written by Chip Zdarsky
drawn by Marco Checchetto
colored by Sunny Gho
Chip Zdarsky's inaugural arc on Daredevil reaches its conclusion, with a battered Matt Murdock making yet another ill-advised decision to take on Leland Owlsley's newly burgeoning operations. Owlsley's hired some cybernetically-enhanced muscle, which nearly overwhelms Matt until a few friends of his step in. Barely escaping with his life, Matt, a lifelong Catholic struggling to reconcile his faith with his violent vigilante lifestyle, finally comes to a momentous decision.
Really, Zdarsky's first five-issue storyline could not have ended any other way given the set-up he'd created. Matt, who essentially comes to terms with the fact that, however unintentionally, he has actually killed someone, finally starts to feel the weight of that death on his conscience, and this shapes the decision he makes at the end of the issue to hang up his mask. It's a logical conclusion to what Zdarsky started, and clearly he's far from done with this character, but I confess I was hoping for something a little more splashy. Still this issue is a decent recovery from the last one, which featured, for the umpteenth time, a confrontation between Daredevil and the Punisher, the only real innovation of which was that Daredevil ended up wearing Frank's shirt.
Checchetto's work is a bit better than it's been in the last couple of issues, though I still have an issue with the fact that Daredevil's pants are as baggy as they are. It's admittedly a more realistic take on the costume but it just looks weird, if I'm honest. I mean, he's done DD's tights thing just fine in his previous work on this book, and a brief appearance by no less than Spider-Man shows that Checchetto doesn't have any qualms about drawing tights in general, so I wonder what influenced his artistic decision this time around. I know Matt's lost quite a bit of weight with all his recent hospitalization, but is he really this scrawny? With Checchetto's tenure on the book apparently over (at least for the next few issues) I confess I'm a bit disappointed overall in the work he's turned in for this story.
This is a somewhat low-key end to what's been a pretty tumultuous story so far, which has featured Daredevil even getting into a fistfight with a cop, of all people, but Zdarsky has definitely founded it on an interesting idea, and while this mini arc didn't quite take off (for me at least), I remain interested to see where he plans to take DD from here. After all, this is the guy who made Marvel Two-In-One such a pure pleasure to read. I'm sure he's got something good up his sleeve.
7.5/10
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