Whenever a rising star at Marvel starts working on its biggest properties, and they’re also working on more than 4 titles at once, I get nervous. It’s very rare that a writer can take on so many projects, especially when some of them are event comics or titles that otherwise require greater than average management of editorial demands, and deliver at a consistently high level of quality.
Unfortunately for Jed Mackay, that generational curse seems to have landed on him, and Vengeance of the Moon Knight #7 suffers as a result.
On the face of it, this issue is a straightforward, dancing between the margins tie-in that is common to so many events. Tigra, Hunter’s Moon and Wrecker break into Asgard with the plan to free the imprisoned moon god, Khonshu, and in so doing allow for the resurrection of their deceased friend, Marc Spector. The trouble with this is that readers already know how that goes – it was covered in Blood Hunt #4… and Moon Knight: Fist of Khonshu #0… and to a lesser degree even Vengeance of the Moon Knight #6. As such, it becomes readily apparent that readers will have paid $4.99 for a book that, for the most part, has already happened in other titles.
To Mackay’s credit, he does try to reframe these well-trodden events less as the resurrection of Marc Spector and more as the resolution of Tigra’s grief, and in that space it finds some limited success.
The reunion between Tigra and Moon Knight is touching (as others have noted too), if only in that it is long awaited and given ample time to breath, but even then it’s very superficial. Beyond the immediate emotional context, there’s nothing about this moment, or even this arc, that’s drawing out any thematic depth. It’s not a particularly thorough exploration of grief, or how those suffering from loss reel in the wake of it. Nor is it doing anything especially interesting with the ideas of faith, death and redemption, despite the lip service paid to Hunters Moon’s existential quandries at the start of the issue.
Instead, Vengeance of the Moon Knight #7 makes an all too common mistake, in that it mistakes motifs for themes, and offers aesthetics when it could be offering depth.
Now, this isn’t so much a criticism of this specific issue – the art of the tie-in is a tricky one, and frankly it’s just impressive that Mackay has managed to make everything as coherent and functional as it is. Instead, it’s a consequence of the level of decompression that’s inherent with any writer juggling too many series.
There’s no getting around the sheer volume of work currently on Mackay’s desk, and it shows. Avengers, Blood Hunt, Doctor Strange, Vengeance of the Moon Knight and X-Men are all currently ongoing works, and that’s not even getting into any one-shots or anthology stories he’s also putting his name to. It would be almost impossible for something not to slip. We’ve seen it before with Lemire, and Bendis, and countless others: at some point, to accomodate the pressing deadlines and mountain of scripts, the density of those documents starts to feel a little sparse.
As a result, decompression has begun to creep in to this series (and Blood Hunt as a whole), and nowhere is that clearer than Vengeance of the Moon Knight #7 where, outside of some additional emotional context, nothing new is shown to readers.
Where this issue steps right, however, is in leaning on that decompression to allow art team Alessandro Cappuccio and Rachelle Rosenberg to let loose. They have been, for my money, the true heroes of this era of Moon Knight, infusing every page with this otherworldly sense of awe, drama and mystique.
Nowhere is that more clear than the gorgeous depiction of the procession of undead Fists of Khonshu presented here. Khonshu reads as bigger than a being, as an idea, as a belief made manifest by the reverance and fear that those who rely on him embolden him with. The eldritch blues of Khonshu’s realm contrast eerily with the oppulent golds of Asgard, and Cappuccio & Rosenberg never let you forget just how powerful this god is, and by implication just how dangerous the Midnight Mission’s plan has become.
Hopefully, as this interstitial series comes to a close and Mackay resumes writing the adventures of Marc Spector, things can wrap up with an emotional weight more consistent with the first arc of this title, rather than the prolonged exhale that the last couple of issues have become.
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