What if you wrote a storyline for a very famous comic book character, and it was so well received that when Marvel Studios decided to make a TV series they used the storyline but didn’t even contact you in any way, shape, or form about being involved? That would suck, and it’s exactly what happened to Moon Knight writer Jeff Lemire.
Lemire, along with Greg Smallwood, wrote the story arc that was widely used as a template for the show. While Smallwood was asked to be a producer on the show, Lemire was not. He said he didn’t even get a courtesy phone call or email from Marvel Studios.
“You learn a lot doing this. I guess you always knew, that at the end of the day, you don’t control work-for-hire stuff. But no, I was not contacted in any way,” Lemire said, per Comicbook.com. Lemire seems to be taking the whole thing in stride. He’s happy with the story he worked on, and he’s happy the 14-issue run is a fan favorite as well, even though he wasn’t even paid for inspiring the show.
“I’m very proud of that Moon Knight run. I know people really like it and it’s great that people responded to it and I love it. Then you just learn that at the end of the day, it’s much better to do your own work, your creator owned stuff, because you have that control over it and because it can sting a little bit to have people being heavily influenced by things you created and not being credited or compensated, so you kind of have to just move on and do your own thing.”
Lemire is a Canadian comic book writer who’s worked on some other very high-profile comic book projects, including Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight, Sweet Tooth, Joker: Killer Smile, and Essex County Trilogy. It’s not like Lemire doesn’t have experience adapting comic books to TV, either.
In 2021, he was an on-set consultant for the Sweet Tooth show on Netflix. As for Moon Knight, it was Lemire’s idea to have Marc Spector end up in a mental institution. One of the great things about that was Moon Knight’s obvious issues with mental health, something that set the hero apart from more clean-cut superheroes like Superman or The Avengers.
In a 2016 interview about his Moon Knight run, he opened up a bit about the hospital storyline that was so instrumental to the show.
“The hospital Marc finds himself in is a bit of a throwback to another era where mental health was much more taboo and these hospitals and facilities were much harsher and more like prisons than hospitals. I wanted this place to represent a lot of the stigma and negativity surrounding mental health. It is not a nice place. While I think we are making progress and are becoming much more open about talking about and addressing mental health in our society today, there is still a lot of negativity surrounding it. And this place is like the most exaggerated, horrible version of that.”
Not crediting or cutting a check to Lemire in this case is a travesty. Marvel Studios made a lot of money adapting his work. Pay him, you bastards.
Moon Knight is streaming on Disney Plus. Still no official word from Disney on another season.