In the seminal Daredevil
storyline, “Born Again,” Miller and Mazzucchelli had the Kingpin discover that
blind lawyer Matthew Murdock was actually his most frustrating nemesis,
Daredevil. In these seven issues, Wilson
Fisk (the Kingpin) used the information to beat down, both emotionally and
physically, Matthew Murdock and then sent him off a pier in a taxi cab to his death. But Murdock survived and eventually came
back, as all heroes do, to defeat the Kingpin without sacrificing his moral
center. It’s an incredible story. And nobody ever picked up that significant
bit of continuity again.
Until Bendis and Maleev came
along.
They opened their four-and-a-half
year run with the outing, in the tabloids, of Matt Murdock as Daredevil. From there, they wove interesting stories
that brought a number of characters back to the forefront of the Marvel
universe like Power Man and Iron Fist, along with newer creations like Jessica
Jones. It was a series of comics that
found critical and commercial success and made Bendis and Maleev superstars in
the comic industry.
I recently went back and read
through my collected editions of these stories, and for the most part, they are
as enjoyable and intriguing as when I initially read them. But I did not find them to be as good as they
were on that first reading.
Reading these issues all in big
chunks, with the collected editions, I think the stories suffer a bit from being
read in this fashion, despite the neatly packaged storylines (often 5 issues,
sometimes 6) Bendis and Maleev crafted. But
I think they would have read far better month to month as they were initially
being published.
One aspect that hampered my
appreciation of the stories was the dialogue tics found in Bendis’s
characters. Certainly, this is a
hallmark of Bendis, as a writer, and part of what has garnered him such wide
appeal with fans, and I would mark myself as one of those. It wasn’t so much the dialogue, per se, as
much as the need – it feels like a need, a compulsion, on Bendis’s part – for
him to infuse this hesitating cadence into much of it. Sure, one could argue that he was attempting
to infuse a sense of tension and fear, on the part of the characters, by doing
this. Except that it appears to infect
almost every single character who walks “onstage” in the book. If it were unique to one individual, it might
be less off-putting, but when I started running into this stuttering in
storyline after storyline, it soon began to grate on me.
Another aspect of this run that
becomes far more obvious – and, for me, bothersome – when reading these DD
stories all in a run is Alex Maleev’s use of repeated images within different
panels. Compounding this, for me, is the
fact that Maleev’s artwork is all-digital, and he would often pull in closer
onto a detail from a previous panel, which is a good effect, except that the
clarity of the linework would deteriorate when he zoomed in on the image for
the later panel. Again, this is a good
tool in the comic storyteller’s toolbox, zooming in on a character to show
tension or some other emotion, depending on the context of the scene. But there are many cases where the same image
is used multiple times (look at Sammy Silke, Jr. in the first storyline,
“Underboss”), which pulls me out of the story because time is supposed to be
passing in a scene but this character hasn’t so much as twitched the whole
time. There needs to be some change in
the character, otherwise I become far too aware of the fact that I’m “reading
something” rather than allowing myself to become immersed in the story. And this technique is peppered throughout the
entire run, to a point that becomes frustrating. For me.
Now, these two, admittedly
subjective, faults can be overlooked, especially if the stories are good. And they are pretty damn good. But with the final storyline – “The Murdock Papers”
– Bendis and Maleev take the train right off the tracks. In this culmination of their run, the Kingpin
agrees to give up the evidence he has proving Matt Murdock is Daredevil, if the
U.S. government will drop the charges against him, release his assets, and
allow him to leave the country and live out the rest of his life. As an insurance policy, Wilson Fisk gives the
story to Ben Urich. Urich writes the
story and it is, obviously, front page news.
WHAAAAATTTTT????!!!????
Hyperbole aside, this is
completely out of character for Urich.
Not only has he already come through the Kingpin’s threats and pressure
on his family in the “Born Again” storyline, but I also just re-read Daredevil
#164, “Expose,” wherein Ben Urich first discovers Daredevil’s secret identity
and takes this information to Murdock, who is in the hospital (still masked,
naturally). They discuss the entire
thing, and in the end, Urich burns up his notes, despite the fact that it would
have earned him a Pulitzer, because he knows the city, and especially Hell’s
Kitchen, needs a hero like Daredevil.
And yet, at this point, we are to
believe that Ben Urich would write a story that as much as states that Murdock
is indeed Daredevil – lending far more credence to the rumors that began early
in this run, since those stories came from the tabloids, not a bastion of
journalism like The Daily Bugle. This
took me right out of the story, even though the underlying plot of the Kingpin
was an elegant little plan. It’s too
bad. It may seem a minor point, but
there needs to be internal consistency for any fictional narrative to work, or
else the entire thing might collapse under its own weight.
Did this final crack in the
foundation ruin the overall run for me?
Not necessarily. But I don’t know
that I’ll be going back to this series of comics with as much fervor the next
time. If I ever do choose to revisit
it.
