The Four Color Media Monitor

While everyone's been giving attention to how Golden Age Green Lantern Alan Scott was turned gay all for the sake of it, and even the gay wedding of Northstar, there's another character who underwent this sad retconning about 6 years ago: Jean-Paul duChamp, Moon Knight's pilot who was nicknamed Frenchie, in the Moon Knight series published several years ago. There's actually 2 problems prevalent in that series. Here's the first one:

Issue #3 re-introduces Jean-Paul DuChamp, Marc’s pilot, who has left him and opened a bistro. In another twist, Frenchie reveals that he’s gay, which angers Marc because Jean-Paul didn’t trust him enough to tell him. Of course, [Charlie] Huston makes it clear that Marc didn’t know because it wasn’t important to him – if it wasn’t about him, he didn’t care. In yet another twist, Jean-Paul has no legs – he alludes to Marc’s brother “taking” them.

Oh no. Not only was Frenchie exploited for the political correctness, he even underwent the same treatment Flash Thompson did a few years afterward, when his legs were lost in the Iraq war. I'd guess the reasons why Huston did the former and the editors approved is because they didn't want to introduce a wife for Frenchie out of the same mentality that led to destroying the Spider-Marriage in 2007, or they didn't even want to introduce a girlfriend for Jean-Paul because they didn't want to add a new cast member to Moon Knight's own recurring cast, in resistance to creativity.

Now the second problem:

As his return is fueled by several dark areas within his psyche, Marc is certainly not the picture of a healthy human being. He doesn’t get the girl – Marlene wants a normal life without drama (although that doesn’t mean she’s out of Marc’s life for good). He doesn’t get his best friend back – Jean-Paul has moved on, both in his romantic affections (he admits that he loved Marc for years, but of course Marc was ignorant of this) and in his pursuits, as he doesn’t see the attraction of causing bodily harm to people anymore. He has alienated others in his life – his old ally, Gena, wants nothing to do with him, mainly because she blames him for the death of one of her sons, who joined the Army because he wanted the adventure Marc once promised him and died in Iraq.

This volume of Moon Knight is certainly not the picture of a healthy series either. Not only do they abuse one of Doug Moench's creations, they even had the gall of dragging allusions to leftist anti-war politics into this. Real life wars may be necessary, but they are not adventurous, and not even WW1, WW2, or Vietnam; they're just sad and horrific because of what the tyrannic autocrats who started them were doing to innocent people. And if the writers were trying to suggest that conservatives view war as "fun" that's simply offensive.

I own a few issues from the 2 older Moon Knight series from the early 80s and early 90s, and consider them a lot better than this tripe. Frenchie may be a minor character, but that's no excuse at all for retconning him, or even severing his legs. What an embarrassment.

Did I mention there's also lurid bloodletting in this series?

I am so not wanting to see Marc Spector and company have to endure this. This is absolutely gross and disgusting.

Labels: dreadful writers, marvel comics, Moon Knight, politics, violence