I remember reading the first (dedicated) series of Moon Knight back around 1980. At that point he was basically Batman in a white costume, despite the Egyptian trappings. But even in the early comics, there was some question as to the character’s mental stability – even his friends would question whether he was hallucinating his guidance from the Moon-God.
Later writers would expand on that a bit and eventually the character would develop full-blown “Multiple Personalities” and struggle to know who he was at any given time.
The pre-teen Tin Wisdom didn’t much care for the weirdness and quickly stopped reading the series, but in retrospect, it seems like it was a neat commentary on how messed up someone like Batman would have to be to do what he does.
Similar to Bruce Wayne, one of his personalities was a millionaire (billionaire?) and he could afford his own spin on the batcopter w/ his dedicated pilot 'Frenchie".
I decided to catch up on Moon Knight after not paying attention to him for 40 years. So I did some digging and came up with some Youtube videos. Casually Comics looks at his firsttwo appearances, while Comic Tropes looks at his entire career.
This confirms my memory of his early history, which is that at the very start in the 70s he had no relationship to an Egyptian god or explicit mental issues. Instead he had multiple civilian aliases/identities he used for convenience while fighting evil-doers - a rich playboy, a cabbie, and a mercenary (the last being his real identity.) He also had a girlfriend who knew about his aliases and Moon Knight.
The YouTubers above, being younger and familiar with the modern character, are a bit baffled by this multiple-aliases-but-no-mental-issues incarnation of the character.
Back in the day, though, young nerd me knew the source of this version. The first version of Moon Knight was based, not on Batman per se, but the Shadow, in particular the pulp (not radio) version. The Shadow, in his civilian life, generally pretended to be rich playboy Lamont Cranston. But he used multiple other civilian identities and aliases as well when investigating crimes. And he was really aviator Kent Allard, not Lamont Cranston at all. Just like Moon Knight, the Shadow had a girlfriend who knew all about his other identities.
Much later (later even than connecting Moon Knight to an Eygptian god) writers decided to make these multiple aliases not mere disguises he adopted but actual multiple personalities. Thus modern Moon Knight was born.
(The Shadow, of course, was a major influence on the creation of Batman. So one way to look at it is that Moon Knight isn’t Marvel’s Batman: Moon Knight and Batman are both Shadow rip offs instead.)
For anyone who hasn’t seen them (or wants to see them again), the Marvel One-Shots are now on Disney+:
The Consultant
a Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Thor’s Hammer
Item 47
Agent Carter
All Hail the King
Team Thor (Part 1)
Team Thor (Part 2)
Team Darryl
I believe these were all previous exclusive to the Blu-rays (and maybe a couple on YouTube), so enjoy!
Been watching the What If… series and it’s actually pretty fun. Just watched the zombie episode and it has nice call-backs to many zombie movies of yore. I’m a little bit surprised they didn’t lean a little harder into having Danai Gurira wielding edged weapons. I can imagine General Okoye showing up with two leashed zombies.
Huh, interesting. I wondered that too (though I thought Skinner was pretty terrible.) His Hank Thomson books represent the absolute best of the “good guy takes a slightly wrong turn and descends into darkness” genre. I think I might have to go back and re-read the Joe Pitt books; I devoured those back in the day. Looks like he hasn’t written anything at all in nearly 10 years though.
In the comics, Madame Web is depicted as an elderly woman with myasthenia gravis and thus was connected to a life support system that looked like a spider web. Due to her age and medical condition, Madame Web never actively fought any villains. For that reason, sources have stressed it’s possible the project could turn into something else.
Hahaha. I know nothing about this character, but it seems like the same is true of the execs at Sony. ““Web” that sounds like Spiderman!. You’ve got the green light!”
It makes perfect sense: Sony has the rights to a fairly limited set of Marvel characters. They probably really want to make some movies with woman superheroes or at least antiheroes, and it’s slim pickings. (There was supposed to be a Black Cat + Silver Sable movie, but looks like it was cancelled). So if there’s a hero they can’t figure out how to make a movie from, might as well try using the name but reinventing the character.
I assume they have the license to Spider-Woman. Seems like a much better place to go than the character described above. The Black Cat that you mention is also a better place to go. I assume the cancellation wasn’t because they couldn’t make the name work—if they couldn’t make that work, not sure how starting with nothing but the bare name of an unknown character is better.
There’s a bunch of female heroes and villains to choose from in the Spidey-verse. Certainly at least a dozen that would be more popular right out of the gate before you need to resort to Madame Web.
Also my thought, obviously Wonder Woman is the tentpole, but Black Canary, Zatanna, Starfire, et. al. make a pretty strong case for the B team being fairly inclusive.
