With a little less than a week (5 days) until Moon Knight releases on Disney+, I’ve been going crazy trying to cram in whatever last little bit of Moon Knight I can get my hands on before we finally experience the show on (for me) Wednesday night.
Needless to say, I’m HYPPPEEEE!!
Anyway, one of those last little bits of Moon Knight content I’ve been able to squeeze in before the release, is the third and final volume of Jeff Lemire’s run with this incredible character (or team of characters). If Moon Knight Vol. 1: Lunatic set the stage but lacked context (thank you Essential Moon Knight Vol. 1 for filling in some of those details even if you were too 70’s to care) and Moon Knight Vol. 2: Reincarnations was a wild ride (though a tad more understandable), Moon Knight Vol. 3: Birth and Death really gives us what we’ve been craving . . . A look into Marc Spector’s past.
In this last amazing issue, we parallel three main stories: 1) The first realization of the splits in Marc’s identity, 2) Marc’s resurrection in the Tomb of Khonshu and the origin of Moon Knight, and 3) the present time in which Marc returns to the mental hospital, faces some challenges, and ultimately must try to kill Khonshu. I won’t spoil what happens (although it’s probably not hard to guess), but I felt that it was indeed a great way to end this run.
Even though this volume covers a lot of the same territory that earlier Moon Knight comics have done (the sequence that leads to Marc getting Khonshu’s cape comes to mind), it felt like these treatments were updated for a more modern audience, and somewhat deeper than in the original I read in the “Essentials” book.
For instance, we get some time with Marc in the military, which felt very familiar to anyone who was around during the 2nd George Bush’s war in Iraq (Fallujah and Baghdad are mentioned specifically and Spector is a Marine. I’ll be curious if they do this with the TV show version as then, depending on the timeline, Spector, Frank Castle (Punisher), and Killmonger could have all been in Iraq at the same time).
We also get to see Marc as a child which was great (and he’s acknowledged to be Jewish which is also great), and I finally learned how Frenchie (actually named Jean-Paul) came on to the scene as well. They mostly call him Jean-Paul which feels a little better these days hahah.
Finally, most of our Ancient Egyptian deity friends are back. Ammut returns, and so does the jackal god, Anubis. Marc must find and rescue his wife Anput. I was dubious when she first appeared on the page, as I had always just assumed Anput was just the feminine way to say Anpu (Anubis) (feminine words in Ancient Egyptian get a T at the end), but upon googling, she does exist! So I learned a new thing.
So Read this one?
I could go on rambling all day about Ancient Egypt, so I’ll get back to business. Yes. Definitely give this one a read. It was a fitting ending to the story we’ve seen so far, and revealed quite a bit about this hero who’ve I’ve been growing to know and love over the last couple reviews.
And that’s pretty much it.
Has anyone read this comic? Thoughts? What are you most excited for in the new show? What villain are you most curious to see? What could it mean if Spector, Castle and Killmonger were all in Iraq at the same time? Leave your answers in the comments below!
alligators and aneurysms! 