An Interesting New Direction: A Review of Daredevil #1

 written by Stephanie Philips

drawn by Lee Garbett

colored by Frank Martin

I was not a fan of the last run on Daredevil by Saladin Ahmed and a rotating gaggle of artists.  It started off strong, with Ahmed and (then) regular artist Aaron  Kuder, working with an interesting premise; having come back from the Hell where he appeared to have been trapped at the end of Chip Zdarsky's run, Matt became a Catholic priest. As the series progressed, though, the storytelling started to come apart at the seams, with Ahmeed's "seven deadly sins" storyline becoming a lot more bloated than it initially appeared to be, and with Marvel seemingly unable to keep their pool of artists to fewer than five.  It actually ended on an interesting note but I wasn't sorry to see it end.

This new direction and creative team of Stephanie Phillips and Lee Garbett, however, looks promising.  Matt Murdock has taken a job teaching law at Empire State University, even though he's no longer a licensed attorney. By night, of course, he's still fighting crime as Daredevil, but he gets a nasty surprise when a new, unknown supervillain appears at Murdock's apartment, telling Daredevil that Matt Murdock in going to die.  It's not exactly new to Matt, but the fact that this new threat completely plays havoc with his enhanced senses and seems to anticipate his every move means that this isn't just another every day threat for Matt but could be someone genuinely dangerous.

Philips and Garbett make for a good creative team, but I refuse to sing their praises too effusively until they've finished at least one five-issue story arc without another artist stepping in to substitute for him. They're not exactly reinventing the wheel with Matt's profession, which was what made Ahmed's run so appealing in the beginning, but as was the case with Peter Parker's teaching career years ago, I think they could go interesting places with this. This is a surprisingly muted issue #1 considering it practically coincided with the second season of the Disney+ show Daredevil: Born Again, but I don't really mind. Splashy first issues are overrated, in my opinion, and what matters most for serialized storytelling is consistency in quality. This new team is off to a pretty solid start, so I hope they're able to keep it up. 

8.5/10