Punished: A Review of Daredevil #4

written by Chip Zdarsky
drawn by Marco Checchetto
colored by Sunny Gho

After having been rescued from the police by Frank Castle, aka the Punisher, Matt Murdock, aka Daredevil now has to disabuse Frank of the notion that he has finally taken to killing criminals as well, and he has to do it while Frank has yet another captive criminal tied up and held at gunpoint. As has almost always happened in their past encounters, their ideological differences flare up and they come to blows yet again. Meanwhile, Detective North's fistfight with Daredevil in the last issue has not gone unnoticed; he gets grief from his immediate superiors, but has found in ally in Daredevil's longtime nemesis Wilson Fisk. Whether or not Matt can survive his latest bout with the Punisher, his problems are far from over.

A clash between Matt Murdock and Frank Castle is nothing new; they're basically fighting the same war but using methods that are basically as different as night and day, so it is basically incumbent on any writer who takes this on to give us something we haven't seen before, and to be honest, Zdarsky...doesn't. I mean, he articulates the difference between them well enough, and he reminds us readers of why Matt is a good guy and Frank basically isn't, but considering how frequently this has played out I sincerely wanted Zdarsky, who spent an entire issue on this, to give us something we haven't seen before, and with the exception of the shirt Matt wears at the end of the issue, he hasn't, and it's frustrating.

Checchetto's art basically holds steady; he's no better or worse than he was in the last issue, but I really, really have to say that I'm disappointed as I was genuinely expecting a bit of an uptick in form from either Zdarsky or him, especially considering how thoroughly I enjoyed Zdarsky's run on Marvel Two-In-One, how intriguing I found the premise of this story, and how I've enjoyed his occasional flashes of brilliance in terms of dialogue which, even here, is actually pretty strong. The thing is, as I've said, we readers have seen this many times before, and in a day and age in which comic books have the potential to captivate a whole new generation of readers weaned on the Marvel Cinematic Universe, middle-of-the-road stories like this feel more and more like a wasted opportunity.

6/10