Written by Jed MacKay
Art by Alessandro Cappuccio
Published by Marvel Comics
A key thing to know about Moon Knight is that he has a mental illness.
Dissociative identity disorder, to be precise, is his diagnosis. It’s a condition understood as a person losing connection between their thoughts, memories, feelings and/or actions, believed to be a coping mechanism in response to trauma, particularly in childhood.
It can manifest as the creation of multiple personalities to process traumatic events.
Marc Spector has seen and committed many traumatic events, as a mercenary, and created multiple identities to enact his mission of vengeance once he became the Moon Knight, the Fist of Khonshu.
It was easier to brush Moon Knight off before everyone saw that the god Khonshu was real as some kind of interdimensional alien. Before it was clear that Khonshu rewired Spector’s brain on top of the DID.
But what does that mean, for a god to rewire a human brain and mind?
Issue #2 operates more as a horror story, with the elderly in a tenement building attacking people in the night.
Moon Knight quickly uncovers the culprit: a demon that uses his sweat to link people’s minds to his. (Gross! Especially in these coronavirus times.)
In a standoff with the demon, surrounded by the possessed residents of the building, Moon Knight challenges him to enter his mind to save the rest. Test how strong he is, right?
And here we get our glimpse inside Marc Spector’s mind. Not the mental illness, which he waves off as common enough for this demon to have seen before. But the part of his mind where Khonshu’s work has transformed him forever as a conduit to something entirely alien.
It’s a chilling prospect, as the demon is covered in a mummy’s wrappings and stuffed into a sarcophagus, alongside the other personalities in Spector’s mind.
In this moment, and another with his assistant Reese, a newly turned vampire, Moon Knight preaches that while we cannot change the terrible things done to us, “we decide what we do with what has been done to us. We make our own decisions. We understand he ways in which we’ve been changed, been broken.”
It’s impressive stuff. But he’s still Moon Knight. He’s still the Fist of Khonshu. So he continues.
“And we use them to destroy our enemies.”
All this action made me nearly forget about the other priest loyal to the imprisoned Khonshu whom we met in the first issue. He’s out there, still watching and lurking.
I’m loving the mood of the title. Keep it going!
