(EDITOR’S NOTE: Paint Monk’s Library, in collaboration with the enthusiastic staff over at the Into the Knight Podcast, is tackling the Moon Knight chronology! Each week we’ll take an in-depth look at the Fist Of Khonshu in a series of reviews, all in order of character appearance! These reviews will appear on Monday each week until we’ve covered them all, or until the enthusiastic Loonies get too exhausted to write. Whichever comes first!)

By JUSTIN OSGOOD – Guest Writer

I like to think that Moon Knight’s experience with The Defenders in this issue prepared the Fist of Khonshu for what would happen years down the road when he joins the West Coast Avengers. If one needed some kind of a “primer” for working with a team of super-powered individuals, fighting alongside the Defenders in their prime isn’t a bad place to start!

On another level, it would have been nice to see Moon Knight working with Nighthawk again: the literal Batman pastiche of the Marvel Universe teaming up with what some would describe as the “symbolic” Batman pastiche – but I am one of the Moon Knight fans who jettisoned the Moon Knight-Batman comparisons to the rubbish heap years ago. Marc Spector is so much more complex than that, as we would soon discover…

Review: Defenders #50

A furious Hulk tears into Scorpio’s new android Zodiac, and within moments he is joined by Moon Knight, Hellcat, and Valkyrie. In a nearby chamber, Nighthawk’s strength is doubled by the quickly-fading dusk, and he is able to break free of his constraints, quickly joining his allies in combat.

The LMD Zodiac gives the Defenders little in the way of trouble, especially considering the rage of the Hulk, and the team is able to make short work of most of them. Scorpio, having left the battle to ascertain the reason behind the disappearance of a handful of his LMDs, is sent into a hysterical rage when he discovers that they perished upon their “birth” – including Virgo, who was intended to be his lover. Unable to recover from this disappointment, he sequesters himself in his chamber with the Nick Fury LMD and commits suicide after listening to a recording of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”.

Moon Knight was the one to utter the immortal line upon finding Scorpio’s body – “Too bad! But who’ll miss a MANIAC like Scorpio, anyway?”

CAPSULE REVIEW: My introduction to the Zodiac was in the three-issue story which appeared in West Coast Avengers a few years after this story, so it was nice to see this LMD incarnation of the group appear in their original forms. Unfortunately, they weren’t the most effective team to face this group of Defenders, and their performance is a little lackluster. Poor Hellcat is the only one who really has any trouble with them, as she takes few scrapes during her claw-to-claw duel with Leo.

Moon Knight doesn’t really contribute much to the battle, and he is flying around the chamber during the majority of it with his wing-cape, but there is a great moment where he and Nighthawk grab the rampaging Aries and send him crashing into a pile of electronic junk. He also gets to contribute the aforementioned closing line upon finding the corpse of Scorpio, which admittedly made me laugh the first time I read it.

David Kraft’s writing is fine for the most part, but there are a couple of exchanges which are absolutely cringe-worthy:

Moon Knight: “Cut me some slack, you slimy headed stooge!”

Taurus: “NO WAY! Come back down here, darn you! I wanna poke some holes in you!”

Dialogue in Defenders #50

And if that one isn’t bad enough, there’s always this one.

Valkyrie: “I will warn but once, my feline friend – the Valkyrie does not fool around!”

Leo: “I don’t believe you really said that, babe! Those are big words for a beautiful babe!”

Dialogue in Defenders #50

Yikes.

Keith Giffen inked his own art for this issue, and I actually like it better than the previous issue. He is still fully channeling Jack Kirby here, and it works very well for the theme of this story and the battle royale between the Defenders and the LMD Zodiac. There were some panels that looked a little clunky, but overall everything looked great and a particular highlight was Hellcat’s fluid, ferocious battle with Leo.

Overall, this was a nice wrap-up to the “Who Remembers Scorpio?” story, but personally I don’t consider this Defenders run to be a highlight of Moon Knight’s early history. It’s nice for what it is – an early way for Marvel to introduce Moon Knight to a larger audience and include him in the constantly-rotating roster of characters in the Defenders.

But it looked somewhat like he was hastily thrown in, and on the whole it seemed to me like he wasn’t really a good fit for this group. I have to doubt his judgment at one point when he thinks to himself, “I’m a free agent – a temporary part of this non-team only by circumstance – but if I ever did decide to join a supergroup – it would be THIS ONE!”

Readers, I guffawed.