With Moon Knight arriving in Disney+ in a few weeks, another aspect of the Fist of Khonshu is coming with him: Mr. Knight! It’s even a big part of the show’s marketing! This shouldn’t surprise anybody familiar with the character (though I admit I was pleasantly surprised myself): despite it being quite a recent creation, Marc Spector’s “Mr. Knight” guise has become so deeply ingrained in the Moon Knight mythos that it’d be difficult to imagine a Moon Knight story without it anymore. Interestingly enough, those recent runs of Moon Knight comics are the ones we’re dealing with in today’s Omnibussin’ (synergy!), as—despite their definitive reinvention of the character and obvious influence on the adaptation—none of them have been turned into Marvel omnibuses. [Read more…] about Omnibussin: Moon Knight, Meet Mr. Knight!
Marvel Reviews
Avengers Epic Collection: The Crossing Line Review!
When the issues collected in Avengers Epic Collection: The Crossing Line were first published in 1990 and 1991, the Avengers were in a bit of flux. Writer Roger Stern’s acclaimed five year long run on the book had come to an end a few years earlier. Just prior to the start of this volume, writer John Byrne had abruptly left his stewardship of both Avengers and Avengers West Coast, a stewardship which had culminated in putting the Avengers at the center of Marvel’s line-wide crossover “Acts of Vengeance” just before he left the books. On the other side of these collected issues, the creative run by writer Bob Harras and (chiefly) penciler Steve Epting looms, a run that will come to define “Avengers in the 90s,” for better and worse. With the benefit of hindsight, this chunk of issues feels very much like it’s simply filling the gap between the Byrne and Harras/Epting runs, merely killing time despite the fact that Larry Hama – whose entire work on the Avengers is collected in this volume – had every intention of staying on the title for a good long while (more on that below). Yet for that, at least some of the stories collected herein are not without their charms, even if few of them rise to the level of all time Avengers greats. [Read more…] about Avengers Epic Collection: The Crossing Line Review!
M-Tech’s Warlock: An Underrated Late ’90s Gem

The M-Tech line of the late 1990s is a mostly forgotten footnote in Marvel’s history today, but that’s not to say it doesn’t hold up. After all, it didn’t have much of a chance to breathe before the whole thing was canceled, which makes it difficult to write it off fully—not a bad idea so much as one that buyers weren’t quite ready for. Regardless of the line’s brevity, tapping into underutilized tech-based characters like X-51 and Deathlok for their own solo series made for some interesting comics, and Warlock Vol. 5 is one of them.
It was in writer Louise Simonson’s run on New Mutants in #95 that the techno-organic being known as Warlock (temporarily) perished at the hands of Cameron Hodge. This was in 1990, immediately before she left the book with #97 and it transformed into X-Force. Here, nine years later, she returns to the character while remaining soundly outside of the X-Line for which they were both known. In the interim, she was one of the main architects behind The Death of Superman and surrounding stories at DC, and Warlock had been through resurrection, a name change, and more than one serious identity crisis.
Discussing Warlock Vol. 5 #1-9 [Read more…] about M-Tech’s Warlock: An Underrated Late ’90s Gem
Welcome Back – Two Downtime Preludes for Big Drama Down the Line: New Mutants #24 & Secret X-Men #1
[covers by Martin Simmonds (l) and Leinil Francis Yu (r)]
Finally! We’re back to two ensemble X titles in one week! Woo! It’ll be more than a month before that happens again—and then we’ll be going big: A veritable title wave of comics! (Not sorry for the pun! And shout out to the used bookstore of the same name I worked at 20 years ago in Anchorage.) Let’s hope we survive the experience; 2022 should prove quite different from the scheduling chaos of the last two years, supply chains permitting.
Regardless, as to the books at hand, they each bring different strengths, but certainly, it’s increasingly clear that Vita Ayala is entering their early peak as a storyteller with each issue of New Mutants, so we’ll start by covering issue #24, which couldn’t be more perfectly balanced as a kind of intermission between arcs (with “The Labors of Magik” likely to be as decompressed as the Shadow King arc but even more epoch-making judging by this issue’s last panel).
Marvel Then: Morbius Moves Forward in Marvel NOW!
The Morbius (2013) series seems to come a bit out of left field, considering that the last time we’d consistently seen Michael M. had been back in the early 1990s with Rise of the Midnight Sons. Receiving a hard push into his own series roughly two decades later with a new costume and a full superhero makeover may have seemed like an odd move because… it was!
Morbius isn’t a character who works particularly well as a superhero—he’s much better-suited for horror-adjacent solo series or guest spots in the books of more traditional heroes like Spider-Man. Yet Marvel NOW! was all about bringing old concepts into the modern age whether they liked it or not, so we ended up with a fairly unusual short-lived Morbius solo that sometimes works, though it often does not.
Covering Morbius (2013) #1-9 [Read more…] about Marvel Then: Morbius Moves Forward in Marvel NOW!