When I think of a character who has a checkered past when it comes to consistency of quality for their books there is no more clear an example than Moon Knight.

Quite simply the character is plagued with misrepresentations, mis-starts, and poor pacing ... at the best of times. At the worst of times creators are just too fascinated with the cult status of the character and get blinded by the big lights put on the launch of a new book with Marc Spector headlining. 

The most recent launch started out promising with Novelist Charlie Huston and fan favorite artist David Finch taking an interesting look at the character who has suffered from so many retcons and relaunches and reimaginings that he understandably has developed something of a schizophrenic past ... so they embraced it all instead of choosing one concept. They made it so that all the relaunches and the derivations and reimaginings and ... everything ... was part of the broken mind of Marc Spector. And it had some people really excited, myself included ... but then schedules got in the way and the book started coming out more irregularly. And the book had sort of a slow pace to begin with and had it come out regularly it would have really probably worked.

But it didn't.

And that's most often the case.

But then Gregg Hurwitz and Jerome Opena came along and started rocking my world. Hurwitz is also a novelist but seems to have a really rock solid handle on the writing of comics that some novelists-turned-comic-writers seem to lack. He knows how to pace things to keep them interesting and he knows that being referential as well as reverential is key to success with the average comic nerd. Add to that the growing and evolving talent that is Jerome Opena and you've really got the potential for a best seller. 

The first two issues have had the pacing down pat and have me hungry for more without feeling like I've been cheated out of my $3. The characters all seem human and interesting and ... great. The way that Hurwitz is dealing with the most recent runs and the recent depiction of the character is wholesale fascinating and the way that he has chosen to distance himself from the most recent run while still being married to the way the character has been fascinating as well. What's been really nice as well is that the characters in the book seem as hesitant about the future of Moon Knight as the reader is bound to be. A whole lot of statements akin to: "Yeah, you've said you're going to be stable and worth knowing many, many times in the past ... but I don't know if I'm going to let you sell me snake oil again." ... but allow me to assure you that if the first two issues are any indicator and if Hurwitz can keep his hands on Opena as the ongoing artist then things just might wind up being amazing ... for a long time to come.