Moon Knight #2

"Who broke my window?!" "Telling the truth isn't going to be crazy!" "Glass everywhere you look! Who broke my window?!" "Why is my stomach all nervous and crazy?"

I want to begin by apologizing for writing a blog that is sometimes hard to understand. I appreciate that you struggle through it because you can tell that it's the smartest writing on the web even if you have a hard time understanding any of it. It's not my goal to make you feel average when you've come to the end and reflect on the piece in stunned and muted silence. Using phrases like "muted silence" every few sentences is a strategic method to keep people of average intelligence comfortable while reading my commentaries. Commentaries that, truly, can only be compared to reading an advanced text on quantum mechanics. I get it. I understand. My work is intimidating! But you know, as a loyal and constant reader of my blog, like a faithful dog excitedly chomping at my heels, that placing yourself in difficult situations is the first step to growing, the first rusty ladder rung of enlightenment! Smiles, everyone! Smiles! My dear readers, I am Tess, your host! Welcome to Eee! Tess Ate Chai Tea!

Before I begin reading Moon Knight #2, I have a clarification to a statement I made in my last commentary. I stated that I had never read a Moon Knight story. Upon meeting with a friend afterward, he decided to embarrass and humiliate me by pointing out that he had loaned me a comic book with Moon Knight in it just a few months previous. Stuffing french fries covered in every condiment he could wring out of the Shari's server, he said, "What the fuck is wrong with you, you idiot? What kind of mental deficiencies are you suffering from? Is your brain rife with cancers? Or are you just too fucking old to remember anything?"

"Well!" I stammered as I angrily stirred my iced tea with a straw. "I never!" I began avoiding eye contact and grew mutedly silent.

After stuffing another round of fries into his bearded facehole, he said, "Hey. Hey. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be so...exuberant." I refused to acknowledge him. "Hey. Look at me. Come on." I slowly turned, as if I were going to meet his gaze. Instead, I stared at the wall just past his head. "You know I just love Secret Avengers and can get very passionate about it. It hurt me, personally, that you didn't remember it."

"Well...," I managed to mutter through a river of snot and tears that I forgot to mention were suddenly coming out of my face due to allergies, probably. I still wouldn't look him in the eyes.

"Oh, I know what baby likes," he began, realizing I was coming around. And that's when I felt his hand on my inner thigh, squeezing delicately and slowly making its way up to the stiffening bulge in my jeans.

And that's when I realized he'll probably be reading this and things are going to be really awkward next time we talk! So I decided to read Moon Knight #2 and pretend none of that stuff ever happened!

This is how the issue begins. It's clever. So be ready for it.

Eight separate characters. Eight separate panels. One death. Okay, maybe that part isn't clever! The clever is coming up!

The clever part is how page two now has seven panels and one white space where an eighth panel would go. The seven panels have the remaining seven characters in them. Same order. Blank panel where the dead guy would be. This page has another death.

Third page, two blank panels where the dead people's stories were taking place. Another dead guy, another blank panel on the next page. Within the stark white borderless spaces where people's lives are now missing, there is a voice. A new story is taking place. But it's an old story tied to the lives of the people in the other boxes. It's the story of a person that was abandoned by these others, long ago. And now he's making them pay. And by pay, I mean shooting them in the face with bullets.

But that's not where the clever stops, apparently! Because you know Warren Ellis's motto: "Always be too clever for your own good!" That's a pretty good motto. My motto is "When playing 'Rock, Paper, Scissors', always choose rock so you'll be prepared to throw the first punch when a fight breaks out." It's a metaphor for how to live life and not just a method for playing the game! Come on! Do I constantly need to hold your little pee pee for you so you piss straight in the bowl? That's also a metaphor so it pertains to non-penis having people as well.

Two comic books in one week with the word "fart" in them! We've come so far!

So that's eight pages and eight people dead with the killer's voice mentioning that he's going to do this to nine people. It also seems that most of them worked in the same building or on the same office block. But that's probably because they were all members of some black ops group working for the same people. Or coincidence. Or some manipulation by some genius bad guy like Harvest.

This story is a nicely done, compact version of an idea I had for a book of short stories. This was years before The Sopranos finale and was a project I never worked on because I'm lazy. Each story was going to be about a person whose trials and tribulations had led them all to the same moment at the same restaurant. Each story would end unfulfilled and incomplete. They would just stop, maybe in mid-thought. Or maybe at a seemingly normal break but with the reader unsatisfied with the conclusion to the story. The final story would be that of a person on a shooting spree as he kills each of the people in the previous stories. His story would get an ending of his own choosing as he commits suicide. The only person whose story gets a proper ending because he was the one to choose the ending for all of them even though he wasn't in any of the other stories. So how could their stories end resolved?

After eight pages of no Moon Knight, we get three pages of Moon Knight landing on a rooftop behind the sniper. So that's half the comic book down and no real Moon Knight action! And, yet, it's still a good comic book! How can Warren Ellis do that? Scott Lobdell fills every page in his comic books with the main characters and I'd rather be reading about characters I've never met whose names I'll never know! Writing! How is it done well? It's a mystery!

Then there's a big chase scene and no words! It's very cinematic! Except without the music layered into the background to try to make you feel something studios don't think you'll feel without music.

See how slow bullets are in the Marvel Universe?! My theory was correct!

The issue ends with Moon Knight learning the story that the reader already knew. And then the ninth person appears in the elevator, shoots the sniper in the head, and says, "Banks are better than guns!" Except his words ring hollowly since he killed the sniper with a gun and not a stack of money.

Now is the part where you tell me how I got the ending all wrong because I opted for a joke instead of a serious analysis. Go ahead. You're free to do whatever you like! Unless you like diddling babies. Then you might be free and you might be doing that but you shouldn't be either of those things!

Moon Knight #2 Rating: Good stuff! I miss this kind of self-contained comic book story. You just don't get enough writers feeling confident enough to write a story that doesn't hinge on the super powers of the title character. Sometimes the title character can be a supporting character because the story is the important thing. I mean, the characters are important too! But only when they're treated like characters and not just super powers wearing a specific costume. I think I might have had something else I was going to say but I've forgotten. So the end.