Moon Knight: City of the Dead #1 // Review
Marc’s not feeling well. He generally doesn't. He's just trying to get comfortable. He’s just trying to relax. He’s haunted by visions of the past and the things that he’s done. There’s a memory of dying in the desert. There are memories of all the lives he’s taken in the line of...work. He’s feeling miserable about it all, and he’s just getting started in Moon Knight: City of the Dead #1. Writer David Pepose starts a whole new story with the character with artist Marcelo Ferreira, inker Jay Leisten, and colorist Rachelle Rosenberg. Pepose and company open a series with a promising mix of street-level aggression and the supernatural.
There’s a kid who is being chased by a group of people in the night. The kid’s name is Khalil Nasser. The people who are chasing him carry archaic weapons. They wear strange-looking helms. They call themselves the Sons of the Jackal. They’re not normal scum on the streets of Marvel Manhattan. They’re responsible for murder, torture, and human sacrifice. They follow the Egyptian god of death, so they don’t really need a reason to chase the kid. They’re going to run into a follower of another Egyptian god altogether. He’s NOT there to help them.
Pepose is somewhat poetic with the narration. As cliche as it is for a hero to narrate the beginning of his own series...it’s still a lot of fun. It makes for a really personal connection with the hero, which is actually kind of necessary to empathize with him and understand the significance of everything to him because...it may start out in a totally relatable place, but Marc IS going to a city of the dead. His first-person narration goes a long way towards making him relatable as he goes into a totally supernatural place.
Moon Knight has such a specifically ambiguous costume. The hero ends up looking pretty drastically different from artist to artist. Line up a dozen different artists all being totally faithful to the overall design of the character, and you’ll get a dozen profoundly different looks. Bill Sienkiewicz’s sweeping simplicity of line and form might be one of the more striking visions of the character ever brought to the page. Ferreira, Leisten, and Rosenberg do a solid job of taking Marc’s image and making it their own with lots of cluttered detail. This is a rough-and-tumble guy who is beating the hell out of a group of people who are beating the hell out of him. It doesn’t look pretty, but it DOES look cool as hell...in its own way.
Now that Marc is off into realms beyond life, Pepose and company are going to have to tread pretty lightly. The supernatural location is going to pose some problems, as it might bend Marc in an exclusively supernatural direction that’s going to alienate the basic humanity of the character. Moon Knight has always worked best as a balance between street-level crime and the supernatural. If Pepose and company can maintain that, they’ll have a hell of a series on their hands.
