Don't Quit Your Day Job, Taboo: A Review of Daredevil & Echo #1 to 4

 written by Taboo and B. Earl

illustrated by Phil Noto

Released back in June of 2023, this four-issue miniseries was originally intended to coincide with the release of the Hulu series Echo produced by Marvel Studios, the starring vehicle for the anti-hero who had been introduced back in 2021's Hawkeye series.  Release plans for that series changed drastically and as a result we're still a week away from Echo launching on Disney + over here in the Philippines. Fortunately, that means this review of this months-old miniseries still has some relevance.

Daredevil and Echo, set during the latter part of the Chip Zdarsky era of the character in which two characters, Matthew Murdock and Elektra Natchios, shared the Daredevil mantle, but because it's Matt who has the shared history with crimefighting deaf prodigy Maya Lopez, aka Echo, Elektra bows out of the story pretty early on due to, well, reasons. The threat the two of them face isn't just any street thug; it's a supernatural evil that is so powerful it even plagued their ancestors well over a century ago. Will Daredevil and Echo be able to stop what their ancestors could not?

As stories go, it's far from the worst I read in 2023, but what truly struck me about this story was how utterly superfluous it was. I rarely expect anything better from these TV/movie promotional or tie-in comics, but given that Marvel had put a respectable artist like Phil Noto on this book I still held out hope that the story would at least be a fun read, but it couldn't even be that. Its villain was a Green Goblin knockoff (Demagoblin, riding around on a glider) and the big bad, well, spoiler alert, wasn't really much to write home about either.  The dialogue was just...sad and the characters were kind of just propelled by the paper thin plot.  I don't know if co-writer Taboo, the part-Mexican, part-Native American rapper from the Black-Eyed Peas, has any other comic-book writing credits than this, but I wouldn't put this on my resume if I were him.

Perhaps saddest of all was how for much of the series Noto seemed to be half-asleep when illustrating it. I hope to see his work again elsewhere, when his heart is actually in the project. 

4/10