It's time for another shot at Moon Knight, this time with novelist Charlie Huston - his website is called pulpnoir.com, which gives you the general idea - and artist David Finch. 

In an impassioned editorial, Huston tells us how much he loved the Moench/Sienkiewicz run.  That seems to be most people's favourite run on Moon Knight, which perhaps indicates the problem.  Frankly, Moon Knight isn't a terribly distinctive character.  To a casual reader, he's a poor man's Batman.  His main distinguishing features are Egyptian mythology, and the fact that he's stark raving mad.  But when you get down to the actual kicking and punching, and the villain-battling... well, there's something dreadfully generic about him.  The strength of the Moench/Sienkiewicz issues is in their approach to comics, rather than anything inherently wonderful about the character himself.

It's a very odd opening issue.  Strictly speaking, nothing happens at all.  Most of the book is Marc Spector dreaming about his life as a superhero.  The rest of the book is Marc having cryptic flashbacks to events which will presumably be explained in full in the next issue, and then crawling across a room.

Instead of giving us a plot, Huston is setting out his stall for how he sees the character.  This can sometimes work if the concepts are strong enough.  But we get off to a faltering start, as Moon Knight's narration tries to explain why he's different from the other superheroes.  He starts off well with the Avengers and the Fantastic Four, but struggles to come up with anything much to mark him out from the street-level characters like Daredevil.

What follows is a mammoth 14 pages of dream scene as Moon Knight fights some generic villains and defeats them.  This seems to have no wider plot significance - Huston is just showing us what Moon Knight does and inviting us to agree with him that it's cool.  Trouble is, it's really very generic.  Drawn with plenty of energy by David Finch, to be sure, but he's not really doing anything that marks him out from a bunch of other superheroes who beat up all-purpose thugs in the inner city. 

To be fair, Huston also uses the narration to set up some interesting ideas about Moon Knight's attitude to what he does, and establishing the specific and subtle ways in which he's off his rocker.  There's an unusual degree of stress on the idea that he's religiously devoted to Khonshu, which is a potentially intriguing concept if it's followed through.

After that, Huston moves on to reveal his big plot idea: Marc Spector's been defeated in battle, he's confined to a wheelchair, and he's gone even more mad than before.  He's driven away his supporting cast and he while away the days drinking heavily and praying for Khonshu to restore him.  In principle, a perfectly decent plot idea, and credit is due for putting it over largely in dialogue-free art.  Nonetheless, it still boils down to six pages of a man crossing a room.

I'm torn here, really.  In many ways it's a bad first issue.  Quite literally, nothing happens, and devoting more than half the book to a dream scene of Moon Knight fighting off-the-shelf villains seems wildly excessive.  On the other hand, Huston does have some interesting ideas for the character, and (especially for a prose writer) a refreshing willingness to let the art carry the weight of the storytelling.  Slightly against my better judgement, I'm intrigued by his take on the character.  The ideas are interesting enough to bring me back for a second issue.  And after all, that's what Huston was trying to sell me in the first place.

That said, the plot really needs to hit its stride quickly in the second issue.  It's pushing its luck already; another issue like this simply won't do.  And I'm going to be terribly disappointed if we actually end up with a comic like Moon Knight's dream scene, which really doesn't make him very different at all.  But there's just enough in the character and the story idea to hold my attention for now.

Rating: B

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