Over the course of his Marvel Comics’ appearances, Marc Spector has traditionally chosen to keep his circle fairly small. Among those in that circle, there’s been very few constants, but Jean-Paul Duchamp, a fellow merc who has been buddies with Spector before his days as the Fist of Khonshu, is one of them.
Over the years, Duchamp, who Spector calls “Frenchie”, became an integral part of Spector’s work as the Crescent Crusader and when word broke the Marvel Studios was developing a Moon Knight series, comic fans expected he’d be among the supporting characters helping out Oscar Issac’s Lunar Legionnaire. Unfortunately, however, other than a tiny Easter egg, Frenchie was nowhere to be found in the series. According to writer Jeremy Slater, in an interview with Comic Book’s Adam Barnhardt, the lack of Frenchie wasn’t because of a lack of interest in using the character.
There were times where we had versions of Frenchie in the show. Because you look at it, Frenchie doesn’t make sense for those first two episodes because they’re all in London, they’re all from Steven’s perspective. And then we knew that once we were going to Egypt, we had to get them in the tomb pretty fast. And once wearing that final battle in the last two episodes, we’re spending most of that in the Egyptian underworld.
Jeremy Slater, via Comic Book
So with Frenchie crossed off the list for the early episodes and the later ones, it didn’t leave him much room at all, as Slater explained:
So we knew episode three was really the only chance we had for a Frenchie cameo. And it kind of wound up of him just being a pilot just flying them in. And it felt like a bad use of the character. Like it wasn’t a cool or memorable version of Frenchie. It was just sort of like, ‘Oh yeah, he’s the pilot in the background.’ So we made the decision of like, when we do Frenchie, let’s do him right. Let’s give him an actual role and an actual character and something to do in the storyline. So I think teasing his name on the phone was our way of letting Frenchie’s fans know like, ‘Yes, he exists in this world. He definitely has some sort of business relationship-partnership with Marc.’ And hopefully that is something we get to explore in future stories.
Jeremy Slater, via Comic Book
Frenchie fans can take solace in the fact that Slater was actively looking to do the character a solid by giving him a chance to matter. Whether or not he’ll get that chance down the road is no certainty, however, as Marvel Studios is being very secretive about the future of Moon Knight. Here’s hoping we see Duchamp flying the Mooncopter somewhere down the road.
Source: Comic Book
