Moon Knight Omnibus, Vol. 2

Moon Knight Omnibus

by Doug Moench, Alan Zelenetz, Dennis O'Neil

The end of the beginning! Doug Moench and Bill Sienkiewicz’s landmark, critically acclaimed run comes to a close. But first Moon Knight must survive threats old and new — including the madness of Morpheus, the deadly return of Stained Glass Scarlet, the devious Black Spectre and a rematch against the Werewolf by Night! Moon Knight teams with Iron Man, Brother Voodoo, Doctor Strange, Spider-Man and more — but when tragedy strikes, the dead walk and secrets come to light, will Moon Knight meet his final rest? Or will he rise again, reinvigorated as the Fist of Khonshu?

COLLECTING: Moon Knight (1980) 21-38, Iron Man (1968) 161, Power Man and Iron Fist (1978) 87, Marvel Team-Up (1972) 144, Moon Knight: Fist of Khonshu (1985) 1-6, Marvel Fanfare (1982) 30; material from Solo Avengers (1987) 3, Marvel Fanfare (1982) 38-39, Marvel Super-Heroes (1990) 1

Genres: Comics, Marvel, Graphic Novels, Adventure, Superheroes

960 pages, Hardcover

First published October 7, 1986

About the author

Doug Moench, is an American comic book writer notable for his Batman work and as the creator of Black Mask, Moon Knight and Deathlok. Moench has worked for DC Comics, Marvel Comics, Dark Horse Comics and many other smaller companies; he has written hundreds of issues of many different comics, and created dozens of characters, such as Moon Knight. In 1973, Moench became the de facto lead writer for the Marvel black-and-white magazine imprint Curtis Magazines. He contributed to the entire runs of Planet of the Apes, Rampaging Hulk (continuing on the title when it changed its name to The Hulk!) and Doc Savage, while also serving as a regular scribe for virtually every other Curtis title during the course of the imprint's existence. Moench is perhaps best known for his work on Batman, whose title he wrote from 1983–1986 and then again from 1992–1998. (He also wrote the companion title Detective Comics from 1983–1986.)

Moench is a frequent and longtime collaborator with comics artist Paul Gulacy. The pair are probably best known for their work on Shang-Chi: Master of Kung Fu, which they worked on together from 1974–1977. They also co-created Six from Sirius, Slash Maraud, and S.C.I. Spy, and have worked together on comics projects featuring Batman, Conan the Barbarian and James Bond.

Moench has frequently been paired with the artist and inker team of Kelley Jones and John Beatty on several Elseworlds Graphic Novels and a long run of the monthly Batman comic.

Reviews

[Chad · Rating 3 out of 5]

Iron Man #161 by Denny O'Neil & Luke McDonnell
Stephen Grant gets trapped underwater with Tony Stark in a leaking submarine. Grant plays chicken and flees in the last escape craft so Moon Knight can find the inventor of the experimental sub and find out how to reseal it.

Power Man and Iron Fist #87 by Denny O'Neil & Denys Cowan
Moon Knight gets himself trapped in a dry water tower. Marlene hires Luke Cage and Danny Rand to find him. This was pretty good.

Moon knight 21-30 by Doug Moench and Bill Sienkiewicz
A bunch of lesser stories outside of Black Spectre in issue #25 as Bill leaves after a Werewolf by Night 2 parter and Denny leaves a few issues later.

Moon knight 31-33 by Doug Moench and Kevin Nowlan
Some lesser stories with local gang and a story about a large man mistaken for a druid myth.

Moon knight 34-38 by Tony Isabella, Alan Zelentz, Kevin Nowlan and Bo Hampton
A new direction that puts moon Knight more into the Marvel universe. Team ups with the X-Men, Fantastic Four, and Doctor Strange. The last story reveals that Moon Knight grew up Jewish before joining the army and becoming a mercenary.

Marvel Team-Up #144: Spider-Man and Moon Knight by Cary Burkett and Greg LaRocque The two street Avengers team up to stop a gang war in Chinatown.

Moon knight: Fist of Khonshu 1-6 by Alan Zelentz and Chris Warner
Starts off really strong, going back to when Spectre believed in Khonshu, He gets stronger at night and some new weapons. H e also jettisons Marlene. More global one issue missions but the creative team disappears over the last 2 issues and the book was cancelled.

Marvel Fanfare #30 by Ann Nocenti and Brent Anderson
A strange story where Moon Knight and Marlene are back together again. They head upstate where they see some mystical mumbo-jumbo.

Solo Avengers #3 by Roger Stern and Bob Hall
Moon Knight tries to break in to the Night Shift's lair and fights the Shroud.

Marvel Fanfare #38 by Jo Duffy and Judith Hunt
Young people are becoming old when they are confronted by the latest boy band.

Marvel Fanfare #39 by Michael Carlin and Bill Reinhold
A Sheik tries to hickjack the U.N. in a short backup story.

Marvel Super-Heroes Spring Special by Robert Ingersoll and Mike Gustovich
All of the team is gone except for Frenchie. Moon Knight is inactive in Texas until a new threat gets him back in the suit. Gena and her boys finally moved to Houston and are doing far better.

Some decent stories all in all. I give this massive collection a 3.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Another solid Moon Knight omnibus. Majority of these issues were one and done stories. Some average and some pretty great. Good thing is that none were bad. Right from the beginning we get the return of Morpheus. He actually reappears a couple times. Dug those stories. There were a few other books, like Iron Man and Power Man and Iron fist that featured Moon Knight. Both of those were solid. One had Moon Knight trapped in a water tower getting cooked during a summer heat wave. There was also a Spidey team up issue that was pretty cool. Forgot for a sec that I as reading a comic from the 80s until Spidey showed up in the black suit. Stained Glass Scarlet also shows back up and she is on a mission. Always though she was a cool, tragic character. There was a story about a 17 year old kid getting mixed up with a gang. That story was a stand out that was sad as hell. Then to my surprise, I really dug the 6 issue mini series towards the end, Fist of Kosnshu. Here, Spector gets upgraded with some new Konshu weapons and powers. His strength increases in the moon’s light in this one. Also added some gold to his costume that I thought looked cool. Him and Marlene hit a rocky spot and Gena moves out of NY to Texas. A lot going on in here. But these stories kept coming and like I said, I really enjoyed most of them. Looking forward to reading the Benson Moon Knight omnibus I have and the release of the Marc Spector Moon Knight omnibus that just got solicited.

[James DeSantis · Rating 4 out of 5]

The second volume continues right from the first, and for most of it, it's really fun if a little uneven by the end.

The stories mostly stay a 1 shot or 2 part storyline. Which keeps Moon Knight more fresh, and a lot of fun. Like I stated in my other review on Issues 4-20 we get a bit more mystic now with moon knight. The highlights are more focused on the deep dark city of new york and how Moon Knight solves issues. More than not, he usually just beats the shit out of people he doesn't think are doing good. But sometimes that isn't always the correct solution and this series displays it pretty openly which is great.

I will say the fist of Khonshu is pretty meh. It really is much weaker than all the previous work before it. The writer on it is okay, and he did come on the end of the original run, and his origin for Marc Spector was solid but man, the stories in fist of khonshu are pretty cheesy. It's not dull, and has fun moments, but far weaker without any big attachment to it.

I will say fist does take this collection down a bit. That 6 part mini is just not very good. Saying that before it is a 4. So I'd still give it a 3.5. Not as solid as the last Omnibus but still worth it if want gritty street level superhero fun.

[OmniBen · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Zero spoiler review)
Take pretty much every criticism I had of volume one (and they were legion). Take them all and turn it all around, every criticism becomes a construction. Every strength into a weakness. Do that, and what you get is Moon Knight volume two. I don't think I've seen a comeback like this since (insert relevant sporting analogy here). This was so very good for the most part, and so close to perfection on occasion, that it made me wonder how so much of it could come from the same creators as volume one. I couldn't even finish that damn thing. So laden was it in silver age silliness. But this... this was, in places, some of the greatest superhero cum noir introspection I've read since the brilliant The Question omnibus by O'Neill. It's of no great surprise that O'Neill edits pretty much this entire offering. Skilled craftsmen and consummate professionals like that just do not exist in comics anymore. I mean, a creative line up of Moench, Sienkiewicz, O'Neill and Shooter. There is more talent, more promise, more passion in those four names than the entire roster at current Marvel and DC.
I could criticize the creator line-up changes that became an increasingly frequent occurrence as the run went on. Though for the most part, the creators impossibly seemed to improve, at least until the very end, when the book unfortunately took a downturn with the inevitable filling of the Fanfare and other unnecessary and usually pretty average titles. I won't be reading the final 100 pages of this, but so much of the 900+ pages here is mana from heaven. There was a little silver age silliness slipped in there early on, with some fill in issues by one of creators, but these stumbles are few and far between. easily three quarters of this book is gold Jerry, gold!
I really should list the artists, inkers, colourists and letterers who made this a very special run indeed, but they know who they are. And I thoroughly recommend you do to. If you're disillusioned by the state of modern DC and Marvel, Moon Knight omnibus volume two is the cure for all your ills. A must read. Well, most of it anyway. 4/5


OmniBen.

[Matthew Kennett-ny · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book definitely starts off as a big step up from the first volume, but by the end of the book it's not that good.

The rest of the original series collected (#21 - #38) and a couple appearances scattered in-between this volume are noticeably better then the first. Had a blast reading them.

Through out the time these issues were being released they were only in comic shop for die hard fans. But for some reason they felt like they weren't getting the reach they wanted and cancelled that run at issue #38 to start a new one, "Moon Knight: Fist Of Konshu". These issues only lasted 6 issues and for good reason. The way they changed up Moon Knight wasn't very good and the stories weren't very memorable.

After those issues we get some more appearances / backup stories which are a lot more enjoyable and felt like we got the original Moon Knight back.

Overall it was very enjoyable if not a little bit shaky by the end. 3.5 / 5

[Rick Ray · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though the latter portion of the original Moon Knight run doesn't quite hold up as well as the initial stint by Doug Moench and Bill Sienkiewicz, there's still plenty to enjoy in this second omnibus. Sienkiewicz, for his part, is much looser in his artistic sensibilities which lends for some of the more exciting moments captured here, and Moench leans much more heavily into the film noir storytelling that fits the character much more. As Moench did during his concurrently running Master of Kung Fu series, there's a significant amount of attention paid towards building a mythos and suitable rogues gallery for Moon Knight. Villains like Morpheus and Black Spectre capture a sense of needed rivalry to keep Moon Knight suitably challenged, while the returning Stained Glass Scarlet is brilliantly utilized in the deeply tragic issue #24. Sienkiewicz, for his part, begins to show some hints of abstraction and expressionism which would emerge full fold during his tenure on Claremont's New Mutants run.

It's the other creatives here who unfortunately can't hang with Moech and Sienkiewicz that somewhat drag this collection down a notch. Alan Zelenetz (who incidently also wrote the terminal stretch of Master of Kung Fu), serves as the primary writer for the last handful of issues of the first volume of Moon Knight. The stories are true to form with what Moench had set up, with a gritty noir tone pervasive throughout, but lacking in some of the measured subtlety that Moench began to cultivate. Sienkiewicz's departure is probably the most notable impact on the book, and though the artists who follow are great in their own measure, they largely return to the Neal Adams-esque stylings of the earlier Sienkiewicz rather than the more experimental layouts of the latter issues. Kevin Nowlan and Denys Cowan are amongst two of the more prominent fill-in artists following Sienkiewicz, but given that they themselves were relatively early into their careers, it's understandable that they couldn't quite match up.

This volume also continues with the second volume of Moon Knight - the largely forgettable six issue miniseries subtitled as "Fist of Khonshu". Though it isn't spelled out entirely, some readers can point to this series as delving a bit into Moon Knight's fracturing mental state whereby the character begins to take orders from an otherworldly source. Mind you, it actually doesn't play out to anything significant here and the adventures of Moon Knight in this six issue series are rather uninteresting, but it can be seen as a fundamental piece from which later writers like Charlie Huston, Warren Ellis, Jeff Lemire, etc. can launch their own interpretations on the character. Other issues collected here include Moon Knight's team up with Iron Man, Luke Cage, and Iron Fist, though much like the "Fist of Khonshu" issues, these are rather uninteresting. The Marvel Fanfare issues are a fair bit more interesting since the stories have a sense of whimsy and don't conform to standard Marvel storytelling, but they also are a fair bit too short to really parse much relevance out of.

Overall, I'd rank this portion of Moon Knight's publication history a bit lower than the original stretch, but it still contains some good stuff - largely due to the continued development of one of the more experimental artists to ever work at Marvel Comics.

[Jimbo · Rating 4 out of 5]

The stories continued to be mostly unique to Moon Knight, especially the second volume titles the Fist of Khonsu, Moon Knight, but lacked the continuation of the characters and story line of the supporting cast and of Moon Knight. All of a sudden, without explanation, Marlene was calling him Marc, instead of Steve, the fortune that Steven Grant had amassed was basically now Marc's. Gina, Crawley, and Frenchie were gone. Marlene leaves him and six issues later in Marvel Fanfare things are back to the original volume one. Then they flip flop and finally on the last story in Houston Texas, Gina has moved her and her kids there and she runs a fancy restaurant with her brother (talked about way back in Omnibus Vol. 1.

Still, I appreciate that Moon Knight, a hero, has psychological problems usually reserved for villains.

Very good story telling and although, I am not a fan of the lack of acknowledgement of the story before I get that each writer and artist needs to find the character for themselves and things may change.

Marvel created a universe, tied in random ways and fairly consistent, so I always appreciated those pathways and consistencies. The Marvel Universe, sometimes when it doesn't quite happen, it is a bit jarring.

[Rob Marney · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first half of this omni with Moench and Sienkewicz is fantastic. Noir adventures with the stylized, surreal art and the hazy, ambiguous narration combine to create something pleasantly distinct from Batman in the same subgenre. This book is worth reading just for these few dynamite issues.

Unfortunately, as soon as Sienkewicz leaves, the whole thing runs straight into the ground. The supernatural is obvious and garish, not a subtle reflection of the hero's psyche. The custome has gold highlights and no moon symbol, which defeats the entire purpose of the design (to stand out as a black-and-white figure on a color page). All the side characters and secret identities leave, which was the main thing distinguishing the series from Batman. Unsurprisingly, the series is cancelled quickly.

The final hilarious assortment of side stories reveals just how little attention was paid to continuity in the late 80s. Half the creators only read the original run, the other half read the new run, so last-minute lettering changes in every single issue explain why girlfriend Marlene is in Steven's bed one issue and back with her ex-husband the next. It's good to hear that not everyone at the office is sold on "Fist of Khonshu" because I sure ain't.

[Andrew Seaton · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was one of the most surprisingly great books I’ve read in awhile. Every episode was tightly written, had some great characters and the story arcs were paced really well. One thing I loved about this book were the editor’s notes from Denny O’Neil interspersed between each issue.

Quick warning, the last couple issues have some pretty outdated humor, so but they’re contained in filler pages and a one-off.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finishing out the amazing Moench run of action crime stories, then the hodgepodge of subsequent writers working to explore more of the mystical connections, this book finishes weaker than it started but entertained throughout.

[Dylan Clink · Rating 3 out of 5]

6/10

[Louie the Mustache Matos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moon Knight Omnibus Vol. 2 is a compendium collecting the Moon Knight superhero stories from the continuing comic by Marvel and various other guest appearances throughout the comic book line. These include: Moon Knight (1980) 21-38, Iron Man (1968) 161, Power Man and Iron Fist (1978) 87, Marvel Team-Up (1972) 144, Moon Knight: Fist of Khonshu (1985) 1-6, Marvel Fanfare (1982) 30; material from Solo Avengers (1987) 3, Marvel Fanfare (1982) 38-39, Marvel Super-Heroes (1990). Various creative teams worked on the stories, but Doug Moench and Bill Sienkiewicz headlined the initial run with Dennis O'Neill editing and curating the character with a specific psychology unique to the superhero genre. Whereas most superheroes have dichotomous relationships that are easily identified as masked crusader and secret identity, Moon Knight has 4 unique personalities with disparate names and characteristics: Marc Spector, Stephen Grant, Jake Lockley, and Moon Knight. He also has a group of supporting characters that assist him in his nightly escapades that sometimes run toward the mystical / paranormal. Those stories are the most enjoyable for me. Great compilation with sufficient background information for anyone desirous of knowing more about Moon Knight. This will serve as Graphic Novel / Trade Paperback #2 of 10 in my Reading Goals of 2023.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Too many things to critique about this book, not sure where to start. First thing I do is compare this volume to the first. The art takes a slight dip in quality because it isn't mostly Sienkiewicz and Moench. We get amazing art from Kevin Nowlan. But by the time he leaves, many of the subsequent artist do not measure up (exceptions to Chris Warner and a single issue by Brent Anderson.

As for the stories, there are some obvious filler issues. But Alan Zelenetz does something that Moench never wanted to do. He actually explains the whole Konshu and mystical elements that supposedly gave the protagonist his powers. I think its kind of interesting, but it seems to get dropped the moment the Fist of Konshu series ends. Hopefully they pick that up again.

[Jake · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Split

This was probably one of the more interesting bits in Moon Knight history. Here, we get a chance to see his Jewish background and how his best enemies are reflections of him. Black Spectre, Morpheus, and Scarlett are all terrifying in their own right and helped build Moon Knight down-the-line. Along with some coming-and-goings of cast members. Nothing out of a hat either, mostly. As well as the supernatural elements that tie Moon Knight together for the best depictions.