DAREDEVIL No. 4, April 2016 |
It’s easy to imagine that a number of the 43,741 collectors who bought Issue Four of “Daredevil” felt somewhat misled by the twenty-page periodical's action-packed cover
illustration. For although Charles Soule’s
narrative does indeed partially concern Bill Everett’s co-creation foiling
“the whole bomb maker’s Pantry” in the Red Hook neighbourhood of Brooklyn. The
costumed crime-fighter doesn’t actually do so in the company of the “veteran
super hero” Captain America, and seemingly prefers instead to undertake the distinctly solo
mission with the silver-haired Sentinel of Liberty simply providing
communications support from his supposed vantage point outside in the street;
“He might not be doing the fighting himself, but the problems get solved.”
Equally as frustrating, though perhaps less ambiguous, is
the Brooklyn-born writer’s secondary suggestion that Matt Murdock’s alter-ego has
actually turned to the elderly Steve Rogers for some much needed guidance in dealing with the blind lawyer's current foe, Tenfingers. The entire sequence depicting Hornhead’s fraught mission to defuse
the detonator before it takes “down the whole damn building” is painfully
punctuated with the athletic acrobat’s hopes that the World War Two veteran can
help dispel his personal doubts as to how best to defeat the Chinese
crime-lord. Yet at the end of the magazine when the former Avenger asks him why
“you called me in the first place”, the supposed Man Without Fear simply
mumbles “Just… reassurance, maybe.”
Admittedly, Samuel Chung’s revelation to his
eight-fingered mother that he is the Church of the Sheltering Hands’ mysterious
“enemy” she so earnestly wishes to personally eliminate, does in some way
further progress the title’s over-arching story concerning the disfigured
magician’s plans to build “a power base in Chinatown.” But even their
subsequent enthralling exchange of blows is short-lived as a result of The Hand’s
abrupt return, and infuriatingly only hints at the potential exploration of an
infinitely more complicated relationship between illegal immigrant and his
misguided parent in a future publication.
Ron Garney and Goran Sudzuka’s pencilling for this comic
book is also rather disappointing in many respects. The creative collaborators' breakdowns showing Daredevil’s billy club zinging around the residential
apartment block, brutally battering the bombers’ heads and legs are well enough
dynamically drawn. However the same cannot be said for some of their
illustrations of Steve Rogers, the actual bombers or Blindspot’s mother.
The variant cover art of "DAREDEVIL" No. 4 by Michael Cho |
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