Marq (Edward Somerset)
Moon Knight

Gale Nocturne

Jeanine Marlo Benedict

Edward Somerset.

But he’d rather you call him “Marq”.

See, Stark-Fujikawa robbed him of his memories. They’d disposed of him in a lonely cargo hold and sent him packing to a slow, poisonous death in the garbage capitol of the U.S of A: the state of Detroit.

They’d also mapped a highly-complex nano-technological battle-suit onto his DNA without his knowledge or consent. Screwing with his life and making him into a corporate assassin just to ‘one-up’ the other R&D divisions of the other mega-corporations.

He escaped his death sentence. He befriended the good people at the Downtown Docs in a Box Local 189: Folks like the irrepressible Gale Nocturne and the stern Dr. Reginald Vonvargas.

But Marq was still plagued by flashbacks. Horrific, aching, blood-hemorrhaging-out-of-the-nose type of flashbacks you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. And with these painful glimpses into his past life, he remembered he was married. That he was happy. That he was normal.

Led on by the flashbacks of a life he could barely remember, he embarked on a quest to find his wife and the missing pieces of his life in the process.

This quest took him Uptown, to the high-tech home of a woman named Jeanine Marlo Benedict.

He thought she was his long, lost love.

He thought wrong.

Together with her true husband Arne, they tricked him back into the iron grasp of Stark-Fujikawa, where they revealed their true relation to him: They’d merely CREATED him.

And now, they wanted to fix their broken wind-up toy.

But Marq managed to escape.

He pledged his life to help the weak, helpless, hopeless souls of Downtown fight back against the cruelty of those who would consider them a surplus population. Marq has promised to fight for those in the darkness who can’t fight for themselves. He will be their guiding light.

How fitting, then, is his handle: MOON KNIGHT…

So for now, he has given up this search for his past. He’s given up finding out who ‘Edward Somerset’ was, in place of defining who the ‘Marq’ is instead.

And Gale Nocturne, the nurse that saved his life, is letting him crash in her apartment above the Docs in a Box. She’s teaching him about the world in which they live, because it’s really hard to save someplace you know next to nothing about, y’know?

And so far, she’s done pretty well. In fact, they’ve actually become a lot closer than either of them had expected. The best of friends. Perhaps, given time, even lovers.

…..time’s up.

Marq held the tiny white little device in his hand as he sat on the edge of Gale’s bed; curiously inspecting the strange, polished object like a small child would inspect a shiny decorative ornament. As if he saw some inner magic within, waiting for his newborn gaze to bring it to life.

He lifted an eyebrow in awe of the tiny, archaic thing in his palm. Pursing his lips in a near smile, he highlighted the selection he wanted on the device’s display and pressed the play button.

And a sudden cacophony battered down on him from all sides.

“ And they say a HERO can save us,
I’m not gonna stand here and wait!
I’ll hold on to the wings of the eagles,
Watch as we all fly away!”

Marq grabbed at the earphones, quickly pulling them off, “GAHH! What on earth…?”

Gale simply giggled, “I told you, Marq. It’s something called an iPod. Probably one of the last ever made. It transmits music from the files stored on the hard drive through the headphones.” She listened intently to the song radiating out of the discarded earplugs, “Sounds like ‘Hero’ by….Quarterback? Or was it Dime-behind? Something like that. At least, that’s what the text on the display says. We’ll probably never know what the twencenheads actually MEANT by any of it. Maybe “Hero by Quarterback” was the title or something?”

Gale reached across the dusky bed frame, speedily snatching up the iPod and turning down the volume, “Sorry. I should have warned you that I keep it on pretty loud. It’s got a self-recharging battery gel-pack, so I figure, why not test it out, y’know?”

“That was….interesting,” Marq exclaimed, shaking the echoes of a very loud guitar out of his mind, “…if unexpected. And that was….what did you call it….music?”

“Yep! Music.” Gale beamed, “It’s a kind of…entertainment. I usually listen to it after hours, when I get bored. Or when you don’t wanna hear what’s going on outside.”

Marq nodded in agreement, “Yeah, definitely. Sometimes, I go on patrol and I hear these crazy people yelling at the top of their lungs with strange chrome and gold devices in their hands.”

Gale fell on top of the bed; startling Marq and rocking the edge that he happened to be sitting on at the time, and began laughing hysterically.

“What? What?” Marq asked in abject confusion.

“Hehehe….those aren’t loonies! Those….*snicker*… those are street musicians! I see them all the time!”

“Street musicians?” he asked.

“Heh, yeah,” she laughed, wiping a small tear from her eye, “Most of them are down here because their lyrics are banned by the big corporations up top! Neo R&B and rap-jazz heavy metal aren’t exactly the easiest kinds of music to underscore subliminals onto! The chrome and gold devices are their instruments, and when they shout, they’re shouting the lyrics of their songs. They’re just expressing themselves, they’re not crazy. Man! You crack me up! I can’t believe you thought…”

“Gale, whatever it is that those guys down there are playing, it isn’t music,” Marq said with a smirk as his eyes drifted back toward the iPod device on the patchwork bedspread, wincing in mock pain as he read the display and remembered the sounds booming in his earlobes, “And neither is that….strange stuff by….Nickelback.”

“Nickelback! That’s the name,” Gale exclaimed. Smirking, she looked the music critic straight in the eye, “Okay Marq, if you don’t think that ‘Hero by Nickelback’ is music, then what IS music to you?”

“Well…” Marq began, pausing as he clutched at the abstract ideas and images swirling about in his subconscious, only to find himself drawing a complete blank, “….I can’t seem to remember, exactly.”

“It’ll come back to you eventually, Marq.” Gale sighed, sitting up next to the puzzled knight.

“What if it doesn’t?”

She stared directly into his eyes, “It will, Marq.”

Marq nodded dejectedly, still not totally convinced he would fully recover from the corporate surgery that made him an amnesiac. He let his eyes drift about the room, his mind meandering toward depressing thoughts.

Gale bit her lip, “But until then, why don’t we take a tour of the city? It might help to jog your memory a bit.”

“How do you know I was even born here?” Marq questioned, wandering eyes finally fixing on a dusty electrical outlet under the window.

“How do you know you weren’t?” She countered.

His gaze drifted toward her direction as he paused a moment, thinking, “Well….I suppose it couldn’t hurt to take a look around….”

“That’s the spirit!” she cheered, jumping off the bed with renewed energy, “Some fresh air will do us both good. Now c’mon! Let’s get that memory of yours rolling!”

They stared up solemnly at the church’s crumbling façade. The pockmarked, cracked face of the dusty, vacant structure seemed to moan and whine with every gentle lapping of the breeze. The roof curved inward, moist with rot and mildew. Splintered window frames hung empty along the upper floors; the haunting portals once home to decorative stained-glass furnishings that had glittered and sparkled effortlessly, enrapturing the inhabitants in their hypnotic rainbow light shows. Wooden planks taped up the ground floor windows, long ago hung up as make-shift blinds that now provided privacy for transient gangs stopping by the abandoned building for a place to rest and stock up on supplies. Truly, this was a termite’s paradise.

“What….did this place used to be…?” Marq questioned, stepping toward the boarded up threshold.

“Believe it or not, this was a church.”

“Church?”

Gale smiled. “Y’know, a kind of gathering place for believers of a particular religion. Like those Thorite churches I told you about.”

“Ah…”

“Yeah. I think this was called the ‘Temple of the Identified Flying Object’, or something wild like that. That particular religion had a lot of temples opened up across New York. Even some Uptown, I’d heard. Darryl King; the self-proclaimed ‘Fearmaster’, high priest of this religion, had convinced his parishioners that some divine alien gods would deliver the faithful from the evils of the world; the faithful being those who could pay all the church dues. He also said that he was their Messiah, blessed with a right hand that could perform miracles.

“Of course, after he left, we started getting a lot of people coming into the Docs who’d said their ‘miracles’ were wearing off. People who’d been ‘cured’ of cancer were starting to get tumors in their eyes. Men and women who’d been rejuvenated to youth suddenly contracting arthritis and suffering through bouts of Alzheimer’s. After that, the whole religion pretty much faded. Temple of the Identified Flying Object, my ass!”

Marq lowered his eyes toward the pulverized concrete gravel of the sidewalk; looking for answers and grinding his teeth at the questions, “Why? Why would someone prey on people’s hopes like that? Build themselves up into false idols, make up false gods, give them false hopes and then disappear on them like that? WHY THE SHOCK WOULD SOMEONE DO THAT?”

“The same reason as always: money…..c’mon, let’s get outta here before the squatters in that building get antsy.”

They trudged away from the crumbling church, turning their eyes instead toward the weed-strewn streets ahead, rich with litter and waste.

“Hey look, there’s another one!” Marq pointed out, gazing at the monolith structure encased in sparkling white, “A….church, you called it?”

“Yup. St. Patrick’s Cathedral,” Gale trailed her eyes along the twin steeples jutting out above the central structure, noticing and remembering the heartwarming way they twinkled in the sunshine. A smile formed on her face.

Marq raised an eyebrow, perplexed, as he stared in bewilderment at the strange architecture. No less than five steeped roofs adorned the shining façade; and the texture of the building itself seemed far different than the rotting brick husks and cracked plasti-cement he was used to.

It was almost alien in design; every surface impeccably smooth, but incredibly complex and intricate. And the way the cathedral towered over the tents and bodegas surrounding it emphasized just how out-of-place the structure was amidst the decay. Marq shuddered, “Is this a Thorite church?”

Gale slapped Marq playfully, “No, no. Much older than Thorism, my friend. From what Father Jennifer (the priest of this particular church) told me, a lot of Catholics used to come here to worship only one God, rather than that checklist of Gods the Thorites pray to.”

“Used to? What happened? The church dues get too high?”

“Oh no, not at all. This isn’t like the Temple we passed earlier. No church dues. No false promises. No lies. Hell, Father Jennifer even shelters homeless drifters and runaways in her church. She sees them as ‘God’s people’ too, and doesn’t turn them away just to make a buck. She’s a decent person, through and through. Although, last time I was around this place, there seemed to be less actual masses than there used to be. People just don’t seem to have much faith anymore.”

“That’s a shame. Although, I can see why…” Marq took another look around the street, noticing old land-based cars spewing out choking black fog from their tailpipes and the flickering lights of makeshift campfires from old metal trash cans coming from the alleyway behind them. Even the pedestrians that passed them lacked a certain sparkle in their eyes. Things seemed more hopeless than ever in this place.

He turned to face the sparkling white structure again, “You come around this place often?”

“I used to,” Gale nodded, “That was before I came around to the Docs. Things’ve gotten better since then.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

Marq could tell from her body language and the distant look in her eyes that she didn’t want to talk about it anymore. He glanced up, making out the serene skyline between the towers and walkways above them that signaled the start of Uptown New York and suddenly had an idea that might cheer her up.

“Hey Gale?” Marq chimed.

“Yeah?”

“Wanna see something cool?”

WHOOOSH!

Gale clutched onto the sparkling knight tightly, excited and giddy.

She couldn’t believe it. She just couldn’t believe it.

They were flying.

Honest-to-goodness flying.

It was beyond incredible.

The buildings sped past them faster than she thought possible. Wind sauntered across their airborne embrace, cradling them as they rocketed along; jutting in and out of alleys, across rooftops, curving and twisting and tumbling across the sky.

Gale could hear the hoots and hollers of bewildered onlookers below. She looked down at them between wind-blown flocks of hair, laughing and smiling in response. She knew exactly how they felt. Seeing something like this was an absolute rarity, even before the SMAN was booted from Downtown.

Marq, garbed in his beautiful white armor, sailed along with the gorgeous nurse cradled snug in his arms, hers strapped lovingly around his neck. She giggled again, an electric buzz of excitement traveling up from her abdomen all across her body.

“THIS IS INCREDIBLE!” she shouted to Marq above the whooshing of the wind.

“It’s a rush, alright!” He shouted back in response, dodging one of the buildings that rose into Uptown, “But you gotta be careful. The sky’s not as open down here as it is up there.”

“Yeah, but it’s still incredible, nonetheless…” Gale panned around the moving rooftops and alleyways, “I mean, you can see EVERYTHING from up here!”

“True…” Marq sighed, arcing above the ancient rooftops of the older buildings of New York City, glancing out at the burnt out buildings and the flickering streetlights, “Sometimes, though, you see things up here you don’t want to see…”

Gale looked back toward Marq, who was garbed almost completely in his glowing white armor; save for the mask and cowl attached to the base of his neck, now fluttering wildly in the wind. With a playful smirk, she glared straight into his deep mahogany-brown eyes, “Are you saying there’s something up here you don’t wanna see?”

“I….well, I mean…that is to say I…”

She slapped him on the shoulder, “Just teasing, Marq! Sheesh!”

Marq snuggled closer to Gale as they sped along on the wind currents, dodging the occasional cluster of smog and dust. They spent precious silent minutes just gazing out at the scenery. Marq snickered at the robust voice of a singing street musician, as Gale just shook her head.

The wind picked up slightly, Gale suddenly feeling a slight chill despite her knitted sweater, frayed at the collar and sleeves. She shivered slightly in his arms, causing him to tear his gaze away from the curious amount of blown-out streetlights and dark windows below. He held her closer, lending her his own body heat.

She blushed, “Thanks, Marq.”

He smiled back at her warmly. “Hey, can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“Well, I’ve been seeing that a lot of the buildings out here don’t have much electricity. There aren’t any neon signs or fluorescent lights. I mean, the Docs seems to be constantly lit up, but these neighborhoods are all dark.”

She bit her lip, her eyes rolling over the dark buildings, “That’s because most places don’t have much electric power anymore. Most of the transformers or power stations are burnt-out or abandoned. And it’s not like the Uptowners are gonna build any waystations down here. Pretty much means that any electricity we get down her, we pilfer off from the currents leading Uptown.”

“Ahh…” Marq nodded his head vigorously, “No profit in it….”

“Exactly.”

“Jammit,” Marq muttered in frustration, “Can’t believe they can be so shockin’ heartless. But at least the Doc’s’re stickin’ it to them, draining their stupid power feeds…”

“Well, not exactly.”

“Not exactly?” Marq looked back at her, “But you just said…”

“We have a corporate supplier.”

“CORPORATE?” Marq gasped in shock for a moment, but only for a moment. “Ohhh…I see. It’s from one of those independent corporations you told me about. Like OmniVision or Gyrotech or something.”

“Or…something…” Gale trailed off sheepishly.

“Wait…what do you mean, ‘or something’?”

“Marq, I…I don’t think you’re going to like it.”

“Like what? What am I not going to like?”

“Look, the big shots stop by like, twice a year and drop off supplies. They barely keep tabs on us as it is. We’re barely a blip on their radar. But we really do good down here, Marq, we really do. We’ve saved so many lives. I know that the corporation has its own agenda, but they keep us stocked up and well fed. We need them. Dammit to Thor, I hate to say it, but we need the backing…”

Marq sighed, “So Alchemax owns the Docs in a Box Local 189. It’s…no big deal. I know Alchemax can’t be trusted, but…but I can get over it. I mean, it’s not like Stark/Fujikawa…”

Gale stared up at Marq, tears forming just behind her eyes.

“Wait…wait, you can’t mean…no…no,no…”

“I never meant to hurt you, Marq…”

The shimmering knight nearly dropped her in the air right then and there, his system still reeling from the shock. His mind was flooded with images as he shook his head in disbelief.

Stark-Fujikawa.

Stark-Fujikawa. The soulless mega-corporation that tore apart his genome. That erased his memory. That forcibly bonded a nanotech combat suit to his genome. That had tossed him out with the garbage as a failed experiment. That had recaptured him and tried to do it all over again. That was probably, right now, hunting him down for both escaping from their high-tech facility and killing one of their brainwashed corporate assassins.

Stark-Fujikawa. Liars. Murderers. Predators.

And they owned the only place he’d ever been able to call home.

“How….how could you keep this from me…?”

“I…I didn’t want you to get upset, I just…”

“Do you know what they DID to me?! They tortured me! They stole my life! They are the reason I can’t remember ANYTHING about my past! ANYTHING!! Do you know what that’s like? Do you even care?”

“Damn you, Marq! That’s NOT fair!”

“NOT FAIR? NOT FAIR?” Marq bellowed, “I’ll tell you what’s not fair! Not fair is knowing that I’m married, that I have a wife out there, somewhere, but for the life of me, I can’t remember WHO SHE IS! I can’t remember where she’d be! I can’t even remember if I LOVED her or not! I mean, God, how would you feel if you had someone out there who loved you with all their heart, but you can’t remember loving them back?!”

“Marq, I…I had no idea…”

“Dammit, all I have to go on are glimpses. GLIMPSES of my old life, and every time I get one, my skull damn near explodes out of my shockin’ head!” The buildings swished by them, faster and faster, their flight suddenly careening out of control. He dodged warped, dead traffic lights and telephone poles at perverse speeds, the anger inside him bubbling to the surface. Gale shivered in primal, quaking fear, and clutched onto the rampaging knight for dear life, “And the worst part, the ABSOLUTE WORST part of it all is that, once I finally find the woman who I think is my wife, she turns out to be a scientist for STARK-FUJIKAWA! Not just any scientist, mind you, but the one who MADE ME! The one who STOLE MY MEMORIES! The one person I had trusted in this whole world and she…THIS is what they’ve done to me, Gale! I can’t trust ANYONE anymore!”

“Marq, please…”

Marq finally stopped accelerating and slowed their pace to a crawl, Gale breathing a sigh of relief. The bellowing anger suddenly left him, only to be replaced with an emotion that was far worse.

“Now…and now you’re telling me….that you’re working for them.”

“It’s not like that, Marq. I mean, things just aren’t that black and white. It’s not like everything’s a giant shockin’ conspiracy against you! They just happen to own the Docs. We just get medical supplies and EQUIPMENT from them every once in awhile. We…we help people, Marq. I hate the corps as much as you do, but we NEED them right now. Downtown NEEDS them.”

“NEED? We NEED the corps, now? Are you seriously listening to yourself? They are evil, predatory little hate-bastards that need to be taken down, permanently! I mean, they’re the reason why everyone’s miserable down here!”

“Doesn’t change the fact that we need them to survive, Marq. They’ve set it all up that way. Still, they never bother to dirty their hands coming down here to check up on us. I mean, we’re NOTHING to them, we’re SAFE, I swear to you. Shock it, it’s not like I’m sleeping with the enemy here. It’s not like I want things this way. I wish to Thor I could just erase the corps from the world, but…”

“Do you, Gale? Do you really? You sounded pretty cozy with the idea a second ago.”

“Oh damn you, Marq! That’s so not fair!”

“Isn’t it? How can I trust you, Gale? After this, tell me how the SHOCKING HEL I can trust you!”

“Trust me? I didn’t lie to you, dammit!”

“Oh you didn’t? What do you call it then?”

“I…I just wanted you to…”

“To what? Wait until the corporation finds me and kills all of you for letting me hole up with you?”

“It won’t be that way! You’ve got to trust me on this.”

“Trust you? What, like I trusted Jeanine?”

“I’m not like that bitch, Marq. You know that.”

“Could’ve fooled me…”

“Uccck!” Gale grimaced, slapping Marq in the face, “You sonuvabitch! You goddamned sonuvabitch!”

They spent the next few moments hovering above the weed-strewn avenue in tense silence. Marq stared straight ahead as Gale let out a frustrated sigh.

“Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, Marq.”

“No Gale, I guess it wasn’t.”

Marq shot up further into the air, turning back the way they’d come. They spent the journey back in silence, locked in a cold, dead embrace.

Marq gazed out amongst the ruins of Downtown New York City.

He clenched his jaw, Gale’s terse form still cradled in his arms as they soared back over the ruined landscape. Weathered brick and collapsed rooftops hid in the shadows of the long-faded twilight. Eclipsed by the city above, the buildings of Downtown looked hollow and lifeless. Empty shrouds of a civilization who’d outgrown this world a century ago.

Moss sung up rotted fire escapes, the tiny green lifeforms being all that held the disintegrated matter together. Weeds poked indiscriminately out of sidewalks, some high enough to mask the wretched facades of the old buildings. Not one first-floor window remained intact, once-sturdy glass having been smashed through decades ago in various lootings and riots. The walls of the row-homes and store fronts were reminiscent of wobbly Jenga buildings, individual bricks having either disintegrated or fallen out of place from years of violence, warfare, weather damage and simple neglect. The city, this neighborhood at least, was long dead.

Among other things.

Marq still couldn’t believe that Gale didn’t tell him something so important. He’d told her all about his encounter with the megacorp. They were evil; pure, unbridled evil. They wouldn’t let anything get in their way. They’d tried to make him into a corporate killer, for crying out loud. They didn’t deal in kid gloves.

Marq knew that if Stark-Fujikawa found them, the Docs was dead. Gale, Vonvargas, Jenny the gizmo guru. All dead. Or captured.

He hoped it wouldn’t the second one; that was worse than death.

Death, at least, had some dignity.

But shock it, couldn’t she read between the lines? He’d told Gale all of this. And after all that, she still kept this important bit of information from him? Why? What the shock was going through her head? The only reason she wouldn’t tell him the Docs had ties to Stark, after all that, was if she was….

What? A corporate agent? An assassin, come to torture him with sweet lies and mock friendship? A liar, a traitor? A lump of coal, disguised as a diamond in the rough? Perhaps she was all these things; perhaps she really was everything that the perverse holographic Emmanuel program had warned him she was back on New Year’s Eve. Perhaps, it all hadn’t been a dream like he’d thought. Perhaps Marq had been had….yet, again.

Thor, he hoped it wasn’t true.

He hoped that Gale wasn’t another Jeanine Marlo; that she wasn’t another traitor dressed up in the gown of a goddess, drooling over the moment she could stab him in the spine.

But even if she wasn’t…how could he trust her again?

The muted sounds of a battle ahead of them suddenly shook Marq from his depressing reverie. Gale stirred, shifting her weight to get a better vantage point as they neared the scene.

Marq suddenly noticed that the streets they were passing were either empty of pedestrians, or full of pedestrians running away from the battle. Neither of which was a good sign.

Automated weapons fire sang violent songs above muffled screams and expletives. The street ahead glowed orange with a fiery intensity amidst the contrast of the deep blue twilight. Marq began to slice an arc around what he thought to be the source of the battle site, attempting to avoid it entirely.

“Fenris…” Gale whispered.

“That psycho gang you told me about?”

They passed over what had been Fifth Avenue, only to see the entire street lined with gang members. There were wild-eyed men and women in the street tackling with people in Norse God costumes. People with twisting horns atop their helmets slung hammers into muscled brutes with laser pistols. Some hid behind cars and exchanged heated gunfire amid gas-tank explosions and debris. Streetlights fell atop combatants, as did huge chunks of aged rooftops and balconies, shaken loose by the gunfire. Snipers on the rooftops, inside the buildings, and in the alleys sniped players on both sides in-between washes of heat from the fires scattered all across the avenue in either direction.

It was hell.

Plain and simple.

“Good Thor. And the Thorites too?! Jammit, this has gotta be a shockin’ TURF war. They wouldn’t fight this hard over anything less.”

“Jeez…”

“Hey Marq, why don’t you drop me right in the middle of this thing? You think I’m a double-crossing corporate agent, right? Might as well get rid of me while you’ve got the chance, since ‘I can’t be trusted’!”

Marq growled, holding her tight, “Hey, maybe that’s how you guys do things in the corporate world, but I’m not that shockin’ petty.”

Gale squirmed, “Oooh, I know you didn’t just say that…”

A resounding crack sounded from below them. Marq and Gale whipped around, locating the source.

A lone sniper on one of the rooftops. Fenris. Very angry Fenris.

Two more shots rang out, and suddenly Marq’s right arm was throbbing in pain.

“Ssshh---shockin’ hel...right in the shoulder…went clean through…”

Marq shifted Gale’s body weight onto his good arm as the sniper reloaded his weapon. He turned his attention away from the bloodied wound and surmised that the attacker was just about ready to take another shot at the floating couple, “C’mon Gale, we gotta…”

And then he felt something wet under Gale’s head start to soak through the silk fabric of his suit.

“Gale…? Jesus, Gale?!”

No response.

“GALE!”

He wiped the bangs from her face, but her head just rolled back onto his bloodied palm.

“God, no. Please, God, no….GAAAAAALLE!!!”

The Fenris sniper zoomed in with his automated scope, cocking his gun, readying the shot that’d bring both of them out of the sky.

---

This issue was so freaking hard to write, you can’t understand. I tried to re-write it a good three or four times at least before I settled on something I liked. But I think this worked out a bit better than the initial false starts did. Certainly is a bit more compact plot-wise than I expected, despite its eleven-page length. Regardless, I hope you guys enjoyed the first issue of Moon Knight 2099UGR’s brand-slappy new ONGOING SERIES!

And yeah, that’s one hell of a cliffhanger, isn’t it. All I can say? I hope you’ve enjoyed seeing Gale around, because you won’t be seeing much of her anytime soon.

Next issue: Can Marq get the wounded Gale back to the Docs in time to save her life? Or is he merely bringing back a corpse to Vonvargas and company? All I can say is that Marq will be getting a visit from a member of the undead by issue’s end. And don’t be surprised if Marq gets in a scuffle or two before the end of Moon Knight volume 2, #2, entitled: “Ticking Clock”. So be here for the second scintillating, searing-hot issue of Moon Knight!

Unless you’re too busy watching paint dry. I mean, who knows? Could be fun. Never really gave it much of a chance, come to think of it.

--Jason McDonald
01.06.06

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