Elmore Leonard sentence, sparse, stark, svelte, and sleek, conveying more than it should in less than it should. Each of the six vignettes contained with it specify a subtly different facet of the Mark Spector/Moon Knight character, who is chiefly referred to as “Mr. Knight” and carries himself like both the warrior-ciphers of classic westerns, for whom emotion and action are the same reflex, and the genius sleuths of pulp fiction, whose intellect isolates them to precipices where they can see all that needs to be seen. These archetypes aren’t far removed from the broody Byron stuff, but in Mark Spector/Mr. Knight, we see them all at once, a moon-phase diagram of the hero-detective.

Not to say that From the Dead is two-dimensional. It seems that Moon Knight’s mental health has always been a mystery, mined as often for thrills as for substance; and though the topic pops up only once by name, in a conversation with Spector’s therapist, it’s addressed from a number of angles throughout these collected issues. He’s called crazy early on by a cop whose jealousy and obsession with Mr. Knight eventually corrodes him from the inside out, leaving him the very thing he accused Spector of being. The contrast frames Moon Knight not as a madman’s delusion but a societal necessity: someone not only willing, but able to do what otherwise isn’t done. I appreciate that that sentiment never has to be said — it’s a moment of “show don’t tell” executed with enviable finesse. Later and earlier, in a twist on Moon Knight’s mission to “protect those who travel by night,” he solves a mystery involving a group of people sharing the same dream that leads him into someone else’s fractured and transfigured consciousness, destroyed and ensnared not by a god, but by something even less explicable. Still, in a few brisk frames, it’s possible to detect some anger at his own situation, repurposed and redirected as Mr. Knight unleashes his wrath on the perpetrator. There are visual callbacks to the unnerving conversation Spector has with his therapist, compounding the psychological underpinnings of From the Dead‘s most surreal vignette and fitting it into an impressive mythology.

But this is not always a character study. Like its protagonist, this volume has different “aspects” of its own, and so there is plenty of action to leaven out the weirdness and experiment with the minimalist framing and imagery. “Sniper” utilizes a few repeating panels to drive home the brutality of the titular occupation in a way that’s both gruesome and memorable, descriptors that apply also to “Scarlet,” an homage to The Raid that somehow loses none of the gripping physicality on the page of the live-action property it channels. In some regards, it works even better. These pages crackle with energy, needing no more than two or three panels at a time to convey the frigid, bone-crunching professionalism with which Mr. Knight dispatches the opposition in a series of escalating battles. That bone-crunching rises to some visceral heights in “Box,” where Mr. Knight (in classic Moon Knight attire, rather than the dapper suit-and-mask update he sports for most of From the Dead) squares off against a gang of ghost-punks. You’re better off seeing how that one plays out for yourself.

Speaking of ghosts, I feel I should point out the way Moon Knight is drawn: he’s a sketch left uncolored so that his presence doesn’t just stand out amid the spectacle, but sucks in, a void the eye must seek out and address before even registering what’s happening around him. You can see the parallel. It’s a technique that pays dividends on multiple fronts. It’s stylish, for one, but also thematically consistent with Ellis’s depiction of the character, an enigma we are drawn to but cannot know well. The most memorable part of From the Dead‘s first story, “Slasher,” is not the flesh-harvesting behemoth Mr. Knight tracks down into the sewers, but an offhand reveal that forced me to flip back a few pages in disbelief to review events I had thought straightforward. Sure enough, there was the information I had missed, tucked away as shrewdly as any metaphor.

Let me reach back to those Batman/Moon Knight comparisons for a moment. Batman’s appeal lies in his duality, whether playboy/loner, philanthropist/recluse, man/hero, darkness/light, or what-have-you. But Moon Knight’s appeal is in his multiplicity, and he is therefore an escalation and complication of what Batman signifies. He is simultaneously more real and more fantastical — New York City instead of Gotham, but also “moon god” instead of vast wealth — but, in a more basic sense, Marc Spector/Moon Knight/Mr. Knight/Khonshu is and are more true to life. It’s true that Moon Knight is the one we see coming. He makes it so. We know who he is by his actions, his reactions, his philosophy, and his intentions, but we won’t ever know what to make of him, or what to do with ourselves, when confronted by the whole.