Matt Murdock, the blind lawyer who moonlights as a superhero clad in red tights called Daredevil, has been one of my favorite comic-book characters since 1993, when I read the miniseries The Man Without Fear by Frank Miller and John Romita, Jr. Some top-level creators have worked on the character over his fifty-year publication history, including Miller, David Mazuchelli, Bill Sinkiewicz, Kevin Smith, Joe Quesada, and Brian Michael Bendis among others. The latest creative heavyweight to take on Marvel's sightless crusader is award-winning, fan-favorite writer Mark Waid, of Kingdom Come and Fantastic Four fame.
I had actually quit Daredevil several years ago, almost a year before Brian Michael Bendis left the title. I actually have almost all of the issues written by Bendis and drawn by his collaborator, Alex Maleev. I was a fan of Waid's work on Fantastic Four, but had not really seen the need to pick up Daredevil, which, from what I had heard, had sort of spiraled into a bit of silliness a few years back when some geniuses in Marvel editorial decided to build a publishing event around him and have him get possessed by a demon.
Then the positive reviews started pouring in for Waid's approach, which was actually a bit of a throwback to the pre-Miller, pre-noir days of the character, and I sat up and took notice. By that time I was no longer regularly collecting comic books, but the thought that one of my favorite characters was getting some love from the critics prompted me to seek out the trade paperback of Waid's first six issues on the book, which proved to be surprisingly elusive.
Then, the pot was sweetened when Waid was teamed up with artist Chris Samnee, whose five-issue run on the series Captain America and Bucky absolutely captivated me, and I ended up buying an issue that took place right smack in the middle of a storyline. As has so often happened to me, I bought the later issues first and ending up driving from my usual haunts in Quezon City to virtually the southernmost tip of Metro Manila, namely Alabang, just to buy the earliest issue of the story, and I have to say, it was worth the trip. Not only that, but I finally found, in Fully Booked, the collection of the first six issues. Wonderful, wonderful stuff.
Of course, I should have expected no less from Waid, but I was struck by how much he seems to get the character. I was also delighted to see that he could handle Matt around a courtroom just as well as the action sequences. To my knowledge, Waid isn't a lawyer, so it's clear he has done at least some homework on the things that lawyers have to know, certainly a lot more than lesser talents (whom I will not name) who have worked on this character ever bothered to do. While he has distanced the book's overall tone from the noir atmosphere with which the character has been most commonly associated since Miller's run, Waid expressly acknowledges the character's history (with a somewhat humorous reference to one of Miller's single most influential stories, "Born Again") and even throws in a couple of dark little story twists of his own, including a pretty tragic one that continues to unfold, involving Matt's law partner and longtime buddy Foggy Nelson.
With these stories, Waid has really crafted an era for the character that is at once entirely consistent with some of the best stories that have ever been published featuring him, and that is at the same time completely its own thing. If a lot of people appreciate this book the way I do, then in the years to come, people will talk about Waid's run with the same fondness they have for Miller and Bendis.
The icing on the cake, for me, is the work by not only Samnee who is easily one of my favorite comic book artists these days, but Waid's other previous collaborators on this book, like Paulo Rivera and Marcos Martin. This is a run I can definitely see myself picking up in collected edition form someday.
No comments:
Post a Comment