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Fuck, that was hard.
Anyway. Bendis takes the themes of Miller's work and pushes them further. The Kingpin knows your identity? No, it's on the front of the New York Post. You're having a minor mental breakdown because you lost your ex-girlfriend? How about a major breakdown? You proposed to a woman with no idea why you were doing it? How about this time you marry her? It's like Grant Morrison's take on Claremont's X-Men - all the storylines that shaped these characters revisited at greater length and with more depth. And it works great. Matt has been exposed as Daredevil and wriggled out of it before, but the way it's done here on the front page of a paper in a noir crime story gives the character a new status quo. Everyone knows, even if they can't officially say so. Everyone knows and he can't convince them otherwise because it's true.
Apart from the out of character ending for the White Tiger in the Trial Of The Century arc, the thematic companion to Miller's Gladiator trial, it's all good stuff. And it builds beautifully to the climax, Matt's intellect and rage duelling until he finally just beats the living shit out of Bullseye and the Kingpin and breaks the deadlock that Daredevil and the Kingpin have been in since Miller brought Tubs in as the villain. He chooses a third way with no idea what he's doing because the Daredevil part of his character - impulsive, physical, showboating - is in control.
And it's after that it begins to fall apart for me. The next couple of arcs are fine, a retake of the post-Elektra breakdown at today's pace and with more serious consequences, and a Widow arc which manages to encapsulate the chemistry between the characters while updating it to suit the book's new premise. But Golden Age, while it's got a lot of charm between its colour dots, treads water in terms of the larger storyline. It misuses the Gladiator fairly badly, turning an interesting reformed villain for whom Daredevil is something like a saviour into one more blackmailed hood. (And though it was good to see Typhoid Mary earlier on, as a big fan of the Nocenti run, she wasn't exactly well used either.) And with Decalogue, which really is what we've been building toward all this time, an examination of how Daredevil can make a difference in Hell's Kitchen, it all collapses.
This is obviously subjective, but to me it seems like Bendis goes blank after two issues of that arc. We're finding out how DD, as the Kingpin, has made a difference. The dealer's girl and the bomber's son tell their stories. Then there's an abrupt shift in direction and it becomes another story entirely, one that doesn't really say anything about the hero or his city. It's a failure of writing. Do I remember Bendis admitting in interviews that he changed plans there? Either way it's no kind of payoff. We jump from noir back onto the clean shiny rails of a superhero story, somewhere we've not been for the whole run.
Then the big finale, The Murdock Papers, compounds that retreat. The Kingpin returns again, after having been beaten down to nothing twice in this writer's run alone. We're back to square one. Elektra pointlessly returns because oo wow Elektra, the Widow's back, Bullseye's back again doing the same thing again because nobody can think of anything else to do with Mr Women In Refridgerators, and the arc which should put the capstone on an innovative new direction for the character goes nowhere. Murdock's sent to prison because nobody's done that yet, not because it's a logical conclusion to the journey he's been on. It's a cop out.
Anyone agree? Have I missed something? Was I expecting too much of a superhero comic? |
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