Moon Knight Annual?

Last week Moon Knight Annual was released. Basically Moon Knight is Marvel's version of Batman. Moon Knight was created in 1975 by Doug Moench and artist Don Perlin, but it wasn't until Moench was joined by artist Bill Sienkiewicz, that the character would go beyond just being another Batman type character. Sienkiewicz started his comic book art career with a style that was heavily influenced by Neal Adams, who had a realistic style, but it wasn't until Sienkiewicz started drawing on influences like artist Ralph Steadman, that he took his art to an exciting new level that really changed how a lot of people looked at comic books (especially super hero comics).

A couple of years ago, Marvel started up a new Moon Knight series, but it quickly lost steam as it became one of those late titles and didn't live up to it's early promise. Well last week's Moon Knight Annual is a return to the kind of edgy Moon Knight stories I remembered Moench and Sienkiewicz doing. The writer on this done in one story is best selling crime fiction author Duane Swierczynski with his comic book debut and the art is also by a newcomer, Jefte Paolo. This was a great little revenge story in which Moon Knight isn't even really neccesary. I wish that Swierczynski was the regular writer on Moon Knight, but I just did a little search on what he's got coming up and he's going to be the new writer on Cable (!?). Cable is an X-Men character whom I think is one of those characters that almost is the exception to the rule that any character can be good depending on who the creative team is - meaning Cable really is a throwaway character that no creator of note cares about (Joe Casey and Laddron had a little run on Cable a few years ago that was good in a Kirbyesque kind of way). Maybe Duane Swierczynski is gong to be writing Cable because he can do anything with this character. I think after this Moon Knight Annual, I'll definitely be reading the first couple of issues of his Cable to see if h's a great new voice for comics that I think he may be.

By the way the Moon Knight cover here is not the Moon Knight Annual, rather I chose a great Sienkiewicz cover from yesteryear because the cover of the Annual is somewhat lame and doesn't suggest how good the interior story is.