What I Bought 6/20/2025 - Part 1

I had to make a run out of town Friday, which I turned into a chance to check out some comic stores I'd never visited before. Didn't do great as far as back issues, but I did find 3 of the 6 comics from this month I wanted. 50% isn't so bad.

Moon Knight: Fist of Khonshu #9, by Jed MacKay (writer), Devmalya Pramanik (artist), Rachelle Rosenberg (color artist), Cory Petit (letterer) - Lot of covers of Moon Knight writhing on the ground lately.

Pym whips up a cure for addiction to the magic drug, but it's got to be tested. On someone other than the bent cop they're keeping prisoner, because if she dies, that's bad. If you say so. So Marc acts as guinea pig, meaning he has to get addicted first.

Most of the issue is Marc, either locked in a big steel chamber, or hallucinating he is, freaking out and punching at shadows of his various enemies over MacKay's stint as writer. Each of them tell Marc the same thing: He likes being hurt, so he gathers friends to him to give him someone to drive away when he needs to be hurt. Which is what Deadpool does, though with him, I think it's less about wanting to be hurt, and more about believing, on some level, he doesn't deserve to have friends. So he self-sabotages.

Pramanik and Rosenberg really go to town on this sequence. The images swirling and dissipating around Marc's fists as he tries to shut them up. In one panel, blood sprays off his knuckles because, as we see in the next panel, he actually punched the wall. Zodiac pops up, wearing a padlock on a chain around his neck, and Pramanik uses that for panel borders. There's a bit where, as Marc seizes, we get an extreme close-up of his eye rolling back on the left side of the page, as panels of him collapsing and staring up at all the hallucinations roll down the other side.

Anyway, the really nice twist of the knife MacKay adds in comes after Moon Knight's ridden out the cure and woken up. Hunter's Moon is there, and won't let Marc tell him what he saw in his "visions." When Marc mentions that maybe he didn't like what he saw, Badr almost laughs and asks why he thought he would? Fists of Khonshu are meant to suffer, and to make others suffer. It's a reaffirmation of his fears in just about the worst way. Most "fists" don't have anyone they care about to hurt - as far as we know, Badr didn't have anyone alive he cared about besides Khonshu before meeting Moon Knight's little band -  but Marc's different, and it makes everything worse for him. 

Runaways #1, by Rainbow Rowell (writer), Elena Casagrande (artist), Dee Cunniffe (color artist), Travis Lanham (letterer) - I thought Doombot would never stoop to public transportation. Are they the Loiterers now?

Doom is sending out Doombots to collect all his other Doombots. Which eventually brings Doombots to the Runaways' doorstep - Doombots - at a time - Doombots - when they're less equipped to handle that kind of problem than normal. Doombots! Karolina's still in space with Nico's staff, Chase is still (allegedly) in the future with Future Gert. Gib (the elder god that got left behind) is there, but he doesn't really recognize the difference between the metal men. Which leaves Molly, Victor and Old Lace, essentially, to fight off the Doombots. But then Chase pops up again in a burst of static, so that's, theoretically useful?

I think Rowell's going to have Nico explore some other way to access magic besides the Staff of One. Whether that does anything for Nico's sense that she can't handle all this responsibility is another matter, but if that's really Chase, and he's really back, then maybe she's no longer the sole legal adult in the group. Victor seems insistent on getting Doombot to take a different name. I guess because he feels it'll make Doombot more of its own individual, separate from its programming. Which is significant to Victor, since he wants to think his programming isn't going to make him kill superheroes for Ultron. Doombot doesn't much seem to care. I'm not sure how he reconciles the duality of knowing he's not Doom, but still thinking of himself as Doom, but he seems to make it work. 

Molly seems really concerned with things not changing. Probably because at this point, change means people leave, and she doesn't like that. Instead of one of her usual hates with the perky cat ears or whatever, Casagrande gives Molly a hat with droopy ears, plus the brim is slanted down. It doesn't really shadow her face - Casagrande's not going that dramatic - but it does add to Molly's depressed air.(Karolina probably should have figured out some way to keep in touch.)

And with Gib just sitting around most of the time, leaves Gert as the level-headed one trying to navigate through all this. Which is not really new, but Gert's extremely cynical brand of realism - like my own - is not best suited for herding this particular group of cats.