Moon Knight is getting the Black, White, & Blood treatment and has already wowed with its first issue. Out this week is Moon Knight: Black, White, & Blood #2 which features three different stories by three creative teams. From the minds of Benjamin Percy, Patrick Zircher, and David Pepose, and the hands of Zircher, Vanesa R. Del Rey, and Leonardo Romero come another solid installment.
I often talk about anthologies being a great way to get more entertainment out of a comic book, but there’s also the benefit of giving creators room to do a lot more. Writers and artists both can get away with a lot more here than in an ongoing or even a miniseries. That’s obvious in this series, especially with the art, as we’ve seen in the Carnage, Deadpool, and Wolverine editions.
This issue opens with a story by Percy and Del Rey that leans into the mystical and the weird of Moon Knight. The story cross-cuts between Egypt on a desert mission and New York where Moon Knight visits Doctor Strange. The story is very weird and visceral in its approach. Del Rey’s art is great for those aspects, utilizing a fever dream visual style that suits Moon Knight’s internal ruminations.
Fabulous middle story.
Credit: Marvel
Next up, Pepose and Romero with color artist Chris Sotomayor dig into the personalities of Moon Knight. This is a good example of how Moon Knight can play with perspective due to Marc Spector’s multiple identities. Even Khonshu plays a part with each of the personalities detailing a different mission. The art is super clean and utilizes red well. There’s also a great bit of dialogue focused on why Moon Knight wears red, which actually makes a lot of sense. This is a story that’ll make you wish Romero and Pepose got to do a full story arc rather than a short in an anthology.
Wrapping up the book is a covert-ops tale by Zircher. This is an interesting story that draws from Moon Knight’s past as a CIA agent and puts him into a similar sort of mission. Zircher’s gritty hyper-realistic style suits the violence and setting, putting readers in the thick of a mercenary fight in Africa. There’s a bit of a mystery as Zircher draws on showing readers another layer of Moon Knight we don’t often see.
A benefit of this issue is how it’s clear there isn’t just one Moon Knight story and they can all be entertaining and valid. Moon Knight is dark, complex, and as Moon Knight: Black, White, & Blood shows, endlessly entertaining.
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