...and this isn't even the first issue it appears in! From 2008, Moon Knight #21, "The Death of Marc Spector, chapter one" Written by Marc Benson, art by Mark Texiera, layouts by Javier Saltares.
Previously, Moon Knight managed to get a registration card and become one of Iron Man's approved superheroes...and abuse the hell out of the privilege by continuing to beat up criminals and carve crescent moons on their foreheads. Spector would quite probably be utterly insane even if his god Khonshu wasn't talking to him, but after his long-time girlfriend Marlene catches him wearing the skinned face of his old enemy Bushman, well...that relationship's over. (Bushman's Marvel Wiki doesn't mention it, but Bushman would return even after being killed and his face torn off: the Hood would resurrect him! To probably get killed again.)
This issue, with his old friends Frenchie and Marlene given up on him, Khonshu forsaken him, and Iron Man after him; Spector gets back to the basics of punching criminals, hard. Iron Man and S.H.I.E.L.D. are forced to turn Spector's case over to the CSA, as Norman Osborn makes plans for Spector's demise at the hands of his new Thunderbolts! This is Tony Stark at his peak of post-Civil War dickishness, while Osborn is just a loon that likes breaking things, with nothing against Spector as such.
I'd have to do a hard count, but I think I like every other writer's version of Marc Spector's insanity. I absolutely loathed Bendis's Avengers-hallucination storyline, but loved Warren Ellis's suit-wearing solo vigilante. I don't know who set up the notion that Spector had multiple personality disorder, either: he may be crazy, but I thought his personas were merely an act.
I'm not sure when the identities became distinct personas either. I know they were by the time he joined Engelhart's West Coast Avengers run (and it gets even worse for him because Khonshu starts being a lot more active in his brain, even taking him over at times, I think).
ReplyDeleteThat storyline where Osborn sics the T'Bolts on Spector was roughly the spot where I started buying that series. I'd started the issue before when Deodato drew a standalone issue of Marc finding a drugged Werewolf by Night in some supernatural dog-fighting operation, and stuck with it until it ended at issue 30, although I should have dropped it before the last, basically pointless story in Mexico.
His mental staus is always I feel, left best for the reader to guess, when its ambigious to the point that it might never have been real.
ReplyDeleteBut yeah, stay the fucjk away from the Bendis series. Nothing good ever came from that. Alex Maleev's career still hasn't survived that one.
That face though...reminds me a lot of that scene from The Devil's Rejects, where Otis wears the face of that chick's dead boyfriend, terrorizing her to madness ands the front of a semi real quick.
Of course, to marc, it might be considered foreplay.