There’s a careful balance in trying to uphold the legacy of a decades-old character while also inventing and expanding upon that character. There’s a compulsory instinct to bring back any and all classic villains of that character in a bid to legitimize the present story with the past.
One gets the image of creative teams playing with these characters like action figures, recreating conflicts that came before, with a half-realized attempt to make them more modern. There’s a similar urge to take classic aspects of the character and grit them up—to apply modern sensibilities to outmoded concepts, to darken the colorful or cartoonish.
In the current Moon Knight, the creative team does an incredible job of upending that balance, subverting those urges. For one, Moon Knight’s major development lived in the grit of the ’80s, under creator Doug Moench and revolutionary artist Bill Sienkiewicz; there were no bubbly, shiny edges to grind away.
Instead, MacKay and company jettison aspects of the character. Aside from the prison-set Devil’s Reign tie-in, Moon Knight never appears out of costume—Steven Grant and Jake Lockley are gone from the equation (ostensibly ‘cured’ back in the 2016 book, though perenially absent before that), and Marc Spector has effectively moved completely into the Mister Knight personality, forsaking his civilian identity. Moon Knight, then, has been streamlined and taken center stage.
Rather than losing his past, this feels like dropping the act.
That means that the domestic concerns of Spector’s past — his Steven Grant mansion, his on-again, off-again romance with Marlene, and his BFF/murder-buddy friend Frenchie are replaced with more ghoulish accouterments. With no Marc, Moon Knight’s entire waking moment is tied to ghoulish darkness.
Marvel Comics
When it comes to playing with old nemeses, the team continues to subvert expectations by looking at somewhat forgotten villains who never appeared in a Moon Knight story before now and submerging them into the high-contrast darkness the current team has established.
Marvel Comics
The book isn’t rehashing old conflicts, it’s creating new ones with characters lost in all that dark (and all that forgotten pulp). We find ourselves with characters from 1979 issues of Spider-Woman, from 1991’s Sleepwalker; Moon Knight finds, adopts, and takes up residence in a haunted house from 1964.
When a classic Moon Knight character is reintroduced, she is not, exactly, the character she was then, but something new, magical, and horrible—she is made into something that fits in with the weird, horrible night that Moon Knight occupies. Unconcerned with reuniting old action figures, MacKay and Alessandro Cappuccio avoid using Moon Knight in her story at all, centering, instead, on Doctor Badir.
Marvel Comics
All of this means that Too Tough to Die, the second collection of this volume of Moon Knight, rather successfully continues the tradition of reestablishing and reinventing a character who becomes something wholly unique in the hands of nearly every creative team to shepherd him. Unlike previous missteps in that tradition, however, this Moon Knight feels as if it’s a natural progression, the zenith of Khonshu’s path; this is almost the Moon Knight Khonshu desires–one who is more faith in his vestments than his humanity.
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