Somebody asked me (I won’t name who) after my last post about my forthcoming novel, did my idea for my debut novel come before I started writing poetry when I was 10. My poetry it has to be said pre-dated this character by likely two or three years – I have honestly forgotten over the years but the design of the character certainly came from Marvel comic’s ‘Moon Knight’ which I picked up I guess a few years before.
If my memory is correct, my Dad took me in John Menzies in Stretford Mall (Now the much less nicer W H Smiths) after having a painful filling to go and get me a comic as a treat for being a brave little boy expecting me to buy Spiderman or the Fantastic Four which most of the kids in my class only for me to come back with a white cloaked Batman like character.
Moon Knight if you research wikipedia is described as “Moon Knight (Marc Spector) is a fictional character appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. Created by writer Doug Moench and artist Don Perlin, the character first appeared in Werewolf by Night #32 (August 1975).
The son of a rabbi, Marc Spector is a former Marine and CIA operative who becomes a mercenary, despite his conflicted feelings about violence and morality. During a job in the Sudan, he is appalled by ruthless fellow mercenary Raoul Bushman. Bushman then attacks and kills archeologist Dr. Alraune. Spector saves the archeologist's daughter and colleague Marlene Alraune, then fights and is defeated by Bushman. The dying Spector is brought into a recently unearthed tomb for shelter and placed before a statue of the Egyptian moon god Khonshu. Spector seems to die but then suddenly revives, fully healed. He claims Khonshu wants him to be the "moon's knight", redeeming his life of violence by now protecting and avenging the innocent. It is later revealed Khonshu is real, one of several entities from the Othervoid (a dimension outside normal time and space) who were worshipped as gods by ancient Earth people. On his return to the United States, Spector invests his mercenary profits into becoming the crimefighter "Moon Knight", aided by his colleague Jean-Paul "Frenchie" DuChamp and Marlene Alraune, who becomes his lover and eventual mother of his daughter. Along with his costumed alter ego, he uses four other identities to gain information from different social circles: billionaire businessman Steven Grant, taxicab driver Jake Lockley, red-haired little girl Inner Child, and suited consultant Mr. Knight. It is later revealed Marc Spector has dissociative identity disorder (incorrectly referred to as schizophrenia in some stories) and that the alters known as Grant and Lockley originally manifested during his childhood, subsequent identities emerging during his adulthood. It is debated in different stories whether Spector's mental disorder is due to childhood trauma or the result of "brain damage" caused by his psychic connection to Khonshu, a connection compelling Moon Knight's personality to shift between the four major aspects of the moon god's multi-faceted nature ("the traveler", "the pathfinder", "the embracer", and "the defender of those who travel at night"). Khonshu claims he created a psychic connection with Marc Spector when the latter was a young boy, decades before he was ready to be fully recruited as his avatar on Earth, the left Fist of Khonshu”
To this day, I can’t remember what drew me to this character, likely something to do with the fact it was something he wasn’t just one character or a man hiding behind the mask, but in this case one man who had a whole host of characters fighting for attention and I loved the anti war message that flew through it. This was a man who had done bad, and was trying to atone for it.
My early stories went at this from the fact from being a writer, and gave him literally split personalities with writing characters which came to life literally to assist them, not the battle of a man who hid behind all of these characters.
I was also mad keen on the white armour and the image of my character flying across the moon but only really found out later the reason why I really related to this character was the use of schizophrenia in the comics something that really hit home with me in my late teens.
I need to clarify next that I have never had schizophrenia in any form but I did have a lot of mental heath trouble certainly in my late teens and knew somebody at this time who also suffered schizophrenia which I’ll talk about in a future post, but Moon Knight was the Author in a very different way and who over time as I discovered when I began to write my bad, little tales in a different, different way which I’ll touch on next.
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