Just like Gil, I want to bring this column back to the roots of it’s creation. Friday Recommendation originally existed as an entity for me to recommend on-going titles to readers, but quickly morphed away from that to expand into the completed title territory. Today, I’d like to offer up a combination of the two.
Daredevil is, in my opinion, one of the tentpole characters in the Marvel Universe. I think that anyone who has a strong love of Marvel should love Daredevil a great deal, even though the more I talk with fans the more I find out that he’s rather under appreciated. This baffles me to a certain extent because when you look at the names that have worked on his book, it’s all writers that are incredibly loved by fans and critics alike. We can start with Frank Miller and his handle of the character, including the introduction/relationship with Elektra as well as the villainous Bullseye, and move forward to amazing runs by writers like Kevin Smith (albeit brief), Brian Bendis (which helped launch his career as a household name among Marvel fans), Ed Brubaker (which picked off perfectly where Bendis left off), and now Andy Diggle.
Now, if you’d like to get an idea of how to look at Daredevil’s history in comics, I suggest taking a look at Walt’s second Crisis of Chronology column, in which he points you in the appropriate direction in which to follow Daredevil throughout his growth throughout the Marvel Universe. Walt lays out an amazing path that I myself have taken in following this character. Today with my Friday Recommendation I would like to focus on the recent work by Andy Diggle, as well as take a brief reflection on the past runs.
Follow me behind the cut as I illuminate for you why I think Daredevil is a book you definitely need in your pull.
Daredevil is perhaps one of the easiest comic book characters to follow in the history of the Marvel Universe. Much like Batman over at DC, he is a character you can start reading with Frank Miller and work your way up. The thing that I love about Daredevil as a character is that he is one of the few characters in Marvel who is really defined and fueled by his strong sense of morality and ethics, as well as his dark past and his faith. There are so many characters in all of comics that simply exist from arc to arc, running various gauntlets and being in impossible situations while fighting their way out. Such is not the case for Daredevil. All the best writers in Daredevil, while working on the character, put Daredevil through such an emotional ride that the character is constantly pushed up to the brink of his own sanity, constantly teetering on the line of hero and anti-hero. There are moments in Daredevil’s career, especially during Bendis’ run, when the character begins to become so dark that he becomes even more of a loner than a character like Moon Knight, and Moon Knight is a schizophrenic misanthropic hero.
This is where Andy Diggle and his co-writer Antony Johnston come in. As Diggle said in an interview, every outgoing Daredevil writer’s job is to make it damn near impossible for the next artist to write. Such was the case as Brubaker signed out in issue #500, in which he left the book incredibly open ended with Daredevil stealing control of the hand from Kingpin and announcing himself as their new leader. One might believe that this is a fairly impossible idea for Daredevil to do, but it actually felt semi-plausible, given that this wouldn’t be the first time he took over an evil empire to destroy it from the inside out. So, when going into the current run of Daredevil (which starts at issue #501 and includes a one-shot Dark Reign: The List tie-in (at least, to an extent)), you need to know only a few things. First, you need to be aware that there is a new assassin in town who goes by the moniker Lady Bullseye. Secondly, after being banished from New York, the Kingpin returns after Lady Bullseye and the Hand attack him in his new life. Finally, Lady Bullseye now works for the Kingpin in a similar manner that Bullseye once did, and the two lie in wait while Matt Murdock controls the villainous ninja organization known as the Hand. While the past years of Daredevil’s history will of course only be beneficial to the reader, those are the two core plot points that I believe the reader needs to know when picking up Daredevil #501.
Continued belowSince Diggle has taken over the character, we have once again seen Matt Murdock pushed to the edge of his sanity. Brubaker’s run before focused primarily on picking up where Bendis left off (with Murdock in jail), and featured a larger conspiracy story involving the Kingpin before getting Murdock back on the streets and reestablishing him as a hero. Diggle, recognizing that the challenge of reforming an organization like the Hand wouldn’t leave the sanest of men unbroken, launched right into his tale as Murdock tried his best to find his way around murder. See, the Hand was an organization that thrived on it’s ability to assassinate anyone who got in their way even slightly, and Murdock was a hero just like any other with strict issues against murder. However, no sooner did the story begin before we saw Murdock finding a clever way. As much as he tried to dodge that bullet, Murdock did eventually end up founding Shadowland, an underground prison for which Murdock allows himself and the Hand to play judge, jury, and executioner to the prisoners they collect from the streets.
What I absolutely love about Daredevil and his stories is that the writers who are charged with his ongoing saga have such incredible talent. Since 1998, when Kevin Smith relaunched Daredevil under the Marvel Knights imprint, his book has been one of the better comics to follow in the Marvel Universe. Now is obviously no exception. Diggle is such a talented writer and works so well with Johnston that the two have created a magnificent story fusing aspects straight out of classic samurai stories and mixing it with Marvel mythology. I love that the two so clearly get the character and how he should react given his circumstances, and his path from hero to villain in the upcoming arc/event Shadowland. It’s a very rocky ride for fans throughout the past decade as his ego and his morality is consistently shattered.
Of course, in some ways reading Daredevil is like watching a horror/torture porn movie. Almost every story I can think of off the top of my head are various forms of Matt Murdock being beaten down. What I find so incredibly endearing, though, is that unlike other heroes, Murdock is incredibly resilient (up until now, of course). There aren’t a lot of characters who consistently fall back on faith the way the he does, or that allow themselves to explore their darker inhibitions in order to make themselves better heroes. A lot of reading Daredevil is reading about Matt Murdock pushing himself to these dark places, but it makes for consistently great stories that repeatedly have huge emotional pay-offs for those who become invested in and with the characters. While this is especially true in Bendis’ run for certain, Diggle and Johnston still manage to capture that emotion, and there are plenty of moments in the book where I truly feel for Matt Murdock and his downfall that I just don’t feel for other characters, because there are so few who have gone through the tragedy that he has and not immediately been broken apart by it.
It doesn’t hurt that the art for the Daredevil books are always quite fantastic. From Roberto De La Torre to Marco Checchetto, and even spanning back to the work of David Aja, David Mack and Alex Maleev, Daredevil books always have a consistent setting to them. The world he inhabits and the environment of Hell’s Kitchen is traditionally dark, and now as he moves into the lair of the Hand and Japan, the book continues to be stylized. Originally the book had a very crime and noir feel to it, but with it’s current move over seas, the imagery is much more influenced by it’s setting. It also keeps consistent for it’s amazing panel structure, which is something that has been done since Frank Miller and the various artists he worked with like David Mazzucchelli and Klaus Janson. The most recent issue of Daredevil for example, issue #507, featured a brilliantly choreographed battle in the snow on top of a set of traditional Japanese buildings as Daredevil fought for his life against a group of traitorous Hand ninjas, pictured here to the right. It’s this kind of consistent and thrilling artwork that helps fuel the action of the book while keeping the quieter moments of the book just as exhilarating and intense to read.
Now especially, we’re getting some fantastic stories from the Daredevil side of the Marvel ‘verse, and what tops it off for me is that it’s so perfect for new readers to jump in. As much as Daredevil is a continuing story, it’s very easy for new fans to pick up the title and get an understanding of what’s going on enough to want to keep reading. Even though I’m a long time reader of his stories, I always appreciate when writers take the time to make their work accessible and less pigeon holed to the current audience. If I were you, and I wasn’t currently following along with the adventures of Daredevil, I’d do my best to track down the past 8 issues of the book as well as some trades. It is safe to say that Shadowland is an event that will rank extremely high in the upcoming Multiversity Year In Review list, and should definitely be an exciting comic to follow along.
