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| DAREDEVIL No. 1.5, April 2014 |
Anniversary specials can be rather ‘hit or miss’ affairs.
Like annuals they tend to be either fantastic one-shots, usually because the
title’s publisher has coerced their very best staff to create the comic, or,
they’re unequivocal failures, written and drawn by some of the less talented
individuals in the business and supported by reprints of the titular character
back in their ‘heydays’.
“Daredevil” Issue 1.5 bizarrely seems to fall
somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, at least as far as the effort
associate editor Ellie Pyle appears to have put into assembling its creative
team. Unfortunately as far as the actual ‘fruits of her labour’ are concerned
though, this rather formidable gestalt of some of Hornhead’s more enduring
writers and artists is a shambolic forty-page mess which doesn’t really seem to
know what it is actually celebrating.
In fact the most successful aspect of this
book is the superb Paolo Rivera cover illustration, which not only incorporates
the identities of the legion of creators behind the Man without Fear’s fifty
year saga but also some of the costumed crimefighter’s most iconic costumes;
all emblazoned across a New York skyline. However any hope that the quality of
the artwork inside will match this masterpiece are quickly quashed with the
realisation that Javier Rodriguez is actually pencilling the comic’s lead story,
“The King In Red”, in addition to his regular role as colorist… And the
Spaniard’s drawings are truly dreadful.
To make matters worse, the plot clearly
is not one which Mark Waid would ever consider to be his best either. Set in
the near(ish) future, the Eisner Award-winning comic book author has a retired
Matt Murdock, young son in tow, become Daredevil one last time in order to
defeat the Owl’s daughter, Jubula Pride and stop her manipulation of a
cyber-optic fluid which has caused three-quarters of San Francisco’s population
to go blind overnight. It’s lame, unimaginative and futuristic nonsense, more
in tune with the “Future’s End” mythos of “DC Comics” than the fiftieth
anniversary of Daredevil.
However the follow-up stories by creative masters such as
Brian Bendis, artist Alex Maleev and Tom Palmer are unbelievably even less impressive;
with all of them incomprehensively having ‘bad days at the office’. Indeed,
published shortly before her defection to the “Vertigo” imprint of “DC Comics”,
it is hard not to read more into Ellie Pyle’s final editorial words “Said with
a smile”, because any competitors of “Marvel Worldwide” who spied a copy of
this supposed 'celebration' of one of Stan Lee’s most famous co-creations, must
have laughed themselves silly at its quality, or rather lack of…
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| The variant cover art of "DAREDEVIL" No. 1.5 by Chris Samnee |
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