It’s not hard to see why Marvel’s Moon Knight is often compared to DC’s Batman. Both are tremendously wealthy, shaped by early trauma, and driven to protect their cities from evil. Each stalks the night in cape and cowl, dispensing their own brand of justice. But the comparison is a false equivalence. While they share surface-level similarities, they are fundamentally different characters. Batman’s stories are rooted in gritty tales of crime and punishment, whereas Moon Knight often ventures into the supernatural, the occult, and the psychologically terrifying. In fact, Moon Knight’s horror pedigree not only distinguishes him from Batman but also highlights Marvel’s unique role as a purveyor of horror within comics.
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While superheroes are the “bread and butter” of the DC and Marvel comic universes, they’re not the only genre of storytelling the two publishers engage in. Both produce a diverse range of material, with horror being a key genre. In fact, except for a brief period between the mid-1950s and the early 1970s, both have been key publishers of horror comics dating back to the 1940s. Naturally, each has injected its own unique style into the horror stories each publishes. However, during the revival of horror comics in the 1970s, DC and Marvel moved in different directions regarding the style, vibe, and content of their horror stories.
While DC tends to stick with a traditional horror aesthetic focused on monster and occult-based narratives like Swamp Thing, Phantom Stranger, and Sandman, Marvel took a different approach by blending horror and supernatural elements within its superhero stories. For Marvel, no character better exemplifies this blend than Moon Knight, which explains why Marvel’s horror landscape sets itself apart from DC’s horror storytelling.
Moon Knight and the Evil That Lurks in the People’s Hearts
For the casual Marvel fan or anyone not deeply familiar with Moon Knight, he may seem like a standard comic book hero at first glance. He wears a mask and a cape, fights crime, and uses unique sets of powers, abilities, and technologies to protect the public. However, if you peel back the veneer of his heroic persona, you will discover a far more complex character — one whose story is deeply intertwined with the occult that lies as the backbone of great horror stories.
Perhaps the best indication of Moon Knight’s horror origins lies in the way creators Doug Moench and Don Perlin introduced him to the Marvel Comics universe. Rather than in the pages of a superhero comic, they introduced him in one of Marvel’s more popular horror series of the time – Werewolf by Night. In a two-part story running in Werewolf by Night (1972) #32-33, Marc Spector, Moon Knight’s primary alter ego, is a well-traveled, experienced mercenary commissioned by a secret cabal of shadowy figures to find and capture Jack Russell, also known as “Werewolf.”
Interestingly, in the “Weremail by Night” section of Issue #38, the creators’ response to a question about whether fandom will ever see Moon Knight again stated that they had no immediate plans for Moon Knight to appear going forward. However, by choosing to debut him in a horror title, they inadvertently ensured that his character would be permanently rooted in the genre’s dark and atmospheric aesthetic, defining his future development long after those ‘immediate plans’ had passed.
Moon Knight Introduces the Horror Hero
A few years later, when Moench and Bill Sienkiewicz outlined the origins of the Crescent Crusader in their 1980 Moon Knight series, we learn that Spector is not only the experienced mercenary who was hired to capture Russell in the Werewolf by Night series, but also far from an average soldier of fortune. As revealed in Moon Knight #1, Spector had died, killed by his partner after Spector’s sudden change of heart threatened the partner’s plans to enrich himself. More importantly for horror stories, Spector was resurrected by the Egyptian Moon God Khonshu to become his “fist of vengeance,” which explains the choice of his name “Moon Knight.” But, if fighting a werewolf weren’t enough to demonstrate Moon Knight’s ties to horror, his connections to resurrection, Egyptian death mythology, spirits, cults, and supernatural powers certainly should be.
Beyond that, the character has continued to evolve through the work of writers such as Jeff Lemire, who reimagined Moon Knight’s original three identities — Marc Spector, Steven Grant, and Jake Lockley — as manifestations of his dissociative identity disorder. These identities were not, as readers first believed, merely disguises and tools Spector used to gather information about criminal activity. Instead, as stated in Jeff Lemire and Greg Smallwood’s Moon Knight (2016) series, the identities stemmed from deep psychological trauma rooted in his childhood. The trauma was then compounded by his death, resurrection, and links to Khonshu and other Egyptian deities. Taken together, Moon Knight’s background is filled with the unsettling, eerie elements that are hallmarks of classic horror storytelling.
The Moon Knight Horror Style
In the world of Moon Knight, horror and heroism are inextricably linked — a rare and compelling fusion of genres. Supernatural beings, occult mysteries, and monsters are not merely seasonal elements of his story. Conversely, protecting the streets from common criminals is also not something he avoids. Both are fundamental to his identity. He is as likely to battle demons and hellspawn as he is to stop a mugger stealing an old lady’s handbag. He’s the one true supernatural masked vigilante; his stories are uniquely told from this fascinating dual perspective.
This is not to say that DC horror is unreadable. In fact, over the decades, DC has shown itself to be a leader in traditional horror storytelling. Characters like Swamp Thing, Hellblazer, Deadman, and even Batman illustrate that DC can produce compelling horror-adjacent superhero tales. However, none of those examples inject the same level of supernatural and psychological horror or integrate terrifying battles with monsters and inner demons to the same degree as Moon Knight does. He’s living a nightmare while fighting crime.
While Moon Knight is the “poster ghoul” of Marvel’s horror-hero lineup, he is not the only one haunting the shadows of the Marvel Comics universe. Marvel boasts a loaded beastly bullpen including Johnny Blaze’s Ghost Rider, Blade, Morbius, and Tigra – a roster that gives Marvel a distinct horror-storytelling edge over DC.
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