Moon Knight #200 - Marvel Comics

MOON KNIGHT No. 200, December 2018

Described by “Marvel Worldwide” in their pre-publication publicity drive as “a celebration of two hundred issues of the multifaceted Moon Knight with an oversized anniversary issue you’d be crazy to miss”, this thirty-page periodical clearly flew off the shelves upon its release in October 2018, astonishingly almost doubling its usual monthly sales figures according to “Diamond Comic Distributors”. But whilst the notable inclusion of artistic legend Bill Sienkiewicz’s single sheet cameo at the very end of this book may well have gleaned some sense of nostalgia from its 33,387 readers, it is arguably unlikely that Max Bemis’ penmanship generated anything else other than bemusement, frustration and perplexity.

For starters, the New Yorker’s belief that Marc Spector would ‘happily’ enlist the help of “his old nemesis” the Sun King so as to finally defeat the Societe des Sadiques seems infinitely farfetched considering just what Patient Eighty-Six put the titular character through when they first fought. In the past the pyrotechnic Nameless One has literally threatened to kill both the ex-mercenary’s girlfriend Marlene Alraune, as well as their daughter Diatrice, and yet supposedly because “this hog you just rode in on has got some very cool angel wings aaaand you are a wildebeest” Doug Moench’s co-creation takes the fiery killer back to meet the family the scarred criminal previously attempted to destroy; “Marly… This looks bad. But I’m as sorry as hell.”

At the time this publication was printed the internet news site “Bleeding Cool” posted about Bemis wrapping up his run on the series, in addition to “cleaning up his life after suffering an emotional breakdown”, and the American author’s battle with his own personal demons debatably shows in the confused mess which follows as the Fist of Khonshu leads a small army of the “Sun King’s old crew I converted” in a full-on frontal assault upon “Uncle” Ernst’s anti-carrier. Admittedly, the ensuing fight sequence is truly pulse-pounding, with artist Paul Davidson superbly pencilling the masked crime-fighter beating the literal hell out of a horde of purple-hooded Nazi sadists and the formidably-sized “False Truth”. But it’s never made clear what on earth any of these sense-shattering shenanigans are actually about, why the Sun King turned against the German who gave him “one more shot to get your proverbial cojones back”, or how Raul Bushman’s former blue-gunk spewing partner became the “living propaganda” of the Societe des Sadiques..?

Writer: Max Bemis, Art: Paul Davidson, and Guest Artists: Jacen Burrows, Jeff Lemire & Bill Sienkiewicz