When we last saw Moon Knight he retired after being a part of the Marvel Knights team. It wasn’t good comics and it wasn’t good for the character, who works best as a paranoid, unhinged loaner.

Fortunately, Charlie Huston immediately tells us this is THAT kind of Moon Knight comic.

It begins with Moon Knight violently taking out some gangbangers while narrating about his history with the West Coast Avengers, acknowledging that he has a history of literally going crazy, and explaining why he wears white…

Violence is a religion for him.

But all that dissolves and we see that he is now confined to a wheelchair after Bushman broke his legs–after Moon Knight literally carved the villain’s face off. It’s violent AF.

After crossing that line and becoming a savage killer, Moon Knight lost Marlene and Frenchie. Khonshu has forsaken him. He’s strung out on prescription pain killers, and nearly broke.And since Bushman is dead, he doesn’t even have an archenemy.

He is truly at the bottom, and has given up his Moon Knight identity.

Ironically, we see him being twelve-stepped by Crawley.  The book presents an interesting comparison of God (Koshnu) to alcohol—not the first time the comparison has been made, but certainly a rare look at drug addiction in comics.  And in the obligatory “crawl up from the bottom,” Spector rejects the moon god as his source of power….

Yes, the story concept borrowed heavily from the “Broken Bat” story in Batman, where Bane breaks Batman’s back, but Huston’s tale is much darker.  The art is dark, the mood is dark, and the book is bloody and frightening.

When Moon Knight debuted, it was as a mercenary for a criminal organization called The Committee. They return in this story, re-formed by the children of the original members who hire a cigar-smoking profiler named (ahem) Profile.

Profile, it turns out, engineered the fall of Moon Knight.

But what he failed to recognize was Marc Spector’s drive and, of course, by the end of this story he puts on the Moon Knight costume again and kicks some Committee ass.

The Committee also hired Taskmaster, so we get a nice fight between him and Moon Knight before it’s over. Taskmaster is portrayed in an almost grotesque way.

The Committee aren’t gone, though. They’ll be back.

By the end, he’s in the costume again, sleeping in the big bed with Marlene, and his old friend Frenchie has agreed to be his pilot again.

Incidentally, Huston reinvents Frenchie as a homosexual.

Overall, Huston and Finch’s Moon Knight is very different—but also very similar—to Moench and Sienkiewicz’s defining take on the character.  What’s most important is that Huston is the first writer since Moench created Moon Knight to have a distinctive and compelling voice, and to make the character his own.  In fact, “The Bottom” as a story rivals many of Moench’s own classic Moon Knight tales.

A most excellent return!