Moon Knight

Marc Spector was a Marine, a CIA operative, and then a mercenary, and he was working for the warlord Raoul Bushman in Sudan when he broke ranks over the massacre of archaeologists at a dig. Bushman left him to die at the feet of a statue of Khonshu, the Egyptian god of the moon and vengeance. Marc died. Khonshu offered him a job. He came back wrapped in the burial shroud, and he has been paying that debt ever since.

Moon Knight debuted as a one-off villain hired to hunt Werewolf by Night, and the character stuck because he is Marvel's most useful contradiction: a rich mercenary who does street-level vigilante work, an avatar of a god who despises his god, and a man whose greatest tactical asset is his own fractured identity. Marc maintains distinct lives, Steven Grant the millionaire financier and Jake Lockley the cab driver, and later stories added Mr. Knight, the daylight persona in a white suit who takes cases from the police.

Marvel has handled his dissociative identity disorder with varying care over fifty years, and the best runs treat the alters as people rather than symptoms. Warren Ellis and Declan Shalvey's 2014 arc introduced Mr. Knight in six perfect standalone issues. Jeff Lemire and Greg Smallwood's Moon Knight put him in a psychiatric hospital and asked the reader to decide what was real. Jed MacKay's run gave him a mission statement and a therapist. Khonshu, meanwhile, remains the worst boss in the Marvel Universe.

Doug Moench created him as a Werewolf by Night antagonist in 1975 and then wrote him for years, with Bill Sienkiewicz's increasingly expressionist art on the 1980-1984 series turning the book into an art object. That run built the Steven Grant and Jake Lockley identities, Marlene Alraune, Frenchie, and Bushman.

Charlie Huston and David Finch's 2006 Moon Knight opened with Marc broken, addicted to painkillers, and hallucinating Bushman's severed face, and the tone stayed savage through Mike Benson's follow-up. Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev's 2011 run had him hallucinating Captain America, Wolverine, and Spider-Man as internal advisers, which is either brilliant or too clever depending on the reader.

The modern canon rests on three runs. Warren Ellis and Declan Shalvey (2014) introduced Mr. Knight and delivered six self-contained masterclasses. Jeff Lemire and Greg Smallwood (2016) set the whole thing inside a psychiatric institution and won an Eisner nomination for it. Jed MacKay and Alessandro Cappuccio (2021) gave him the Midnight Mission, a legitimate therapist, and a place among the Midnight Sons.