Marvel’s MOON KNIGHT: Mr Knight, Mr Moench And Me (A Tiny Bit)

I came across this photo from the forthcoming MOON KNIGHT streaming show the other day:

I invented the “white suit” Moon Knight visual with artist Michael Lark on an issue of SECRET AVENGERS, which I later redeveloped into the “Mr. Knight” persona with a look evolved by Declan Shalvey and Jordie Bellaire on our 2016 MOON KNIGHT run. Which appears to be out of print, but still available on Kindle (UK) (US).

The photo here is clearly the Declan look.

(Incldentally, on that run Jordie made one of the most intelligent and brave choices I’ve ever seen a colour artist make on a mainstream comic – she took all the colour off Moon Knight himself. That might seem a minor thing to you, but, if you have access to that run, take another look at those pages.) This was a really weird thing to trip over this week. That’s Dec’s design and, it feels, even his shading and folds.

I still have fond memories of those six issues of MOON KNIGHT, not least because I got to do a rare personal thing within the work. It was, on one level, a tribute. Each of those six issues has a thematic link back to an episode of the original run by writer Doug Moench. Doug Moench created Moon Knight with artist Don Perlin for an issue of WEREWOLF BY NIGHT in 1979, and reconceived the character in a more heroic tone in a series of stories in the Marvel magazine-size anthologies of the period, Hulk Magazine and Marvel Preview. The artist for these was Bill Sienkiewicz, and, after forming a working partnership to evolve the character, they got to do Moon Knight as a monthly book. They did, I think, about thirty issues together. Sienkiewicz moved on, and Moench did a few issues with a new young artist before moving on himself a few months later. That new artist, by the way, doesn’t have a huge body of work, but it’s a very influential one. That artist is called Kevin Nowlan, and if you compare his early work to the early work of Jim Lee, you’ll probably see the connection. It was a personal pleasure when Kevin inked Bryan on our THE BATMAN’S GRAVE.

Doug Moench was one of the very few American comics writers I read regularly in my teens. For a guy who wrote adventure comics, his style was gloriously eccentric. He was clearly intelligent and cultured — he read like someone who’d done time in music journalism, someone who loved space rock as much as he loved James Bond. And, more than once in his career, he did things that really made you wonder what would have happened if someone had let Dennis Hopper make a Bond film. He could be prolix, but in a glorious way, and he could land a great short line right on a beat like very few others.

If you’re not aware of his work, you should do a bit of reading. He has a very odd comics career. In line with the more interesting writers of his period, he took the roads less travelled so he could have fun without people getting on his case. Take a look at this, from, I swear to god, his residency on the PLANET OF THE APES comic in the 70s:

(Art there is by the magnificent Tom Sutton)

He was a writer of his time, which meant he had the constraints of the time, not the least of which was “all sound effects, all the time.” But, being the kind of writer he was, he thought about sound effects A Lot. This was a writer who clearly spent hours generating new and correct onomatopoeia for the sound of a window breaking or the sound of a key being turned in a lock. It may seem like a minor and even silly thing, but it denotes a writer who put serious thought into every aspect of the form of the time. The Marvel-style method did not allow for a writer to lead the page structure, for example, and in my first issue of Moon Knight I absolutely emulated the way he’d string a monologue across a large panel or full-page picture to enhance the pacing of the piece.

And, in fact, when he chose not to do that. Here’s the thing: a writer of his wordy style, immersed in the forms and tropes of the time, could still teach me to respect the artist as co-storyteller and as artist. A different writer of that time would have put two hundred words on that page. The page after this, in fact, is completely silent.

I remember his work into the late 80s of being slightly ahead of its time – MOON KNIGHT 26, “Hit It”, was probably the fullest collaboration between Moench and Sienkiewicz and reaches for a language of superhero comics that didn’t quite exist yet — and I suspect most people who entered the medium afterwards aren’t aware of their debt to him in creating new spaces and giving permission for new approaches in commercial comics.

Pretty sure the colour on these is by Christie Scheele, by the way. Again, Scheele was constrained by the demands of the commercial form of the time, as well as by the extremely, almost absurdly limited tools at her disposal. Christie Scheele moved on from comics to become an important American landscape artist. Check out her website.

I’ve never spoken to Doug Moench. But I couldn’t do Moon Knight without finding some way to acknowledge his primacy as creator, or finding some small way to say thank you for the pleasure of reading his work. As I say. every episode of my Moon Knight was directly inspired by one of his.

All of which is to say, it’s nice to see Mr. Knight in the flesh, as it were, but I hope that show makes Mr. Moench’s name nice and big in the credits.

(An earlier version of this piece appeared in my weekly newsletter, Orbital Operations)