Moon Knight [2021] #16 - Marvel Comics

MOON KNIGHT No. 16, December 2022

Cleverly entwining Marc Spector’s exhilarating interview with Lady Yulan and a terrifying battle involving an overconfident Doctor Badr, Jed MacKay’s narrative for Issue Sixteen of “Moon Knight” must surely have landed very well with this comic’s audience. True, the West Coast Avenger’s lengthy conversation with a vampire “raised from birth to be an assassin to the dread immortal Yi Yang” is incredibly word-heavy and bursting with well-filled text balloons. But having shown just how incredibly fast the undead killer can be by suddenly single-handedly pinning the superhero against a wall without any warning, every subsequent word uttered in Chinatown is laced with a deadliness that should keep even the most blasé of bibliophiles unequivocally hooked.

Furthermore, the tense sequence helps establish just how large-scale the blood-drinkers’ operation actually is, as the demonic-looking Nosferatu talks openly of a global structure which even includes Dracula’s “first internationally recognised sovereign vampire nation in history.” This context shows just how big a problem Doug Moench’s co-creation is actually facing and intriguingly raises the odds of the ‘street level vigilante’ surviving a long-running campaign against the Tutor; “Maybe it takes ten years. Maybe it takes a hundred. Vampires can work on a very long timeline, Mister Knight.”

So lethal a threat is certainly reinforced by the chilling fate of Hunter’s Moon, following the Egyptian doctor’s unwise decision to tackle Nemean and Grand Mal alone during the dead of night. Arrogantly assuming he can outfight Kenneth’s top two hired guns with just his knuckles, despite the fact that the pair have already bested the (other) Fist of Khonshu, Badr is eventually brought to his knees by a torrent of ferociously-fanged and lethally armed thralls during a riveting, roof-top ambush.

Similarly as sensational as this twenty-page-periodical’s penmanship is Alessandro Cappuccio’s eye-catching artwork, which genuinely helps make the fraught atmosphere inside Yulan’s head-quarter’s palpably pulse-pounding. Likewise, the Italian illustrator is extremely good at pencilling the increasing desperation which creeps into Hunter’s Moon as the anti-hero stoically stands his ground against overwhelming numbers. Indeed, one of the highlights of this publication actually arrives at this publication’s end, when he provides a splash page which encapsulates all the haunting, spine-snapping dread of Gwen Stacy’s disconcerting demise by Gil Kane way back in 1973.

Writer: Jed MacKay, Artist: Alessandro Cappuccio, and Color Artist: Rachelle Rosenberg