Moon Knight [2021] #29 - Marvel Comics

MOON KNIGHT No. 29, January 2024

As penultimate issues go, Jed MacKay’s narrative for “The Final Hours Of Moon Knight” certainly must have had its audience completely hooked from the comic’s blood-splattered opening through to its wonderful reveal at its end. Sure, the twenty-page periodical’s never-ending pulse-pounding pace does debatably prove a tad tiring once Marc Spector has seemingly defeated the latest incarnation of the Black Spectre in a brutal fist-fight. But many a bibliophile should quickly gain a second wind when the Canadian writer savagely shows Ryan Trent to have merely been a diversionary tactic of the real McCoy.

Much of this book’s success is undeniably down to just how well the various sub-plots are all threaded together, with the likes of Hunter's Moon, Tigra and Reese’s diabolical predicaments being perfectly progressed alongside the author’s central storyline. These secondary sequences, with the exception of Greer Nelson’s rescue by Soldier, are just as gory as the Fist of Khonshu’s battle, and all contain more than a modicum of danger for the various protagonists concerned; “Boss said you smelled the bomb. I can’t do that. If it had been me here, I’d have gotten the boss blown up.”

Furthermore, all of the confrontations are apparently resolved at similar times, resulting in the reader fully believing that all of the protagonists are going to come together on the top floor of the Black Spectre’s base of operations for a celebratory conclusion. Disconcertingly though, this euphoric feeling of a well-deserved victory lasts as long as it takes Moon Knight to be riddled with the entire contents of a six-shooter, and the multi-storey building’s dramatic detonation – a terrific twist which comes completely out of the blue.

Likewise, there’s plenty of dynamic, action-packed panels to keep any onlooker well and truly hooked, courtesy of some cracking pencilling by Federico Sabbatini. Working in tandem with colour artist Rachelle Rosenberg, the Italian Illustrator does a first-rate job in depicting just how downright ruthless and unrelenting the close combat is in this comic, with Spector’s very noticeable ‘wear and tear’ increasingly catching the eye as the former West Coast Avenger desperately continues to fight for survival against a plethora of substantial physical injuries.

Writer: Jed MacKay, Artist: Federico Sabbatini, and Color Artist: Rachelle Rosenberg