'Moon Knight's First Episode Seemingly Swipes A Lot From An Obscure DC Comic

Moon Knight's thrilling first episode gave us a glimpse into what would happen if (mild spoilers ahead) Ricky Gervais played a Marvel superhero. The entire series premiere is about Oscar Isaac as an awkward British museum gift shop attendant with a serious sleepwalking problem who very slowly realizes he has an alternate personality as some sort of badass adventurer. It's an interesting concept ... that, as we've covered, was completely absent from the original Moon Knight comics. Steven Grant, the name Isaac's wimpy character goes by, was an alias Moon Knight used to pose as a suave millionaire playboy. 

The multiple personality dynamic we see in the Disney+ show has more in common with a relatively obscure DC Comics series called Rose and the Thorn. A 1970 issue of Superman's Girlfriend, Lois Lane presented Rose Forrest, a shy secretary who keeps waking up in strange places with bruise marks all over her body. 

Of course, that's because she's secretly a violent vigilante called Thorn and doesn't even know about it. In her case, this is due to the trauma of watching her dad being murdered by criminals -- since poor unassuming Rose Forrest is "incapable of violence," she unknowingly creates her Thorn personality to go out at night and break criminal bones. While initially unaware of her own heroic deeds, as the character progressed she slowly began catching on. 

Like Moon Knight's various personalities, Rose starts seeing Thorn or hearing her inside her head when she wants to take over the driver's seat, which she usually resists. Then, other "alters" join the party: one of them, the ultra-violent "Wild Rose," talks like an Irish person for some reason, meaning that Thorn was doing the inexplicable accent thing long before Oscar Isaac. 

It remains to be seen if the rest of the Moon Knight show will follow the rest of Rose and Thorn's DC Comics career, which would mean that he'd become inmortal, help found a team of superpowered teens in the 30th century, and at one point team up with Batman to fight some Nazis who stole his dad's corpse. 

Follow Maxwell Yezpitelok's heroic effort to read and comment on every '90s Superman comic at Superman86to99.tumblr.com. 

Top image: Marvel Studios