Moon Knight #27: Crossing the Threshold

Warning: Spoilers for Moon Knight #25-26

Transitions in storytelling can be a double-edged sword. Poorly conceived shifts can feel like a terrible exposition dump, or narrative pipe laying, that wastes space to get to a more interesting place. A great storyteller understands the power and use of a transition, converting the kinetic energy of moving characters around the board into future potential. It’s no surprise that a book like Moon Knight, which has played with form and expectations over its 25+ issue run, captures that enthralling method of moving plots along to a final stride. 

Moon Knight #27 – written by Jed MacKay with art from Frederico Sabbatini, Cory Petit – is all about the transitions, both narratively and contextually for the larger arc of the run. With the recent announcement that the book has entered its endgame, the book is moving past its episodic structure to a serialized stretch of the story. 

After the previous adventures of Moon Knight and Hunter’s Moon, the two are back on Black Spectre’s trail by going through Vibro. The only complication is he’s been beaten into a coma and appears to be brain-dead from the fight with Hunter’s Moon, who’s been off since his final resurrection. The barrier between Badr and the former Fists of Khonshu has weakened because of the flawed resurrection, and now the violence is difficult to stop. 

Moon Knight comes up with a plan to interrogate the supervillain, by using the telepathic sweat of Leonard Hawley, introduced earlier in the run. The avatars use the sweat as a medium to enter Vibro’s mind and find out information about Black Spectre, and why the villain broke Zodiac out of prison in a previous issue. The plan works, and Moon Knight and Hunter’s Moon have to dig through the villain’s mind. They learn more about Spectre’s endgame for Manhattan, which involves the sound, anger, and mind control of various antagonists in the series. All the while, Spector learns more about Vibro and his life before the powers, giving a subtle nod to Marc’s own struggles. 

The key element of this script is transitions, as characters, stories, and ideas move from one state to another. MacKay doesn’t use this as an exposition-heavy table setting, instead using that sense of the rug being pulled out to accelerate the plot while weaving together the seemingly disparate threads of the book. MacKay makes the long game clear with these issues, and the falling dominos feel like a natural reaction to those initial stories. MacKay’s script feels like it’s closing one door just to open another and the space in-between those doors is some of the most interesting to explore thanks to this issue. 

Using the idea of transitions to key into this home stretch has a  thematic resonance with the nature of Moon Knight, thanks to his role as the protector of travelers. MacKay does his best work when weaving the internal and external, echoing sentiments from previous issues to create new foundations. Here, that comes as a result of building out Spector’s character, taking the lessons he’s learned living with DID and the fluctuating gifts from Khonshu to help not only Badir but Vibro as well. In the language of the story, Moon Knight protects those who travel by night and makes clear in the script that those who travel between identity and existence just as much as they do geographically. 

Sabbatini is the perfect collaborator for this transitional-focused issue, working yet again to fill in one last time before the book returns to Alessandro Cappuccio for the final set of issues. The linework from Sabbatini is clear and concisely in this issue, reading as the space the concrete and abstract while in Vibro’s mind. The linework and layouts in this sequence take steps away from a realistic depiction of the world, and the over-exaggerated style the book is known for comes through.

The issue is primarily focused on characters in costume, only showcasing faces during the mindscape as Marc tries to appeal to reason. Shifting between these two visual modes allows Sabbatini to work in the world usually associated with Cappuccio’s art, but does not lose the excellent use of expressions the artist captures with a masterful set of pencil lines. The action is great to watch beat to beat, but the real moment of clarity for the issue comes when Marc has a simple conversation with another man. It’s not splashy or bombastic, but it’s a human moment that resonates from the core of the series, and Sabbatini is the perfect choice for the scene. 

It wouldn’t be a true review of Moon Knight without mentioning Rosenberg’s coloring, which yet again gets to play in multiple realms thanks to the split nature of the book. The external world is filled with the typical bright blues and all-consuming blacks, but in Vibro’s mind, the reds and browns are overwhelming on the page. The book takes on an almost psychedelic effect when making the switch between the two, and Rosenberg’s palette creates a disorienting effect. There’s no doubt that the book has moved from one space to another while looking at the colors, and Rosenberg has created a rich, complex color profile across spaces throughout this run, time and time again.