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| DAREDEVIL No. 1, February 2016 |
Having somehow placed “Matt Murdock mysteriously back in New
York City, his secret identity once again intact and practicing law” Issue One
of “Marvel’s All-New, All-Different” “Daredevil” undoubtedly proved a rather
unsettling read to some of its 84,500 strong audience in December 2015. Indeed
without any explanation whatsoever, except that Charles Soule’s infinitely more
seriously-toned narrative is set “eight months after the events of Secret
Wars”, this twenty-page periodical depicts a superhero utterly unrecognisable
from the titular character who had made “a home for himself in the Golden Gate
City” under the creative team of Mark Waid and Chris Samnee.
Such a dramatic change in direction for the ‘Man Without
Fear’ doesn’t take too long to accept however, as the title’s new writer
immediately throws the masked vigilante into a no holds barred fist-fight with
a gang of ‘tooled-up’ criminal heavies, and simultaneously introduces the fact
that ‘his’ version of Hornhead is accompanied by a new partner; the “illegal
Chinese immigrant” Sam Chung, also known as Blindspot. This ability to merge
pulse-pounding action with the Milwaukee-born author’s rather edgy alterations
to Murdock’s mythos is undoubtedly one of Soule’s greatest strengths and even
allows him to be forgiven for ‘reverting’ Foggy Nelson back into a rather
tiresome, somewhat self-centred bore, who refuses to help Matt ‘ever again’
“just because you let me remember” who Daredevil really is…
Arguably though any storyline which crams so much drama into
its first half, including a wonderfully tense underwater scene where the
superhero uses a wrecked car littering “the bottom of the East River” to help
his radar sense pinpoint a drowning criminal, was always going to struggle not
to run out of steam... And sadly the “New York Times best-selling comic book”
writer’s script falls into just such a trap, with a decidedly wordy final third
which dwells far too long upon the blind lawyer’s new role as an assistant
district attorney; “You might know me as Matt Murdock, Defence attorney, here
to help. That guy’s gone. I’ve changed sides.”
Possibly just as difficult to become accustomed to as
Soule’s changes to Daredevil’s circumstances is Ron Garney’s “very dark” highly-stylized
artwork. Strangely reminiscent of some of Frank Miller’s drawings of Hornhead,
the motion picture costume illustrator undoubtedly provides this magazine with
a very unique-looking “Film Noir” style to its panels. But whilst this artistic
panache definitely manages to imbue his fights scenes with raw dynamism, it does
prove somewhat disappointingly bland when portraying the more sedentary aspects
of the narrative, such as Murdock’s lengthy ‘office-bound’ conversation with Ellen King.
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| The 'Action Figure' variant cover art of "DAREDEVIL" No. 1 by John Tyler Christopher |
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