What Was Moon Knight Doing, If Not Getting Money From Dracula?

Every time Marvel Studios makes an announcement about its upcoming Moon Knight present, social media is usually blanketed with probably the most well-known panels that includes Khonshu’s fist: the hero looking down Dracula, to get his goddamn money. But, as beloved as it’s, it’s not really an actual panel from the pages of Marvel’s comics—however the story it’s from may be simply as foolish as Marc Spector being a vampire debt collector.

The modified panel that has now grow to be probably the most defining photographs of Moon Knight on social media—in the best way that well-known panel of Watchman’s Doctor Manhattan isn’t really from Watchmen—is taken from the pages of 1987’s Solo Avengers #3, an anthology sequence that advised tales of particular person members of the long-lasting hero group, anchored by month-to-month appearances from Clint Barton’s Hawkeye as one of many two tales in every subject. Moon Knight’s look in subject three of the sequence, within the story “Tower of Shadows,” by Tom DeFalco, Mark Bright, Josef Rubinstein, Ken Feduniewicz, and Jack Morelli, does certainly see him slink into an ominous trying fort.

But he’s not there to search out Dracula—who’s, in fact, nonetheless an honest-to-god character within the Marvel Universe—or cash. He’s not even wherever significantly fancy; it’s really set within the Santa Monica Mountains in Southern California. Moon Knight’s there on the behest of certainly one of his first “foes” from the comics, rapidly turned ally: Jack Russell, aoka the Werewolf-by-Night, who believes he has a lead for a prison mastermind the West Coast Avengers—who Moon Knight had simply joined—had been in search of.

“Tower of Shadows” is definitely a narrative of a job interview gone fallacious: Marc finds himself accosted by all the types of traps you’d anticipate in a spooky fort property that very presumably would’ve been snug with Dracula as its proprietor. Spiked partitions, dart-firing fits of armor, lure doorways, you title it, Marc barely scrapes his means by means of it, till he encounters a masked vigilante performing as a mirror to himself: a person known as the Shroud, who instantly leaps into battle towards Marc. After a fast battle the place the Shroud has the higher hand till Marc manages to briefly dazzle the shadow-loving vigilante with a flash bomb, the Shroud rapidly finds himself conceding, and revealing that the true premise of the entire endeavor was that he needed to recruit Moon Knight into the Night Shift, a group of nocturnal, supernaturally themed heroes (together with Werewolf-by-Night), as a possible substitute for the Shroud as chief.

Alas, Marc declines—regardless of the hilarious pitch that Night Shift is extra of his temper as a night-based squad of heroes, in comparison with the literal day job of being an Avenger—goes on his merry means, and the story ends there. He’s by no means really fought Earth-616’s model of Vlad in his lengthy comics historical past, within the pages of Solo Avengers #3 or in any other case—an occasional power vampire like Count Nefaria, however no Dracula mud up outdoors of his most iconic meme.

Who is aware of although: Moon Knight has lengthy served as a bridge between extra supernatural parts of the Marvel Comics universe and its street-level vigilantism. With the MCU digging into extra magical and sinister supernatural stuff proper now, and with a Blade film on the best way sooner or later too, perhaps Oscar Isaac’s white-cloaked hero can discover away to beat up a vampire for spare change on display in some unspecified time in the future.

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