Marvel’s Moon Knight evolved from ‘crazy’ into Oscar Isaac’s version

“Will I be in a straight jacket?” The attending nurse laughed when I asked her that question, but I wasn’t joking.

My extreme depression and anxiety were not diagnosed until then. Following a suicide attempt my doctor sent my to a behavioral clinic. I had never been exposed to this type of facility before. As I was being helped to remove my shoes’ laces and my sweatshirt strings, I became overwhelmed by four-color images. Panels of Kraven the Hunter or the Joker yelling at Dr. Ashley Kafka, Ravencroft Institute, filled my head.

Superhero comics don’t have the best track record with mental health, and in the character’s earliest incarnations, Moon Knight was among the worst offenders. Initially introducing the character as a Batman riff in 1975’s You Werewolf at Night #32, writer Doug Moench, who co-created the character with artist Don Perlin, added “schizophrenia” as a differentiating gimmick.

Despite this checkered past, Moon Knight has become one of Marvel’s most relatable superheroes — and he’s about to get an introduction to a much wider audience, thanks to a certain Disney Plus series starring Oscar Isaac. “Relatable” may seem like an odd way to talk about a hyper-violent guy who sometimes chats with a deity and flies around the city in aircraft piloted by his aide-de-camp Frenchie. But thanks to a multiple personality, and an angle added to the character shortly after his creation, Moon Knight stories have featured some of superhero fiction’s most nuanced portrayals of mental health.

Image: Jeff Lemire, Greg Smallwood/Marvel Comics

Moon Knight was created when Steven Grant, a moral mercenary, committed an act of heroism that cost him his life. The Egyptian moon god Khonshu resurrected Grant. Moon Knight, the Fist of Khonshu was responsible for protecting those who travel under the moon. But psychic trauma caused additional identities. These identities initially included Steven Grant, a suave billionaire, and Jake Lockley, a hard-luck taxi driver. But, they would expand to include Mr. Knight, a methodical detective, and in an unforgettable run by Alex Maleev and Brian Michael Bendis, Captain America and Wolverine.

Moench and others changed the characters over the course of the 1990s. Occasionally, Frenchie or others would refer to Moon Knight’s “schizophrenia,” and some stories treated the identities as distinct from one another. Spector treated his identity as a character, a tool in his mission, more than any other time. Typical scenes include Spector doing a change of clothes and wearing a newsboy cap. He chooses Jake Lockley over Steven Grant to complete a task.

As it has so many times in the 2000s: The Ultimate Universe made everything possible.

When Moon Knight arrived in 2005’s Ultimate Spider-ManHe was #79 and checked all of the Ultimate universe boxes. Ultimate Moon Knight wore a slightly different white costume designed by Mark Bagley, had the bad attitude common to the universe’s heroes, and a backstory that seemed arbitrarily altered from his Earth-616 counterpart.

Image: Brian Michael Bendis/Marvel Comics

But Ultimate Spider-ManBrian Michael Bendis wrote that the Moon Knight was distinguished by his multiple personalities. This hero didn’t simply adopt new personas to suit a mission. Full-blown dissociative personality disorder (D.I.D.), he was. In Bendis’s hands, Moon Knight would shift from one personality to another without warning, with his identities even going to battle against one another.

This new focus had almost immediate repercussions in the mainstream Marvel Universe, especially in Ed Brubaker and Mike Deodato’s 2010 Secret Avengers run. These stories found Steve Rogers deploying Moon Knight as an undercover agent, taking advantage of Spector’s shifting selfhood.

When Warren Ellis and Jamie McKelvie took over the book with issue #16, Moon Knight officially became the team’s “crazy person,” at least according to the first page introductions. When a stray bullet lands in his leg, Moon Knight assures his teammate Beast, “Relax. I’m far too borderline psychotic to feel pain.”

For the next few years, insanity became Moon Knight’s core trait. Bendis and Maleeve presented Moon Knight, a delusional, annoying annoyance, when they launched their series in 2012. To be sure, Bendis gets in some quality jokes at the expense of Spector’s troubled psyche. This comic introduces an intriguing concept. One that has not been seen before in comic book depictions of mental illness. Maybe Moon Knight wasn’t a hero despite his mental state, but because of it.

Ellis was clear about this when he returned in the beginning six issues to his character from a 2014 ongoing. In that time, he teamed up with Declan Shalvey (artist), Jordie Belaire (colorist) and Chris Eliopoulos (letterer). These stories featured regular appearances by a fourth identity, the cool and collected Mr. Knight, a variation of which showed up in 2011’s Secret Avengers #19. #19.

Ellis and Shalvey took a look at the previous Moon Knight series. Via email, Shalvey told me that they approached the hero “like a brand new character.” Mr. Knight helped the creative team reach that goal, explained Shalvey, giving them a fresh canvas to work with without getting bogged down in the character’s convoluted history. “Mr. Knight not being in a superhero outfit, being in a white suit, provided a whole new way to draw the character that hadn’t really been explored before.”

For their run, Ellis and Shalvey invoked Moon Knight’s unusual mental state but did not exploit it. Moon Knight’s character was not the only one who treated him with suspicion. Other characters also viewed Moon Knight as suspicious. He appeared in white suits and wearing dapper clothes, while Grant and Lockley stood by. Despite all the off-kilter energy, Ellis and Shalvey ran featured Spector in peace with his broken psyche.

Greg Smallwood and Jeff Lemire further explore this aspect in their ninth Moon Knight continuing, which was launched in 2016. The first five-issue arc, “Welcome to New Egypt,” partially plays like a classic Moon Knight story, in which the hero and his long-established supporting cast must escape agents of the god Seth to prevent the destruction of Earth.

Lemire contrasts the plot with scenes at a mental institution, where Dr. Emmet treats Spector. These scenes look like comic-book portrayals of mental illness, which is what scared me my first time in an institution. The white hallways are filled with antiseptic patients, surrounded by fearful orderlies and nurses.

Image: Jeph Lemire, Greg Smallwood/Marvel Comics

While my hospital stays have put me into contact with some frightening figures, and I have certainly dealt with nurses who made questionable care choices, Lemire’s choices strike me as exaggerated. Lemire, however, uses these elements in order to transform mental-health patients into peculiar individuals who must be fixed before they re-enter society. Instead of making Spector a villain, Lemire portrays Spector as a hero whose powers are derived from his bizarre mental state.

Lemire never clarifies if Emmet and her (admittedly abusive) staff truly want to help Spector by freeing him from the Khonshu coping mechanism he’s made for himself, or if they’re minions of Seth. Smallwood adds to the confusion by using different panel layouts and linework. Scenes in the mental institution feature realistic figures constrained in tight, small panels, made more claustrophobic by colorist Jordie Bellaire’s dingy washes. When Moon Knight puts on his costume, Smallwood’s figures grow dynamic and the panels widen, accentuated by Bellaire’s brighter tones. Cory Petit uses an unusual font to write Khonshu, where the word balloons remain unmoored. Smallwood creates white spaces between each panel, displaying the literal nothingness of realities.

Mid-way through the adventure Spector becomes confused. He is lost in a subway tunnel and is unsure if he has just fought the forces of Seth, or beaten up doctors to escape a mental hospital. Spector falls to his knees to call for help. Khonshu arrives, rendered by Smallwood as an indistinct sketch, and dismisses Spector’s questions about truth.

Image: Jeff Lemire, Greg Smallwood/Marvel Comics

“Let your insanity guide you,” instructs Khonshu, his words captured in a single black balloon, hovering in the darkness surrounding Spector’s head. The next page begins with a bright horizontal panel, taking a bird’s eye view of the unmasked Moon Knight in a white three-piece suit. On either side of his outstretched arms, we see the words, “Let your madness show you the way.”

Moon Knight’s trust in his perception is a pivotal moment, and not only for the story but also for himself as a character. On a plot level, Moon Knight’s trust in his perception allows him to not only find a way out and save his friends but also eventually break free of Khonshu. In the following issues Spector makes a new definition of himself as someone who is not a failure or a mistake. He sees himself as someone who has a different approach to the world that offers many benefits and challenges.

Mental illness has become a real problem with this breakthrough. Lemire, based on Ellis, Moench and Bendis’ work, gives us an example of a hero whose mental health does not conform to simple binary rules. He’s not a healthy person with a relatively stable outlook on the world, nor is he a madman driven to dangerous ends. Rather, he’s a person whose brain works differently from others, a condition that presents challenges and offers opportunities for heroism.

The majority of creative teams that followed Smallwood and Lemire have kept exploring this idea. Say Anything singer Max Bemis joined artist Jacen Burrows for an arc that contrasted Spector’s mental state to that of a villain, while the current ongoing from Jed Mackay, Alessandro Cappuccio, and Rachelle Rosenberg features Moon Knight balancing his personalities to serve others through his Midnight Mission.

Image: Marvel Studios

Teasers of the Disney Plus Moon Knight series suggests that the show will play up the character’s insanity. However, the show’s first four episodes handle the issue with care, even drawing heavily from the Lemire and Smallwood run. Leads Oscar Isaac and Ethan Hawke don’t ignore the difficulty of living with mental illness, nor the sometimes comedic situations it can create. Jeremy Slater, showrunner, follows recent creative teams’ work and portrays Spector as a person with unique challenges and benefits.

The public will become more conscious of their mental health and can learn ways to cope without being hospitalized. This increased awareness should be followed by superhero comics, which must eliminate simple distinctions between mentally ill villains and well-informed heroes.

Moon Knight’s nearly fifty-year evolution has made him sympathetic, and nuanced portrayals of mental health. That’s a hero that everyone needs, whether they’re checking into a hospital at a moment of crisis or well along their mental health path.