Written by Andy Diggle
Illustrated by Davide GianfeliceIs this the final end for Daredevil…? For years he was known as the Man Without Fear. But now, trapped in his own very personal hell, Matt Murdock must confront the darkness within himself — and what he finds there terrifies him to the core.
Andy Diggle ends his Daredevil run with a hundred bangs that add up to one whopper of a whimper. More after the jump.
Andy Diggle’s run on Daredevil is a curious thing. It started as one thing, became another, and ended another still; this is one more twist than the path his Thunderbolts stint took. On Thunderbolts, it started as a comic about Norman Osborn and his gang of scumbags, and ended as a Nick Fury / Black Widow espionage thriller. On Daredevil, it started with a lean toward a sort of post-terrorist social activism (how can the self-appointed Protector of Hell’s Kitchen avenge the lives lost in the bombing of a tenement building?). It then proceeded into a journey into how low Daredevil himself was willing to sink in order to reinforce his territorial control. This was an interesting tactic for a while — the unspoken question of Daredevil’s fierce devotion to Hell’s Kitchen is “How much does he want to reactively protect it, and how much does he want to actively control it?” (Brian Bendis took a less extreme, equally noncommittal poke at this.) That culminated in Shadowland, which itself was a cramped, speedy little action-movie clip show that jerked awkwardly between brain-dead ninja fights and vague character mutterings.
This led us to Daredevil: Reborn, which concludes this issue, bringing with it an end to Diggle’s run and Daredevil’s self-imposed exile. When we first met him in this mini, Matt Murdock had hit the road and turned his back on heroism, having decided that if he couldn’t succeed at the gig by allowing an evil demon to possess him and turn him against his friends, then hell, what’s the point? In his wanderings, he chanced upon a town that took a little TOO unkindly to smelly, sulky drifters, and for three issues now has been alternately beating the hell out of them and having the hell beaten out of him. The mini-series, in its entirety: “Daredevil finds a town whose police force is in the thrall of a super-powered Mexican drug lord, and fights them.” You can literally read the entire mini in about fifteen minutes; speeding through it won’t risk eliminating any important subtexts, because there are none.
If there’s a deeper meaning to Daredevil: Reborn, a grand concept that underscores the necessity of Matt Murdock squeezing himself back into red spandex and hitting people with clubs until they do what he says or go to jail, it takes a bit of lateral thinking to tease out. By fighting the police (would-be enforcers of the law that he himself worked to uphold as an attorney), Daredevil re-establishes his personal supremacy over The System — something he’s long exploited by having it both ways as both lawyer and superhero — and faces down a funhouse mirror version of his own trials. Just as Murdock let himself fall victim to the influence of an evil ninja cult, these cops have become narco-pawns, trampling the law that they once upheld. By fighting them, Murdock is fighting himself, and by beating them, he’s beating himself — or more accurately, flagellating. It’s a good concept and a solid core to build around. Daredevil: Reborn is so sparse, though, that it’s easy to miss this core idea completely.
By invoking seemingly every action-flick cliche available short of a weasely, motormouthed sidekick, Diggle has successfully drowned his own pitch in white noise. It’s a bit like that old Krusty the Klown line: he said the quiet part loud, and the loud part quiet. What should read as Daredevil coming to terms with the perilous mistakes he’s made and re-engaging with his superheroic life instead just reads as some sort of bizarre, Daredevil-starring homage to First Blood. Even when things are baldly stated within the dialogue — “But the thing I was running away from… it turns out it was inside me all along” — the overwhelming urge is to compare it to the cringe-worthy reflective moments of a Chuck Norris movie. As something meant to re-ground the character and tie up his current agonizing psychological quandaries (until the next set, of course), Daredevil: Reborn seems more intent on aping the characters of 80s punch-and-shoot actioners — which is not hard, because there are, like, three between all nine zillion of them — than showing us anything that makes Daredevil unique.
If Marvel’s key innovation was to make it okay for superheroes’ lives to be awful, then Daredevil is the ultimate Marvel hero. Even more than Bruce Banner, Daredevil — at least, in his post-Miller incarnations — has relished in his psychological torments. This is a character that breathes melodrama, and whose life is always one good push away from toppling head-long into the abyss, risking dragging everyone he loves with him. Considering that he already did that in Shadowland, it’s obviously too soon for a direct repeat performance — besides, if this is meant to be Daredevil: Reborn in concept as well as title, then what’s wrong with pushing him in another direction? The catch: this is direction heads straight to the shallow end of the pool. It’s not much of a spoiler to say that it ends with Matt Murdock becoming Daredevil again, but the way he goes about it has the triteness and pat simplicity of saying the presents under the tree came from Santa.
On the plus side, Davide Gianfelice draws the hell out of it. His art is the perfect compliment to what Diggle’s script is TRYING to be: elegant in its simplicity and yet devastating in its force. While I’m hesitant to invoke one of the masters of all masters, Gianfelice’s work comes off like Alex Toth’s scragglier son. He’s the name to take away from this, and whatever he does next will certainly be a sight to see. It’s a shame that he’s not given more than trite discussions and ho-hum action to illustrate, but if he can make such paucity so interesting to look at…
A million years ago, before the last huge Daredevil renumbering, there was another story like this. Matt Murdock woke up amnesiac in Paris, and had an ugly new costume, and something something something. It’s best remembered as a bump in the road, a brief hiccup of service between signposts. I suspect that a year form now, Daredevil: Reborn will be remembered the same way: the time that Matt Murdock woke up a drifter in Texas, and had an ugly new beard, and something something something.
Final Verdict: 5.5 / Wait for Waid
