Nerds That Geek Comic Book Review: 'Moon Knight' (2017) #194

Written by Joel T. Lewis

We all know the Origin of Moon Knight, or if you didn’t and you’re reading this, chances are I’ve reiterated it to you a dozen times in reviews passed and you have grown sick of reading about it. Marc meets Bushman, Bushman stabs Marc, Corpse meets Khonshu, Marc becomes Moon Knight. We’ve seen it replayed and reimagined over the years, but something we’ve never hammered out for sure, is the origin of Marc Spector’s Dissociative Identity Disorder. With issue 194, author Max Bemis takes a shot at the trauma that gave birth to Steven Grant and Jake Lockley when Marc Spector was just a boy.
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Taking broad strokes of inspiration from the 1998 Bryan Singer film Apt Pupil, issue 194 recounts the story of young Marc Spector discovering that a longtime friend of his father’s, adopted Uncle Rabbi Yitz is in fact Ernst, a Metahuman Nazi War Criminal whose unnatural long life comes from torturing and killing Jews. Marc’s discovery of this friend of the family’s capacity for violence and cruelty is what Bemis, and by extension, Marc credit as the traumatic lynchpin for Marc’s creation of Steven Grant and Jake Lockley. Marc confides this story to Frenchie as a way of exercising the demon of that trauma in preparation for explaining his disorder to his daughter Diatrice. Bemis leans hard on Marc’s Jewish upbringing and the influence that Jewish humor and the religious Elder community had on Marc at an early age.

This was a tense read for me, as I braced myself for the very real possibility that Marc’s Disorder might have come out of sexual abuse. Relief is an odd word for what I felt when it was revealed that Ernst was a Nazi serial killer and psychopath rather than a pedophile, but there it is. Bemis boldly juxtaposes the flashback of a blood-covered Ernst explaining to Marc for the first time, what the Shoah (Holocaust) was and his role in it with images from the present day depicting Marc, Marlene, and Diatrice in the most domestic and happy panels ever to appear in a Moon Knight title. The weight of this description, the depth of the cruelty and horror of the holocaust hits Marc all the harder for having finally achieved some semblance of a family unit, a base of comfort and love that the thought of having ripped away would be unbearable.

Ernst and this storyline feels as if they were lifted right out of the final arc of the first run of Moon Knight wherein a group of Cabalist mystics abduct and raise from the dead Marc Spector’s recently deceased father. For Marc’s first enemy to come from so intimate a position in his life, to be so subtle and vaguely super powered as Moon Knight is himself, and for him to have disappeared so suddenly following Marc’s confrontation with him all those years ago sets the stage for a present-day return of the False-Rabbi Ernst and a showdown that will carry more weight than any that has come before. This is a really well executed issue, and while I am suffering from the origin fatigue that afflicts many of us in nerdom, this origin was paced, framed, and developed appropriately so that it felt fresh and necessary.

Though artist Ty Templeton didn’t draw much of the jet and silver avenger in this issue, the tension between the violence and cruelty of Ernst and the calm domesticity of Marc’s new family is accentuated by his clean, cartoonish style. This contrast is as much the triumph of colorist Keiren Smith, whose transitions in lighting and color scheme really leap off the page. Bemis continues to deliver a comic that feels like the Bronze Age in the modern day and if he continues to use Moon Knight to quote Seinfeld (as he does in this issue) I will buy his issues forever. Until next time, Geek On!

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