Mark Millar's Prodigy is wasting its potential as it could have been a much more interesting take on Marvel's very-fragmented Moon Knight.
At first glance, Mark Millar's Prodigy from Image Comics came off like a love letter to spy films. It dealt with the genius professor, Edison Crane, as he took on various missions to save the world. The first volume (from Millar, Rafael Albuquerque, Marcelo Maiolo and Pete Doherty) focused on Edison trying to stop an alien incursion, led by the Hydra-like Brotherhood of the Dragon cult, which resulted in him hopping across the world with a CIA agent, Rachel.
He defused missiles in the sky, fought off various armies, went diving with sharks, and explored various temples as well. It added a bit of Indiana Jones and Batman to his story, where easily he got out of every precarious situation. However, after dissecting the way Edison's mind works, this story could have been a much more interesting take on Moon Knight.
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In Moon Knight, Marc Spector's Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) basically fragmented his mind into various personalities. The Disney+ series recently brought this story to life, with Marc as a mercenary, Steven as a bumbling museum worker, and Jake Lockley as a cabbie and hitman. What made Marc so interesting is how often his personalities would clash, especially as they didn't want to lose the body they were in, across the books and the TV show.
That led to a typical vigilante story, with each personality taking over for a different mission. In Edison's case, he's so brilliant, he compartmentalized his mindscape, so that a different Edison exists up there for every field in the world. One builds rockets to blow up asteroids, another's a medical expert in open-heart surgery, one's a bomb expert, another's a chess master, and so on. In short, there are many genius Edisons upstairs, who often coalesce and work together -- as seen when they had to find a way to stop the incursion portal.
This created the opportunity for one (or more) of Edison's personalities to go rogue. After all, it's easy to see them all having different views on saving the world, with the possibility others could go extremist, akin to the MCU's Ultron. In that case, what would make this so much more interesting than Moon Knight, is that Edison could have gone from the smartest hero in the world to the smartest villain. That would leave a much more challenging quest, not knowing which personality delegated their expertise to the job. More so, rather than Moon Knight being a puppet to the Egyptian moon god in Khonshu, Edison might have been a puppet to a smarter master.
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The danger factor would be elevated, and trust would be eroded, especially as the evil Edison would know how the mindscape works, maybe even having left booby traps there for years in secret. In that sense, evil Edison could kill off or cripple the smarter ones, creating a whole new hunt inside Edison's mind. That paves the way for two worlds -- one with Edison on the ground, and another in his mind where he's trying to stop his greatest enemy: himself.
And make no mistake, the WMDs and traps that could be set in both realms would provide something grounded, yet more intense than what Moon Knight could ever experience when his mental civil wars occur. Ultimately, Moon Knight's personalities aren't genius intellects, so it's easy to sort those issues out, but with Edison, he may end up learning the smartest man on Earth was never the one occupying his body in what would be a cerebral rebellion.
I'm a former Chemical Engineer. It was boring so I decided to write about things I love. On the geek side of things, I write about comics, cartoons, video games, television, movies and basically, all things nerdy. I also write about music in terms of punk, indie, hardcore and emo because well, they rock! If you're bored by now, then you also don't want to hear that I write for ESPN on the PR side of things. And yes, I've written sports for them too! Not bad for someone from the Caribbean, eh? To top all this off, I've scribed short films and documentaries, conceptualizing stories and scripts from a human interest and social justice perspective. Business-wise, I make big cheddar (not really) as a copywriter and digital strategist working with some of the top brands in the Latin America region. In closing, let me remind you that the geek shall inherit the Earth. Oh, FYI, I'd love to write the Gargoyles movie for Disney. YOLO. That said, I'm on Twitter @RenaldoMatadeen. So holler.
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