Review: ‘Moon Knight’ #4 Gets Vulnerable
by Tony Thornley
Sometimes you can forget in superhero comics that there’s someone behind the mask. In some series, it can be months between glimpses of Peter Parker or Tony Stark under those masks. In Moon Knight #4 we get a glimpse of a deeper reason behind that for Marc Spector, beyond just sales.
A third the way into this volume’s first year, and we’re beginning to see more and more what makes Moon Knight tick. Thankfully this month, we get a guest star who helps him let his guard down. Jed MacKay, Alessandro Cappuccio, Rachelle Rosenberg, and Cory Petit dive deep into Moon Knight’s head.
Moon Knight knows someone is after him, trying to ruin his life. Now, that someone is making bigger moves, targeting Mister Knight’s finances. Thankfully he has Tigra in town to back him up… in more ways than one.
For one of the only superheroes that openly struggles with mental illness, Moon Knight himself is not a very vulnerable person. It wasn’t until this issue that I realized it. What MacKay did, without anyone even noticing, was incredibly smart. Before this point, there were very few references to his life outside the mask. He only even called himself Mister Knight. Hell, his closest allies didn’t even know he had a name outside of “Knight, Moon” until Tigra showed up.
That sets the character up to be vulnerable. In the superheroic plot of the issue, that’s literal- a computer genius cracks into his finances and blackmails him into working for him. But in the larger view of the issue and the series, that means seeing Marc Spector’s face for the first time, as Tigra pushes him to be vulnerable and open up to her.
And really, this is where Cappuccio and Rosenberg shine in this issue. In his line work, Cappuccio’s really grown as an artist, especially in his more dynamic scenes, and Rosenberg is putting in some of her strongest color work in recent years. But the splash page of Moon Knight taking off his mask to reveal the broken bruised Marc Spector, and the series takes on another dimension it didn’t readily reveal.
This has been a series from the beginning that has tried to do something different from the norm. I think it’ll be seen as accomplishing that goal easily. I’m excited to see what the team does next.
Moon Knight #4 is available now from Marvel Comics.
Overview
A standard feeling sueprhero story turns on a dime. It’s not often we see our heroes get vulnerable, and the team execute it incredibly well.
