Obsessively putting our comics in chronological order since 1985.
| 1994-01-01 00:03:30 |
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Moon Knight #58-60
Issue(s): Moon Knight #58, Moon Knight #59, Moon Knight #60
Cover Date: Jan-Mar 94
Title: "Death in the family" / "Bad blood" / "The final phase"
Credits:
Terry Kavanagh - Writer
Fred Haynes / Stephen Platt - Penciler
Scott Koblish / Fred Haynes & Scott Koblish / Stephen Platt - Inker
Mindy Newell & Karl Bollers - Assistant Editor
Sarra Mossoff - Editor
Review/plot:
These are the last issues of this Moon Knight series. This story concludes the unwanted and incomprehensible Templar/Seth the Immortal/Hellbent storyline. It's incredible to me that this fantasy story - and demon stuff generally - has occupied Moon Knight's book for so long. It's not at all within Moon Knight's normal themes, and it's not doing anything to make Moon Knight more interesting. And there was the whole Midnight Sons line for people that wanted this sort of thing done (slightly) better.
Anyway, i've already given up trying to follow this, so i'll just call out what seem like the highlights as best as i understand them while skimming (and probably getting a lot wrong).
Moon Knight finds himself teleported to Seth the Immortal's Amazonian headquarters.
He fights some Hellbents in a Hellhole (?!?!).
Frenchie is fighting demons too.
And Chloe Tran and her Cadre are in the fight as well.
Seth transforms Frenchie into some kind of beefcake monster. Moon Knight fights the monster, not realizing it's Frenchie.
And he seemingly kills Frenchie.
And that's when all Hellhole broke loose.
I mean, honestly, are we supposed to be keeping track of all these characters?
Moon Knight fights Seth. It turns out Frenchie is still alive (it seems only his Pierre Latrec persona is dead).
Moon Knight holds off Seth long enough for Frenchie to recover and... something about a mirror.
Remember when Frenchie was just Moon Knight's pilot?
After much more chaotic fighting, there's a big volcanic explosion and Seth is buried alive in lava.
Meanwhile, Marlene Alraune takes over Spectorcorp.
She later shows up to tell Moon Knight about it (god, the art).
Moon Knight returns to his Shadowkeep to run a software purge (he's giving up on the Shadowcabinet idea). But he finds that Seth has left a virus on his system.
The virus will reach out to all the world's computer systems, so Moon Knight gets his friends out of the building and then causes it to self-destruct. And so he dies, surrounded by the ones he loves some supporting characters that have become unrecognizable, along with some other weirdos that no one cares about.
And, not leaving well enough alone, Kavanagh leaves open the possibility of the return of the Hellbent under another demon called Nightshadow. Nothing will come of this, thankfully.
Always leave them wanting more thankful that the book is cancelled.
Terry Kavanagh is nigh incomprehensible on a good day, but part of the problem here is the art. Stephen Platt is nominally the regular artist, but for the first two issues of this he's only doing covers. Fred Haynes is doing interiors, but he's clearly been told to mimic Platt's "Todd McFarlane but messier" style. And then Platt himself comes on for the final issue and we get these splash pages which Kavanagh has to overload with dialogue to keep the story going.
Kavanagh is trying to do something with a lot of ancient backstory and a ton of characters, and it's not well served by huge honking splash panels. I'm not saying it would have been readable anyway, but the lack of nuance in the art is a big part of the problem.
Quality Rating: D
Historical Significance Rating: 1
Chronological Placement Considerations: Moon Knight is (seemingly) dead at the end of this series. His cameo in Starblast #1 complicates that. This issue begins with Moon Knight being teleported directly from Infinity Crusade (last issue was a tie-in) to Seth the Immortal's base. Starblast takes place after Infinity Crusade, but Moon Knight can't appear there if he's dead. So the MCP has created a gap in Moon Knight #60, allowing him to appear there before the final scenes where he died. There is plenty of time for that. Issue #59 ends with Seth's death and the beginning of #60 shows Moon Knight and his cast of misfits returning to Earth, but there is downtime after that where Moon Knight can take time out to go beat up Trump under the moon. I'm therefore treating the majority of this story as a flashback and placing it based on the final scene.
References:
- This arc starts with Moon Knight thinking to himself, "It's all too true... The Infinity Crusade is over - one way or another - and I've lost my chance for redemption". Infinity Crusade ended in Infinity Crusade #6.
- Moon Knight wasn't sure if Marlene was alive after Moon Knight #55.
Crossover: N/A
Continuity Insert? N
My Reprint: N/A
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Comments
This issue wasn't coordinated very well with Infinity Crusade 6- Marc's thought balloons suggest that Marc and several other heroes were teleported away at the end of Infinity Crusade but we didn't see any of that in Infinity Crusade 6.
The point of Marc killing Frenchie was that Marc has the same life force draining power as Seth. Thankfully, this is never mentioned again.
The point of the scene with the mirror is that the arcane knowledge that Seth sought was contained within Frenchie's memories and that by draining Frenchie's life force, Seth could absorb the knowledge he sought. Also thankfully, the idea that Frenchie has arcane knowledge within his brain is never mentioned again.
The point of the scenes with Nightshadow was to imply that Nightshadow was Marc's brother Randall- Randall was calling himself Shadowknight the last time we saw him and Hook calls Nightshadow "Rand". This is never confirmed in-story, although one of the Handbooks claims it is so, and when we next see Randall working for an agent of the Hand, this story isn't mentioned.
I remember Wizard promoting these issues as the next HOT thing at the time and....yeah.
Didn't Terry Kavanagh bring back the Hellbent in X-Man?
Yeah, and weirdly Dusk seems to be among them- no mention of what happened with Nightshadow.
Ah, starting to see the beginning of computer coloring at Marvel in these 1994 issues. Looks a bit overdone here. It takes 'til like 1999 for the computer coloring to actually look good.
