Written by Ed Brubaker
Art by Michael Lark
Published by Marvel
It's never easy to start again. The Daredevil series has put it's characters through hell for a while now, and although Brubaker has done an astonishing feat in picking up the book from the years of Bendis and Maleev, it's been brutally apparent that Marvel was eventually going to need the book to experience some kind of coda--some point where the ever fabled "new reader" could pick up the book and not wonder what had gone before. Regardless of how well-written Daredevil has been, and it's been extraordinary, it stopped being a comic that didn't demand further exploration about forty issues ago. Each issue, when taken by itself, spoke to a much larger idea--that's not a criticism, just as a later episode of The Wire or an out of context hour of 24 can be brilliantly entertaining, they always speak best in the larger context. In many ways, this was the issue the Bendis fans had been dreading--the month were the comic finally, mind-bogglingly, was going to have Daredevil show back up in New York City and claim that he wasn't Matthew Murdock, the month when the genius move that initiated the whole book (the outing of his secret identity) was washed over and filed back on the shelf.
It wasthat issue--and although that portion of the book, just as the reunion of the various supporting characters, was about as unbelievable as could have been expected, it was still treated soberly enough that one couldn't hold to much against Mr. Brubaker. The secret identity is a meat and potatoes tradition, and any realist knew that it would have to return, eventually. After all, Daredevil is a Marvel owned character, which means that while these are excellent times for it's creators, eventually, somebody who doesn't like the character is going to end up writing it, and somebody who can't draw that well is going to provide the pictures, and Daredevil is going to suck all over again. That's the way mainstream comics work: they're rarely great, they're sometimes good, but they're usually bad, bad, bad.
In the final portion of this talk-heavy comic, one that only includes a few pages of costume-laden frames, the newly exonerated Matthew Murdock meets with his end-all arch-nemesis, Kingpin. It's one of the strongest pieces of back-and-forth dialog that's ever made it into a super-hero comic, and it encapsulates what has made the transition from Bendis to Brubaker so well--both writers recognize that Daredevil works best when it's about one thing--the relationship between a hero and his villain. Everything that's occurred in this book since they took over, can somehow be traced back to what these two men have done to each other--be it the murder of Murdock's one true love, or the attempted patricide that resulted in the outing of Murdock's identity. As Brubaker makes abundantely, finally, clear, Daredevil the comic isn't about Daredevil alone--it's about what wrestling with evil does to one man. More than ever before, the Daredevil comic on the stands today is the best possible example of what a post-modern, post-therapy comic looks like.
It won't last forever--anyone with a years worth of monthly comic experience knows that. Don't miss out. On that note, a moment of grief should be shed for the closing of one of the more reliably entertaining books on the shelf, Legends of the Dark Knight. With 214 issues of totally up and down quality, LODK was a reliable book that ignored the passage of taste and time and stuck to doing one thing: Batman doing stuff stories. While it had more misses than hits in it's 17 year run, it was nice to know that once a month there would be a Batman comic that didn't care if your knowledge extended beyond "Isn't his name Bruce something?" It will be missed--especially since its replacement, Batman Confidential, is about the best example of how to do a bad idea badly.
-Tucker Stone, 2007
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