Moon Knight #21

[Cable]

Some friends are going out dancing for fun! Surely nothing terribly violent will happen in this Moon Knight comic. Surely.

Full Spoilers:

Spoiler: show

Reese is recalling the night's events to Moon Knight and Dr. Sterman. Four hours previously she and Soldier topped off on blood bags, so as not to get hungry around humans, and then went out with a couple vampire friends Teddy and Shannon. Jake Lockley drives them to a nightclub and drops them off. While there Reese tries to get Soldier to loosen up and dance. They can't enjoy their night for long though because soon the DJ is abducted and replaced. The new guy, clearly unfriendly as he is wearing a robe and an ominous facemask, puts on a record that first causes everyone severe pain and then drives them to try to kill one another. Because of their different physiology the vampires are unaffected. Moon Knight comes smashing through the roof, apparently having kept an eye on them, and starts punching people. Reese says this won't work because the people are innocent and the spilled blood could trigger the vampires. She instead tries a trick that Blade had been training her to use: turning into mist. She is able to float through the crowd and over to the DJ, and then she destroys the sound equipment. One of the henchmen blasts her with a shotgun and the masked man and his goons escape. She survives, though others in the crowd do not. Now as she discusses this event with Moon Knight and Sterman, she questions whether Zodiac was responsible. She suspects that this was related to when the 'ghost in the telephone' brainwashed people to kill Moon Knight's former friends. Someone is experimenting with using sound to cause murders, and this test means it is going to happen again.

This doesn't push the main story forward by much, being more of a bit of character work for Reese and Soldier, but I thought it is one of the better examples of an issue that tries to make you feel what it is like to be a vampire. There are a number of good scenes, starting with the opening need to drink, then to those great panels in the club where Cappuccio and Rosenberg did a fantastic job with the onomatopoeia intermingling the beat of the music with the beat of the hearts into a rumbling overwhelming frenzy. And then Blade explaining the mist to Reese and the difficulty of coming back from dissociation. Overall if you are a fan of vampire fiction in general then this is an issue for you.