Moon Knight’s Comics Show How Marvel Mishandled Blade

Moon Knight’s Comics Show How Marvel Mishandled Blade

Moon Knight’s solo series from Marvel Comics shines because it believes in the uniqueness of his character. It’s time Blade got the same treatment.

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Moon Knight’s Comics Show How Marvel Mishandled Blade

During the early to mid 1970s, Marvel Comics underwent a period of unprecedented change that resulted in the creation of characters like Blade and Moon Knight, who had a supernatural bent. With the relaxing of the Comics Code Authority in 1971, a set of guidelines that had previously banned the publication of werewolves, vampires, and zombies in American comic books, publishers like Marvel were free to create characters that they otherwise would never have been permitted to. With Blade debuting in 1973 and Moon Knight in 1975, a new era was born for Marvel Comics that continues to remain relevant today, with both characters set to join the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the near future.

As Moon Knight kicks off a new series ahead of his Disney+ show, his current stories reflect an approach that Marvel should have taken with Blade years before. The lack of a strong, consistent body of work for Blade has not gone unnoticed by fans, with incoming MCU director Bassam Tariq commenting on it in an interview. That said, the mistreatment of Blade by Marvel, despite the massive success of his films starring Wesley Snipes, can be remedied through taking a similar approach exhibited in Moon Knight’s comics.

The current Moon Knight series, from writer Jed MacKay, artist Alessandro Cappuccio, colorist Rachelle Rosenberg, and letterer Cory Petit, strikes an effective balance between intrigue and accessibility. At once making sense of one of Marvel’s strangest characters to newer readers while also taking a character-driven approach to satisfy longtime fans of the character, Moon Knight makes use of a “monster of the week” storytelling structure that is hardly seen in most superhero comics today. With current comics opting to tell a story across multi-issue arcs, The Amazing Spider-Man being an ultimate example of this, Moon Knight’s revolving door of foes not only shapes his character’s mythos for a new era, but also evidences that he is a competent enough character to stand alone in his own series. Because each issue of Moon Knight has been a self-contained story, the character isn’t marred by cameos from Marvel’s more popular characters in the way that Blade’s comics were, despite the popularity of his films.

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Moon Knight and Blade both come from the supernatural side of the Marvel Universe, and Moon Knight has benefited from the fact that it doesn’t try to justify his existence by bringing in some of Marvel’s heaviest hitters to his story. In contrast, the cover of the first issue of Blade’s solo series from 2006 features a fight between him and Spider-Man, undercutting the legitimacy that Blade has in leading his own series. Blade is unabashedly a supernatural character, and as his earliest comics can attest to, this quality alone makes him a compelling protagonist worthy of his own series like Moon Knight.

By telling small scale stories that dig deep into Moon Knight’s psychology, backstory, and beliefs, Marvel has avoided the cardinal sin it committed with Blade years before. Blade and Moon Knight both come from a period of immense creativity from Marvel, but that energy has not remained consistent throughout time. Considering that Moon Knight has been both a commercial and critical hit thus far, the time has never been better for Blade to get the same undivided attention he has always deserved from Marvel Comics.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/moon-knight-marvel-comics-blade-mishandled/

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