"The End" Week: Moon Knight #17!

Another year, another last issue for Moon Knight! Let's see: we saw Bendis's Moon Knight #12 last year, his original series wrap-up #38 in 2014, and Fist of Khonshu #6 back in 2011. Today his most recent last issue: from 2015, Moon Knight #17, "Duality" Written by Cullen Bunn, pencils by Ron Ackins, inks by Tom Palmer and Walden Wong.

This issue was the capper to the series began by Warren Ellis, with MK in a sharp white suit without the traditional cloak. And possibly less crazy than usual. Or differently crazy. Here we have another of the recent motifs of Moon Knight comics: his god Khonshu isn't just a figment of his imagination, he's totally real and rather a prick.

A new homeless shelter, managed by unsettling, always-smiling workers, brings in an old man, who notices the shelter is putting the homeless to work panhandling. Or mugging. But they have a different job in mind for anyone too observant: human sacrifice. Complete with guards that look like they're from a King Tut episode of Batman.

Luckily, the old man is a disguised Moon Knight, who manhandles the guards, but is then greeted warmly as "Father" by the smilers. They lead him to his "sister," the "mother," the priestess of Khonshu; who I thought was Nekra, but she isn't referred to by name anywhere here.

Nekra, if it is her, explains she does all this in Khonshu's name, at Khonshu's whim: as god of the moon, his aims may change like the phases. Moon Knight considers that pop-psychology mythology, but does have a bit of a hard time with her and the bizarre, armored monsters at her command. Drugged and hallucinating, MK still knows this was not Khonshu's will: he was.

Burning down the mission, Moon Knight limps away, with Khonshu by his side like the footprints in the sand parable, if Jesus was a violent nutjob. This isn't as good a done-in-one issue as Ellis's run, but at least it's not stretching two issues worth of plot into six-plus, which I kind of feel Lemire's current run is doing.