- What’s the difference between Venom and Moon Knight?
- What is that funky Arabic groove playing over the end credits on Moon Knight?
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Venom is some odd parasitic alien ooze and Moon Knight is basically the avatar of an Egyptian God.
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Not a clue
Checking IMDB: probably this one
Bahlam Maak
Written by Abd El Rehim Mansour and Hany Shenouda
Performed by Nagat
Courtesy of Mazzika Group
Yeahbut. . . what is the functional difference? Like, what makes them different besides backstory?
Honestly, I know too little about Venom. But Khonshu can resurrect his host (Moon Knight). I think that is at least one difference.
One is that Venom is real. Like other people can see him/them real. Moon Knight…might be neurodivergent? Might not? And he doesn’t (usually) have any powers. And he’s a much sharper dresser.
There are three personalities involved in Moon Knight, and I do not know the source material but I’m getting the sense that the relationship between the two human personalities (or aspects of the one perhaps) is going to at least as important to the story as their relationship to the possessing supernatural/alien force. That’s one functional difference anyway.
But yes, the impatient violent and verbally abusive voice in the head that no one else hears and the superpowered personality taking over is pretty much the same thing. OTOH the taking over and not remembering portion is also done with Hulk and heck before that Dr Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, The Werewolf … Not much that isn’t derivative - which is fine if it is executed with some fun twists.
Shazam Captain Marvel is a lot closer to Moon Knight than Venom is. Actually, Silver Age Marvel Captain Marvel is too. And Hulk is closer to Venom than Moon Knight is. Superheroes swim in a pretty shallow pool.
Well, Moon Knight doesn’t generally eat people…
I haven’t seen either of the Venom movies, so I can’t speak specifically to that version of the character, but in the comics, he’s much more of an anti-hero than Moon Knight. Other heroes tend to see Moon Knight as a good but troubled person. They tend to view Venom as a monster whose saving grace is he mostly preys on other monsters. Venom/Eddie Brock also are definitely not delusional. Venom’s got an independently verifiable existence, and has bonded with multiple people over the years, starting, originally, with Spider-Man. Part of Moon Knight’s deal is that the people around him are never entirely sure if Khonshu is a real entity, or another one of Marc’s multiple personalities.
Moon Knight also has echoes of The Shadow, and Venom… does not.
Thank you all! That no one can see the superpowered entity in Moon Knight does make it so that you can tell radically different stories. And that end jam had me and my husband seat dancing.
In the comics, Venom is a retcon of an unpopular new Spider-man suit
In the original comics, Moon Knight was a Batman rip-off. Instead of a black-and-gray costume, he had a white-and-silver costume. Instead of batarangs, he had crescent darts. Instead of the Batcopter, he had the Mooncopter. Instead of Alfred the butler, he had Frenchie the copter pilot.
The original twist was that, instead of one secret identity, he had three: Steven Grant, millionaire; Marc Spector, soldier of fortune; and Jake Lockley, street-smart cab driver.
The Lockley identity was used mainly for gathering information, but arguably he had the biggest social network. He was somewhat ashamed of his past as a mercenary, but when firepower was needed, he would don camo fatigues and take up a rifle. He tried to spend most of his time as Grant, but “playboy tycoon” was arguably the shallowest persona of them all.
In the earliest comics, the mystical connection with Khonshu was rarely mentioned. Readers often opined that he had super-strength during the full moon, but the writers never explicitly said so. Whether he was resurrected from death by the Moon God, or simply woke up from a coma, was left to the reader to decide.
Later in the series, they came up with the idea that the alter egos would develop into a case of Multiple Personality Disorder.
Later writers made the Khonshu Connection explicit. The Egyptian version of the Illuminati gave him a gaudier costume and weapons. That series was cancelled fairly soon, though.