Moon Knight #16 - Marvel Comics

MOON KNIGHT No. 16, August 2015

Whilst undeniably living up to Cullen Bunn’s promise that “each of my five issues will feature self-contained… street-level supernatural” stories, there is most definitely also an awful lot of sophisticated technology on show within “Angels” as well. In fact for the vast majority of the twenty-page periodical the North Carolina-born author’s narrative focuses exclusively upon a ‘running’ sky-battle between a stupendously large glider-born Moon Knight and a group of unnervingly fanatical jet-pack wearing goons.; “All right team. Let’s take the payload to the nest.”

Such a tense high-octane action-packed confrontation provides numerous thrills, and genuinely seems to capture all the atmosphere of modern day fighter aircraft combat, with the Fist of Khonshu continually directing Drone One to either “deploy countermeasures or a “missile swarm”, as well as dispense (micro)drones in order to “retrieve falling targets.” The American novelist, with the notable pencilling skills of artist German Peralta, even arguably manages to include a nice ‘nod’ to “DC Comics” caped crusader Batman, by having Marc Spector momentarily camouflage his crescent-fashioned flying machine within the bright glare of a similarly shaped moon.

Sadly such a wonderfully written sequence eventually comes to an end as the former mercenary’s motor-glider crash-lands atop a Manhattan tower block, and Don Perlin’s co-creation is forced to ultimate face his final surviving antagonist on foot as a result. This skirmish however is something of a disappointingly irrational and mystifying climax, despite being “one hundred percent weird in nature”.

Indeed it is Bunn’s insistence on making the motivation behind the aerial kidnappers so supernaturally bizarre and unnecessarily contrived that causes the comic to end on such a head-scratching low-note. For instead of simply scooping their abductees so as to somewhat understandably hold them to ransom, the Bram Stoker Award-nominee illogically would have the title’s 21,497 readers believe that “the flying men” have snatched up their hapless prey in order to take them to the nest of “the raptor goddess… so that the children could feed the mother for a change.”

This utterly bizarre nonsensical conclusion disheartening undermines all the good work which has preceded it, as it is impossible to associate the fast thinking, technologically advanced flyers with a mentally unbalanced belief that by starving people to death at the feet of a hokey winged idol, a goddess would elevate them to the status of angels? It also raises the question as to where the four acolytes managed to obtain their cutting-edge equipment from in the first place, especially when their totem is little more than an unsophisticated macabrely-dressed decaying human corpse which has been suspended from the ceiling by wires…

Writer: Cullen Bunn, Art: German Peralta, and Color Art: Dan Brown