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Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Moon Knight Volume 5 #16












Author: Cullen Bunn


Artists: German Peralta



Overview:


Cullen Bunn continues his run on Moon Knight in issue #16. This time Moon Knight is up against villains with jet packs. That's right, Marc Spector must use his fancy gadgets to take down high flying fanatics. This can easily be a stand alone issue for a Moon Knight tale, but clearly Bunn is trying to creating a bigger picture. Peralta's artwork attempts to create a brutal, violent, gritty vibe for this issue. In the past few issues, Spector has shown how he deals with baddies that are either supernatural or non-supernatural as Mr. Knight, but can he hang with four jet pack enthusiasts?


Synopsis:



Along the streets of New York City, a group of friends are walking and chatting with each other. Suddenly, two of them are swooped away by the jet pack antagonists. Four of them fly towards their “nest” with their captives, then abruptly are ambushed by Moon Knight with his Moon glider (or Moon Drone?).  



The jet pack assailants drop their captives off and focuses their attention on Moon Knight. Moon Knight discharges two mini drones to rescue the captives from their fall. The four assailants begin to engage Moon Knight; Moon Knight's first counter is releasing a swarm of crescent-shape darts towards the assailants, which manages to take out one of them. Moon Knight's second counter measure is unleashing a horde of missiles; however, the assailants manages to take out the missiles with their guns, but this buys Moon Knight time to disappear for a moment.

They use this moment to plan their escape, then one of the assailants points out to the moon in the night. His partner states “That's no moon...it's a space station!”(just kidding, he doesn't really say that, but that was the first thing that popped up in my head).

  















Moon Knight orders two of his drones to go on a kamikaze run on two of the three adversaries; killing both of them. The last enemy takes off and Moon Knight takes pursuit. The Moon glider's engine, all of a sudden and I'm not sure why, explodes. He then ejects and must rely on his last mini drone to chase his last high flying foe.

Moon Knight tracks him down to an abandon oil rig platform. There he finds a group of other captives, including an idol that resembles the jet pack assailants. The captives informs Moon Knight that the jet pack gang have been kidnapping them, so that they can feed the “raptor god”. The assailant pops out and calls Spector a traitor to their god (I'm assuming he's referring to the Moon god “Khonsu”?). He remarks that his crew and him were promised to be transformed into “angels” for their offerings to her. He then tries to shoot down Moon Knight, but accidentally takes out the idol. Moon Knight knocks him out and then releases the prisoners.

Review:

I have this feeling that Cullen Bunn is trying to build a larger story with lots of teases such as this issue. Again, this issue seems like it can be a one and done kind of story. The artwork by Peralta, along with Dan Brown for coloring, created a great visual display of the aerial combat in this issue. Especially when Spector unleashes his moonerangs and hides himself as the moon. There wasn't much interacting, dialogue, or characterization in this issue. At most, reading it felt like watching an action flick. Hopefully, Bunn will lead Moon Knight into a story where he must face off against something that pushes him to the edge instead of displaying how bad-ass of a character Moon Knight is. If you want to read a cool Moon Knight issue, go ahead and pick this up, but don't expect much from it.  



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