Daredevil - The Thread

The Elektra issues therein are generally a cut above the rest; and the Klaus Janson-drawn ones similarly great.

Elektra Lives Again (which has been reprinted -- woe me for having bought the first run HC for $40!) is wonderful though not necessary -- it's Miller art before he gets messy à la Sin City. Beautiful coloring from Lynn Varley, too.

And of course, there's Elektra: Assassin, but that has minimal Matt Murdock-content even though it ranks as one of the best things Miller's ever done (and that applies to Sienkiewicz too).

What was the arc that FM did w/ Mazzuchelli? That was pretty tight, some say the best arc in spandex history.

Frank Miller with Bill Sienkiewicz is win/win all 'round. Leee's right about the first volume of the Miller DD being largely superfluous. Stick with the others, though. Outstanding work. Before Frank Miller came on, DD was pretty dire, so unless you want a heaping helping of goofiness, stay away from anything that wasn't drawn by Gene Colan or Wally Wood...

The Born Again trade is sold under that name, also.

PS - Don't bother w/ the Mack stuff. Even the one Bendis wrote. DON'T TRY IT.

I say classic, esp. the bits where he;s trying to decide which of his three secret identities to marry Karen in.

I was reading a good thread elsewhere about how much crap Foggy gets laid on him. He's easily one of the most unsung supporting characters in comics (same goes for his legal skills).

Btw, I just finished Daredevil vol. 7. Hot shit. I suppose I'll ignore the David Mack volume that follows it and wait for more Bendis trades.

But, yeah, the Typhoid Mary issues are the only ones Marvel's probably going to collect from her run, unless they extend the reach of their "gotta-TP-it-all!" program.

The Mike Murdock idea could have been good, but Stan only kept it going by ignoring its big flaws (no one ever asked why they never saw the two brothers together, despite their always hanging out in the same places with the same people!) and by not going far enough. Mike talked in a flashier style, but he never really did anything outrageous, never gave the impression of living a different life or offering Matt significant freedom from the straightness of his established lifestyle and routines. He just talked in a jazzier way, but since it was Stan writing, it always read rather like a comic book writer's idea of a groovy playboy manner, not like any kind of terribly convincing patter.

There should really have been some kind of fight between Mike and Bernard the poet, Lee's other 'what-the-kids-are-into' character. Both are cringeworthy yet secretly deeply pleasurable. Especially Bernard.

The fact that they're soliciting the Secret Marvel Daredevil 24-page Encyclopaedia (or whatever they call it) with the question 'And who the blazes is Mike Murdock??' bodes ill. If there's only one comic's worth of space to go into Daredevil's life and times, why include Mike? Unless you're planning on bringing him back?

Don't forget that the same canister was responsible for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. (In the original comic, that is.)

I also realized that I somehow missed vol. 11, Golden Age, which looks pretty cool!

i'm going to read hte bendis stuff next.

Secrets, lies -- and lawyers!
"Daredevil" suffered for years under Frank Miller's shadow, but Brian Bendis and Alex Maleev made it one of the most engrossing comics of the last decade.

By Douglas Wolk

Jan. 05, 2006 | When the final issue of Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev's four-year run on "Daredevil" appears later this month, it'll conclude one of the most engrossing stories that's appeared in mainstream comics this decade, an ornately zig-zagging narrative about moral blindness and double lives, with a hero sinking irreparably into a pit he's dug for himself. (The first three-quarters of their collaboration have been collected in six paperbacks or three hardcovers, all published by Marvel.) Bendis is the most prolific writer in comics right now -- he writes four other monthly series and then some -- but his work with Bulgarian-born artist Maleev has a distinct tone and look, an intimate, understated security-camera perspective on the demimonde of crime, law and the press. They've managed to make "Daredevil" their own -- a doubly impressive feat, considering that almost everyone who's worked on the series for the past 20 years has struggled and failed to get out from under Frank Miller's shadow.

"Daredevil" was launched by Marvel Comics in 1964 as a superhero comic with a Big Shocking Twist -- the hero is blind! and a lawyer! because, all together now, justice is blind! And he dresses up in a spandex devil suit, because he lives in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of New York! The series spent the next 15 years limping along as the poor cousin of "Spider-Man" and "Fantastic Four." When Miller, then an unknown 22-year-old cartoonist, and his artistic collaborator Klaus Janson began their work on the series in 1979, it was marginal at best, a generic superhero title with no particular reason to exist. They quickly reworked it into something far darker -- both visually and metaphorically -- and more interesting than it had been, influenced by film noir, crime fiction and Will Eisner's old "Spirit" comics. Miller's "Daredevil" became hugely popular, especially after he introduced Elektra, the hero's ex-lover, now a ninja assassin. Ninja assassins were pretty big in the '80s.

Both Miller and Janson left "Daredevil" in 1983, and went on to wider celebrity with "The Dark Knight Returns" and (in Miller's case) "Sin City." But from then on, "Daredevil" was the comic book Frank Miller used to do; nearly everyone who attempted a "Daredevil" story after them was either trying to send "a valentine to Frank Miller," as Bendis calls it, or to rebel against his legacy. (Both the wretched "Daredevil" movie and the even worse "Elektra" movie were ineptly crayoned valentines.)

When Bendis and Maleev began their "Daredevil" collaboration in late 2001, they paid their respects; most of the supporting characters from the Miller era appeared in short order, most notably Wilson Fisk, the enormous Hell's Kitchen crime lord known as the Kingpin. Their "Daredevil" looked and moved nothing like Miller's, though. From the beginning of their first issue, Maleev unleashed a drawing style that's sometimes been called "photo-realistic," which it isn't, exactly -- it's wildly, unmistakably stylized, even when he's clearly working from photographs of cityscapes or models. But it's believable, even seductive, in the same way a grainy surveillance tape is seductive. And their opening story line, "Underboss," caroms back and forth in time like a ricocheting bullet: a model in miniature of the way Bendis' four-year plot loops around and through itself, revisiting key moments from different perspectives. (Julian Darius has assembled a terrific set of annotations for "Underboss" and its sequel, "Out," teasing out their scrambled chronology.)

That splintered, documentary approach is appropriate for Bendis and Maleev's overall story, one of whose major themes is information and evidence -- who knows what, and which secrets are actually secret. At the center is a nasty twist on one of the sacred tenets of superhero comics: the secret identity. Beneath his mask, Daredevil is a trial lawyer, Matthew Murdock. If that were ever to get out, his life would be destroyed -- he'd be instantly disbarred, and go to prison for any number of obstruction-of-justice charges -- and the lives of everyone around him would be at risk from his enemies. So nobody knows. Except for a bunch of other superheroes, and various ex-girlfriends, and his partner at his law firm, and a trusted reporter or two, and a rather large number of people who've seen him with his mask off, and a bunch of murderous ninjas, and -- oh, yes -- the Kingpin. And the Kingpin's family knows, too, and so do a handful of friends they've blabbed to, and following a mob power struggle, one morning Matthew Murdock wakes up and his secret is on the front page at every newsstand in Manhattan.

There's no going back. From that moment on, the series' hero is in a morally untenable situation, and everything he does makes things worse. The only thing Murdock can do is to start lying, and make all of his allies lie for him, too. He denies everything. He files lawsuits that he knows are fraudulent. He beats the Kingpin half to death, drags his unconscious body into an underworld bar, and declares himself the new boss of Hell's Kitchen. Then the narrative abruptly jumps forward a year, and things really start going downhill.

The second half of the Bendis-Maleev run fills in the gaps of the missing year bit by bit, and suggests what happens when a hero chooses to rule in hell (or its kitchen) rather than serve in heaven. Murdock has taken on the responsibility of single-handedly saving his community, and he can't even save himself. He's forced to break ties with his allies; he becomes the pawn of greater legal powers than his own; he's de facto a Kingpin himself. Bendis hints briefly that Murdock might have had a nervous breakdown before everything went wrong, then makes it clear that he's just made one terrible error in judgment after another, out of pride and shame. By the final Bendis-Maleev story line, "The Murdock Papers" (which probably won't be collected until this summer, but that's what comics stores are for), Daredevil is trapped and desperate, under attack by both sides of the law he used to defend, and he's made it impossible for anyone around him to do right, either.

Naturally, there are all sorts of other superhero-comic devices keeping things lively, too: a sexy ex-Soviet spy called the Black Widow; a couple of cameo appearances by Spider-Man; the illegal drug Mutant Growth Hormone; a woman known as the Night Nurse whose clinic patches up injured heroes, no questions asked. It's melodramatic, pulp-fictional stuff, and what keeps it from getting soggy is Bendis and Maleev's shadowy, low-key delivery. Bendis' dialogue is crisp and fragmentary, often David Mamet-inflected; his favorite trick is to give the reader just enough information to get a sense of what's happening, letting crucial context slip out bit by bit, much later. His Matthew Murdock thinks and talks like a lawyer, convinced that he can make true the legal fiction that he's not Daredevil if he keeps repeating it, even as the story's gap between what's just and what's legal keeps widening. And the violence of Bendis' "Daredevil" isn't what usually gets called superhero-comic violence -- the glamorous, bloodless fight scenes he writes in "Ultimate Spider-Man" and "New Avengers." In "Daredevil," it's quick, confusing, horrible and resonant, and its victims are haunted or ruined by it.

Maleev isn't much for heroic poses, either. His artwork has the appearance of a newspaper photo that's been blown up and photocopied until it disintegrates into blotches and grains -- the backgrounds in his outdoor scenes appear to actually be degraded photographs, and his characters' body language and facial expressions are indicated more by jagged, scribbly flickers of ink and spackled folds of shadow than by clear, continuous lines. (Often, a blown-up detail from one panel becomes another.) Colorists Matt Hollingsworth and Dave Stewart reinforce his drawings with flat, subdued tones that allude to the look of hand-tinted black-and-white photographs.

The visual techniques Maleev and his colorists use change a little with the demands of each story line: In the "Golden Age" sequence, which deals with the history of the rulers of Hell's Kitchen, Maleev draws flashbacks to the early days of Daredevil's career as simpler line art, and they're colored with slightly off-register matrices of dots against an off-white background, to suggest the look of old four-color comics on yellowing newsprint. The one really jolting thing about reading the Bendis-Maleev "Daredevil" in sequence, actually, is that a couple of crucial segments are drawn by fill-in artists; they're all competent or better, but they're all normal cartoonists, and the contrast with Maleev's technique breaks the spell.

"Daredevil" will be continuing after Bendis and Maleev bow out, although Bendis has noted that his conclusion will make things awfully difficult for his successors. Next month, the series is being taken over by writer Ed Brubaker and artist Michael Lark, who've already collaborated on some impressive story lines for "Gotham Central" (a police procedural set in Batman's Gotham City). Brubaker has said that he wants to "piss all over the book and make it mine as soon as humanly possible." That's promising, even though it's going to take some doing -- but it didn't look like anybody could pull it off after Frank Miller, either.

i'm there!

In softcover:

Vol 4: Underboss
Vol 5: Out
Vol 6: Lowlife
Vol 7: Hardcore
Vol 9: King Of Hell's Kitchen
Vol 10: The Widow
Vol 11: Golden Age
Vol 12: Decalogue
Vol 13: The Murdock Papers

In hardcover:

Vol 2, 3, 4, and 5

i'll give you david mack.

xxpost

it's not like i have anything against photo 'realism', or even fumetti - but maleev's artwork has that kind of 'rotoscoped' quality that puts me in mind of ralph bashki's LOTR animated movie- the obvious basis in 'reality' of the figure poses/facial expressions PULLS ME OUT of the story. when maleev draws the owl in a way that's totally at odds w/ all his previous depictions, i just think he cldn't find a model who looked like the owl. whereas w/ gene colan you just think 'shit this guy can really fucken draw'

I don't see bad draftmanship here.

but i am sounding like an old fart crank now, i def. come to ILC to praise the new comics not slam 'em, so i'll shut up now

I'd hit it, though.

Also, I like how the photo refs give the feeling of a specific if not real city. The "ghetto" in comic books (and comic book movies--see every Batman movie ever made) usually ends up being a sort of generic slum.

EB: Don’t take it.

UGH UGH UGH. Are all "comics journalists" total goobers? I mean, this is sub-Wizard humor!

Anyway, I guess I will see it through for a little while to see where this going to go.

[Huk sank my x-post]

Also: I'm dubious about the big "spoiler" for the Brubaker run that's been floating around the last couple of months (on the cover of #83, in the solicitation for #84, etc.), since Bendis makes a joke about it in his text piece in #81... I suspect it's more than it seems.

I'm torn about continuing on with Brubaker. On one hand, I think he's set up to tell really good stories with the new status quo. On the other, the part of me that didn't care about Daredevil before starting the Bendis story kinda wants the story to have a beginning, a middle, and a definitive ending. I definitely wish that this could be the last issue of Daredevil ever published.

As good as his run was, his return to the character with Mazzucelli on art is better.

Love and War is ace. Good luck finding it, though. You'd think they'd reprint it and Miller's whole run together, which sorta works as one giant graphic novel if you look at it from a safe distance.

As much as I liked Brubaker's CATWOMAN and SLEEPER (and other stuff), his Daredevil work seems static and like he really wants to write it for television. I'll stick with it a bit, but the last issue wasn't a mind-blowing start to the run. Sez me, anyways.

But yes, the McKenzie-written/Miller-drawn stuff is very inessential, and the Man Without Fear mini came squarely after Miller had turned rub. Plus the Visionaries books are pretty much unreadable for the way they use shitty newsprint separations on high-gloss paper

everything is a lurid purple printed darker than the line art
I didn't buy the third volume because I'd found the second too painful to read

various Gene Colan issues, but esp. the 'blind soldier' story inked by george klein - too too gorgeous

steve gerber's brief run roundabout the issue 100s - not gerber in full-on weirdo mode, but tight, entertaining superhero comics w/ gd black widow stuff

jim shooter and gil kane's equally brief run on the title just prior to roger mckenzie - these were the comics that really established bullseye as one of DD's best villains, and kane is mostly inked by klaus janson, so again the artwork is v. fine indeed

i haven't read em, but lots of ppl speak highly of the ann nocenti/jr jr issues, and even some of the denny o'neil/mazzuchelli issues are v. readable

Although I did buy a few issues of Daredevil for the first time EVER last weekend, 'cuz I'm a budding Brubaker buff. I kinda liked 'em, not because of their inherent Daredeviltry (and/or Murdockery), but because I like implausible tales of miserable prison life, and 'cuz I kept hoping Murdock would start acting like Ryan O'Riley.

I mostly sped through the volumes -- probably a bad idea given the mountains of dialogue BMB writes -- and only two really stood out for me, I think vols. 6 and 7, if only because BMB bams DD/Murdock up a thousand notches, but afterwards he comes back down with angsty sadfacery.

But by no means am I a majority opinion, so take w/ a grain of salt etc.

Also, first Brubaker DD trade soon, pls!

I finished up reading the Bendis/Maleev run of Daredevil a couple of days ago. I really liked it, probably the best reading extended run on a super hero book of stuff that came out in my absence from following comics I have found so far. They really managed to stretch out the Daredevil mythos without exactly repeating what Miller did, while at the same time building up off of it. The last arc when Elektra finally shows up and pretty much every thing goes boom was really killer.

I was a big fan of Daredevil in the 80s and started reading the book month to month in the latter part of Miller's first run. I'd like to re-read them again, but I seem to remember that the quality didn't fall off after he left and Denny O'Neil wrote the book. Towards the end of O'Neil's run Dave Mazzuchelli became the artist and it kind of sets up Miller's second run, which is one of his best stories. After that you get Ann Nocenti with John Romita Jr. and Al Williamson doing artwork and it was also really good. I got a chunk of the in-between issues out of a 50 cent bin and once I get them filled out will give them a re-read.

The early Miller Daredevils are not as good as it got, but the story where Murdock goes up against the Hulk and the one with the Gladiator are kind of classic in an early 80s Marvel way. Bendis did a good job playing off that Gladiator story in his run.

Either way, I am kind of hooked and am going to start in on Brubaker's run on Daredevil next.

Another more recent Daredevil story I liked was that Dave Lapham Daredevil/Punisher miniseries. I thought that was pretty good and I think Lapham might do pretty well working with Daredevil. Considering Hammerhead is shown in the cell next to the Owl and Kingpin, I'd say that he comes up next in the Brubaker story.

The first two Ed Brubaker and Michael Lark story-lines were also pretty cool. I think for a lot of writers, having the main character put in the joint and his status quo completely screwed would lead to a quick fix, but Brubaker played it out really well.

I recently re-read all my Miller DD's (somewhere in the mid 170s up through Elektra's death and Miller's final issue) and then the Miller Mazzuchelli stuff, which I actually think is better... dunno if I need to keep 'em though. Are these worth anything, or does anybody even care about back issues anymore now that bound collections are the norm?

Other than the first appearance of Elektra, the Miller Daredevil issues don't seem to go for much more than they did 20 years ago. I got a bunch of the Denny O'Neil run out of the .50 cent bin at my local shop.

If you are wanting to sell, I think putting a big lot up on ebay seems to do better than parting it out.

eh I hate dealing with Ebay, I'd have to bag 'em and ship 'em and all that... I guess these are going out on the street. I bet my old Kirby stuff isn't worth anything anymore either, now that the New Gods and Marvel Masterworks reprints are out.

If ebay was as easy as Amazon Marketplace, the whole normal retail economy would collapse. (collapse or no, I wish it was easier.)

The Kirby DC Fourth World actually seems to be worth a few bucks, especially if it is in really good shape. The later Marvel Kirby stuff isn't as pricy.

The old 70s stuff whose prices made my eyes grow wide was early issues of The Invaders. Those things were worth pretty much nada 20 years back and they are priced crazy like nearly $40-50 bucks for a number one in VF.

I've seen people also put big lots up on Amazon Marketplace.

I really want to sell my FF #48-50 but sometimes it seems like only slabbed copies get any interest.

two items:

1) I just dug out my Fall from Grace TPB and started re-reading it...D.G. Chichester/Scott McDaniel, Daredevil's new grey costume, Elektra returns as a bald woman...it's not *THAT* good, in fact I'd go so far as to say it's *NOT* good at all, but from the sound of it, without having read either, it sounds like some sort of halfway mark between Miller's run and Bendis's...I dunno, anyboedy else read it? any thoughts? I know nobody has brought it up yet, which leads me to believe that most fans would prefer it to go unmentioned...(you're welcome)

2) Maleev's Black Widow up there is a dead ringer for Taimie Hannum (Beware: it's prolley safer to look her up on imdb than googling her...)

Not read. (My association with Chichester is only the Groo joke.) But interesting in a car crash way, or just a car crash?

For what it's worth, I too loved the Nocenti-Romita Daredevil run. This might be because it was the first Daredevil run I read, possibly even the first run of superhero comics anywhere I read. But I still have a fondness for the way DD kept getting beaten up at least once every issue, and the Typhoid Mary story was great because i) TM was hawt and ii) that kind of split personality stuff is always good for a laugh. I remember the DD crossover from the X-titles' Inferno being incredibly bizarre, but in a good way.

But interesting in a car crash way, or just a car crash?

Little bit further into it, it's not a horrible car crash or anything...it's a decent late-90s Marvel story, with all sorts of predictable crap earmarks of The Marvel way in the 90s:

- gimmicky guest stars whose role in the storyline seems contrived (Silver Sable, Venom AND Morbius show up in this one)

- new hip badass grey costume with armor signalling a new darker "EDGIER" direction.

- return of long dead popular characters in SHOCKING TWIST e.g. "hullo I'm Elektra I was never really dead I was just in a monastery in the mountaintops. And now I'm bald."

- lots of homages to Miller's golden age (including bunches of loose ends from Elektra: Assassin which presumably get cleared up here).

-the death of "Matt Murdock" and the introduction of a new alter-ego ("Jack Somebody") (in the earlier post I made the kneejerk comparison of this storyline as half-Miller, half-Bendis. The Bendis part was basically bcz in this story the whole Murdock-is-Daredevil newspaper headline was a subplot that led to the dissolution of DD's lawyer identity--in fact, to be perfectly honest, when I was reading Douglas's book and he mentioned the Bendis-Maleev run and how Bendis attempted (and achieved) a total break from Miller's version (and all other past versions) of the character, and then went onto talk abt how the story began with the front page headlines outing his secret identity, and I was all, like, "Oh, this again?"--but basically my point is that Idk what Bendis's story was about not having read it but it sounds like it transcended the genre, and Fall from Grace is 100% pure straight cliched genre so the comparison might be bunk.)

On the plus side, Daredevil gets to use nunchukus in the story. HOORAY!!!

Picked up half a dozen of the Bendis/Maleev trades at a closing-down sale and this is bravura stuff. Seriously great storytelling on every level - especially love the dialogue-free issue, the White Tiger trial, the superhero "intervention" and anything with Ben Urich. Better even than the first Miller run, and up there with Born Again, but with a voice of its own. I don't really read superhero comics anymore. Even the witty stuff like Morrison's New X-Men seems a bit too daft for me now, but there are so many outside influences here - Mamet and Pelecanos as cited above, plus Homicide and The Wire - and such a beautifully sustained sense of moral peril that it feels more like watching a great HBO show. Must pick up the last four.

Is any of Bendis's other work this good or does it get to superheroey? I can't imagine this approach working with the Avengers - maybe Spider-Man at a push.

They need to reprint the Noceti-JRJR run because it was awesome. JRJR's pencils rule hard, especially his Mephisto and demons and whatnot.

Dorian, you're gonna want to read "Alias" for sure.

I'd recommend Powers as well.

Checked out Alias, which is indeed amazing. Thanks for the recommendation.

Influenced by everyone's suggestions, I picked up a big chunk of the Nocenti run of Daredevil at Cosmic Monkey's 50-cent sale. Very much looking forward to reading it.

Yesssss. I love Nocenti's Daredevil. I'd say it should be collected in toto, but the whole run really can be snatched up for super cheap.

I should reread the Nocenti run, I really liked it when it originally came out, preferred it to Miller's run. JR Jr.'s art in it was awesome too, I still remember the scene where DD is fighting Ultron on top of a hill of discarded Ultron head. It's a shame it hasn't been collected.

Nocenti's Longshot mini was great too, I don't think Claremont ever handled either Mojo or Longshot as well as Nocenti originally did.

"discarded Ultron heads"

On the Nocenti tip, you should also check out "Someplace Strange", the Marvel graphic novel she wrote in the 80s. It's quite, er, psychedelic, but a fun read with some pretty painted John Bolton art.

on a serious DD kick these days - even considering watching the movie - only one mention of it on this thread? It seriously bombed didnt it?

It did pretty good box-office wise, enough to justify the Elektra picture, but it didn't have good buzz and a lot of people (like me), who would have been predisposed to see a Daredevil movie, just...didn't. Have yet to talk to one Daredevil fan who will straight up say "it's good."

Completely fell off of comics in the last year, seriously want to catch up, for Daredevil if nothing else. I lost track right around the second or third issue of the new Mark Waid/Marcos Martin book, which seemed AMAZINGLY good, just a pitch-perfect restart for the character after years of diminishing returns...plus the best art I've seen in a superhero book since I don't know how long.

the movie is really terrible but over the years i've gotten some mileage from telling ppl that i believe it's the greatest movie ever made. it's so self-evidently bad that no one could really believe such a thing. some high points are colin farrell as bullseye and michael clarke duncan as kingpin. jennifer garner was so bad.

Waid's DD hasn't quite rocked it out of the park as much as those first issues promised, but it's still pretty great.

I lost track right around the second or third issue of the new Mark Waid/Marcos Martin book, which seemed AMAZINGLY good, just a pitch-perfect restart for the character after years of diminishing returns...plus the best art I've seen in a superhero book since I don't know how long.

Marvel upped this to three issues every two months or something - Marcos Martin was actually the fill-in artist bcz Paolo Rivera couldn't keep up. He only did issues 4-6. (so you stayed longer than you thought!)

Mike Allred's drawing it now, and it's still pretty good, but not quite up to those great early issues.

Allred's done a one-issue fill-in, Chris Samnee is the regular artist.

The Latveria issues were awesome.