Moon Knight By Lemire & Smallwood: The Complete Collection

This is a great story and the artwork with it brilliant.I enjoyed it very much, thank you for your excence.

Product arrived damaged. Waiting to hear about replacment.

“Moon Knight by Lemire & Smallwood” collects issues #1-14 of this series from (beginning in) 2014. It was previously collected in three paperback editions –Moon Knight – LunaticThis volume collects the first five issues of the new (post-Secret Wars) Moon Knight series. Yet another new writer for the series manages to capture the feel of the preceding series launched by Warren Ellis and maintained by Culled Bunn, and the artist from volume two of that series is back, again maintaining that feel; and they now manage to find yet another new direction within that now-established mood and setting.The story opens with Marc Spector in an asylum, where he is told that he has been all his adult life, and has been subject to delusions about being Moon Knight, who is a real-world character, whose activities are reported on the television there.SPOILERY BITThis is a comic book about Moon Knight, so we “know” that Marc Spector must be Moon Knight, but you do start wondering for a couple of pages, until you, and he, realise that asylums are not really allowed to be run like this anymore.UNSPOILERY AGAINThen it is a matter of finding out what is really going on, and even when we are told, we, and Marc, still feel a bit unsure about it all; and the presence of the entire supporting cast from the original stories (with a cameo by Scarlet on the TV) just adds to the unreality.We reach a revelation/resolution of sorts, which leaves a lot still to be understood and acted upon, but there is a volume 2 in a couple of months to take us onward.I found this to be a really unputdownable story, and the artwork reminded me of that by Bill Sienkiewicz, who introduced the ‘scribbly’ style to a mainstream audience back in the 1980s with Doug Moench on their classic Moon Knight series.Moon Knight – ReincarnationsThis collects issues #6-9 of the current series, along with issue #2 of the 1980 series, which addressed the current situation of Moon Knight in the vocabulary of the traditional comic-book of the day. Comic-book writing and comic book fans have come a long way in the intervening thirty-something years, and all for the better, writers actually got fired for writing stuff like this back then (though Jim Shooter fired people for all sorts of things).So – this story sees the various identities used by Marc Spector as his aliases having to be hunted down in their own realities and brought back into the single personality that has been fractured in the previous volumes; or so it appears to us. Wes till can’t tell what is ‘real’ and what isn’t, and so this is all purely subjective for the central character in the story.Whatever it is that is going on, this is definitely a really good comic, and this is a really good episode in the ongoing storyline. I could waffle on about the influences of 1970s comic-book writers or 1960s British TV, but I don’t feel like it.This is an excellent version of Moon Night, building on the previous short series, and on decades of history for the character.Don’t start here though, start with Warren Ellis’s opening volume,  Moon Knight Volume 1: From the Dead (Moon Knight (Numbered)) .Moon Knight – Birth and DeathThis collects the final issues of this series - #10-14, but you really have to read the preceding two volumes to appreciate it, and preferably the preceding three volumes before those, stating with Warren Ellis’s  Moon Knight Volume 1: From the Dead (Moon Knight (Numbered)) .The first three volumes were written by three different writers, Ellis, Wood and Bunn, while the second (current) three are all by Jeff Lemire, but you’d be hard put to find a break in continuity or style.This volume is the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle that has been assembling throughout the series, and is the secret origin of Marc Spector and all his aliases.I have been reading Moon Knight since his first appearance, and, as I often say, comics have grown up with us, their first audience to actually grow up with them, and this is the grown-up Moon Knight, actually growing up.Marc Spector: “is this real? All I know for sure is that the rain feels real as it hits our face. Real enough, anyway. And that’s good enough for us.”Me too.