Moon Knight #3

History

The 2014 Moon Knight series launched as part of Marvel's All-New Marvel NOW! initiative, following Brian Michael Bendis's run, which had relocated Marc Spector to Hollywood. Warren Ellis and Declan Shalvey were brought on to reestablish the character in New York with a clean, accessible status quo. Ellis structured each issue as a standalone genre exercise, a method he had previously deployed on titles like Global Frequency and Secret Avengers; #3 is his supernatural-horror entry in that anthology-style framework. Shalvey confirmed in a Marvel interview that the creative process involved a degree of discovery issue-by-issue — he was not given a complete design roadmap from the outset — and that the run pushed him to develop as a visual storyteller, with colorist Jordie Bellaire assigning each issue a distinct dominant color (issue #3 is keyed in green) to further differentiate the self-contained stories.

Trivia · 8 facts

• Published May 7, 2014 by Marvel Comics; written by Warren Ellis, drawn and covered by Declan Shalvey, colored by Jordie Bellaire, lettered by Chris Eliopoulos; edited by Stephen Wacker and associate editor Ellie Pyle.
• Part of the All-New Marvel NOW! initiative — Moon Knight vol. 7, issue #3 in the series that ran #1–17 (March 2014–May 2015) with rotating creative teams.
• The issue is structured as a fully self-contained ghost story in which Moon Knight battles a group of spectral 1980s punk gang members terrorizing New York civilians, consistent with Ellis's done-in-one anthology approach across all six of his issues.
• Issue #3 is the chapter in the Ellis/Shalvey run most directly focused on Moon Knight's connection to Khonshu and Egyptian mythology, foregrounding the supernatural source of his power rather than the street-level detective or sci-fi angles of earlier chapters.
• Jordie Bellaire used a predominantly green color palette for issue #3 as part of her deliberate per-issue color-theming strategy across the six-issue run — a design choice widely noted by critics and later tied to her winning the 2014 Eisner Award for Best Colorist.
• The entire six-issue Ellis/Shalvey run, including #3, was collected in the trade paperback Moon Knight Vol. 1: From the Dead (ISBN 9780785154082), which remains the primary collected edition of this material.
• The Mr. Knight persona — the all-white suit-wearing police-consultant identity established in #1 and prominent across the run — became a permanent fixture of the character in subsequent comics and was adapted for the 2022 Disney+ Moon Knight series.
• Shalvey disclosed in a Marvel.com interview that he had no prior familiarity with Moon Knight before the series and that the design choices, including the streamlined Mr. Knight suit, evolved organically issue-by-issue rather than from a fully pre-planned blueprint.

Full credits

Variants (2)