‘Moon Knight Epic Collection: Death Watch’ is another example of the clumsy 1990s

Drooling demon Knights and indecipherable plots.

October 25, 2023

There is no end to opinion pieces, market analyses, and vitriolic listicles online about the tragic state of comics in the 1990s. The industry had gone through some major upsets, both positive and negative; the divergence of creative forces into a third major publisher, Image Comics, and a dozen or more similar but failed indie superhero publishers had paved the way for both a stifling glut of superhero noise and a frightful thinning of vetted and quality creators left for the Big Two. Dozens of books were coming out, all attempting to cash in on famous creators’ styles and famous character’s tropes.

Marvel and DC were in trouble. It was the era of exhausting, tired crossovers and murky storytelling, and while DC was protected a little by Warner Bros’ financial corporate umbrella, Marvel was sailing directly into its famous bankruptcy.

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The issues collected in Moon Knight Epic Collection: Death Watch might be presented as evidence of the souring of the larger Marvel Universe, though certainly not the most egregious offenders of the era – this is no desperate Image-ification of Marvel characters, here, no desperate attempts toward merchandising – these issues present a sort of clunky sloppiness of a book running on fumes.

Oppressively dark, confusingly laid out, and half-heartedly written by a notable writer doing plenty of decent work elsewhere, the book moves as if it’s desperate to be finished with itself. There’s a frenetic barrage of poorly executed attempts at concepts better used in better books. Marc Spector is infected with a sort of demon virus by the Demogoblin, resulting in the all-popular drooling Venom tongue and spikey teeth; he gears and powers up, gaining superpowers and a not-quite Batcave (complete with a not-quite Danger Room); he lands himself a blood-thirsty murder villain, not unlike Carnage. Nothing quite resolves, mainly because it’s hard to resolve anything as indefinite and weightless as these stories.

It’s a bad sign when the strongest two issues included in a Moon Knight book are two issues of Web of Spider-Man, though there are some noteworthy moments, such as the Infinity War tie-in issues in which Moon Knight is swept into his own blindingly fast Spider-Verse, more homage and mockery than conceptual.

Of the five available volumes of Moon Knight Epic Collection, Death Watch is the least vital, the most tedious. It’s best left to the completists and historians.