That was...Long: a *Late* Review of Daredevil #4 to #19

 written by Saladin Ahmed

drawn by Aaron Kuder and various

colored by Jesus Aburtov and various

One of the first casualties of having to adult pretty hard over the last few months has been the meager creative juices that I need to come up with regular blog posts, as a direct result of which, this blog has been tragically neglected in favor of generating much easier, less cerebrally-taxing content like unboxing videos. Heck, even my movie review YouTube channel and has gone tragically neglected. 

Considering how many hours I had poured into this blog, that seems like a shame, especially considering how regularly I used to post here.

Anyway, I'm just going to cut to the chase here; writer Saladin Ahmed's first mega story arc on everyone's favorite blind lawyer/superhero started out strong, and I managed to review the first few issues before life got a little too busy.   Unfortunately, it has since extended into a bloated, unwieldy and somewhat monotonous story that was at least four, possibly five issues longer than it needed to be, and ruined by a chaotic rotation of artists and a resultant shifting in tone that made it hard to stay focused. Not only that, but it ended with more questions than answers. This was a mammoth nineteen issues, and it ceased to be particularly interesting after the first ten or so. 

For those of you just tuning in, this particular run began after writer Chip Zdarsky ended his run Matt literally going to Hell to save his friends. Ahmed brought Matt Murdock back as a Catholic priest, with everyone in his world having seemingly forgotten about him.  In the course of his nineteen issue arc, Ahmed has had Matt face off against demons representing the seven deadly sins, each one possessing someone close to him, or at least someone he knows, which was a pretty good pretext to have members of his supporting  cast and even the occasional guest appearance.  As it dragged on, though, each appearance felt more and more like stunt-casting or fan service and less like a compelling story, and the fact that so many different artists subbed for the original series artist, the excellent Aaron Kuder, made for a very disjointed reading experience. Ahmed's writing may have been uneven but it was enjoyable overall, but the art experience reading this run was just the pits. A decent editor would have had the sense to rotate the artists properly so that each mini story arc could have had a consistent tone and been part of a bigger, better whole.  Instead, the whole thing just has the feel of something cobbled together.

I've been a fan of this character for years and even through some of his lean years I have been able to appreciate the work of the creative teams working on him, but as promising as Ahmed's early issues were, this particular run just kind of went off the rails, which is a shame because if it had only been managed properly, these past nineteen issues could have been so much better.

It feels unfair to grade the entire storyline like this, but in truth, I'd argue Ahmed brought this on himself by stretching out a 12 to 15 issue storyline to something this long. 

6/10