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Moon Knight: Second Wind (issue reread + reactions)
Got a Tumblr ask for my thoughts about Moon Knight vol 1 issue #35…and I ended up rereading the thing, and writing a whole mini-essay. Decided it was substantial enough to crosspost!
Original ask:
thoughts on Moon Knight 35?
It’s the X-men crossover where Steven (and the others but mostly Steven) deal with being wheelchair bound and the reason he is in episode 5: Asylum. As someone who was temporarily chair bound in the psych ward both scenes mean a lot to me.
Also Storm flirts with frenchie, Nightcrawler saves Moon Knight’s life and Bora is such a classic tragic villain and Xavier can read Marc’s mind which we know is not true of most telepaths in Mckay run.
And the reread/more-or-less-liveblog…
In the comic the guys are using a chair because of a spinal injury (a Comics Injury which comes and goes as the plot demands), and the implication I got from the show was that the asylum put them on meds so strong they couldn’t walk. So I don’t think they’re that directly connected. But it’s nice to have the visual callback.
Marlene being so present and supportive during the hospitalization and physical therapy is extra-depressing compared to how Marc will treat her hospital-grade injury in later runs =(
I don’t think it’s actually Steven fronting for the first chunk. Marlene usually calls them Steven, but that’s just like how Frenchie always calls them Marc, and the diner crew always calls them Jake – even if someone with a different name is fronting, he almost never corrects them.
(More than that, Marc specifically encourages Marlene to call him Steven! Skipping to a later scene, this is one of the issues where he spells out how much he wants to be Steven for her.)
Backing up: The whole “detaching from his personal trauma by obsessing over how to catch the bad guy” thing is classic Marc.
And when he starts getting snippy, then goes “Sorry, lady, that’s the pain talking,” that sure sounds like Jake, elbowing Marc away from the front to smooth things over.
(No wonder Marc’s relationships really start imploding in the runs where Steven and Jake are MIA.)
The diner crew visits and calls him Jake, and I think it’s Jake fronting for most of that, too. Especially when Crawley asks when they’ll need his help again, and Marlene offers to just put him on a regular retainer salary. Steven would’ve offered that himself!
…Not that Jake doesn’t care (he absolutely does). Just that he doesn’t think of himself as having that kind of money.
It’s totally Steven fronting when they do anything at the ballet studio, though. Marc wouldn’t have the patience for it, and that kind of High Culture setting would make Jake awkward and out-of-place.
Extremely funny: the leaps the narrative goes through to justify “we’re going to have cameos from like 20 other S-class Marvel heavyweights with actual superpowers…”
“…but all of them agree that Moon Knight – a guy with gadgets and a cape who couldn’t walk two days ago! – should face the also-superpowered villain one-on-one.”
She’s such a typical Moon Knight villain (in a good way!) with the twist of mutant powers, most of this works. It’s just. The avalanche of cameos, vs. how little they affect the plot, is a lot.
Looking over the Professor X scenes, and what he says he reads in Marc’s thoughts…fear, doubt, agony…I think that’s totally consistent with what we get in the MacKay run.
Marc’s mind has always been a dangerous place. It’s just that (a) by the current run he’s learned to weaponize it against telepathic villains, which he’s not even trying to do here; and (b) Xavier, for his part, isn’t trying to stick his metaphorical hands in the psychic box of bear traps, just observe it from a safe distance.
And the ending, oof =(
Paired with the earlier Marc-Marlene conversation, it totally sums up one of the recurring themes of the MK comics.
When Marc can’t be honest with himself and his loved ones (“I am definitely a mentally-stable singlet, who would be happy to be just Steven forever, and can totally quit being Moon Knight any time I want”), his relationships are tense and distant.
When he is honest (“so maybe I have a lot of issues, also this Moon Knight thing gives me purpose and I’m going to be doing it forever”), the people in his life are actually okay with it! Even if he’s a weird mess, people can accept that and love him anyway! He just has to own it!
…We get a surprisingly close parallel to that in the modern run, where Marc obsesses over tracking a different bad guy, and ends up lying to Tigra, putting her through a bunch of extra work, and making her feel seriously betrayed. But when he gives her a sincere apology and owns up to some of his issues, that’s when they get a happy makeout scene.
So! Has Marc gone through enough personal growth (and enough “accepting that he needs Jake and Steven around for support”) to actually stay on the emotionally-honest path this time? Guess we’ll find out.
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(I'm still working on that overall MK writeup! It's just...taking a while.)