Daredevil [2016] #7 - Marvel Comics

DAREDEVIL No. 7, July 2016

It is highly unlikely that many of the 43,704 strong audience for Issue Seven of “Daredevil” found Charles Soule’s narrative an especially satisfying conclusion to “Elektric Connection”. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that many of this twenty-page periodical's readers could actually make sense of the Brooklyn-born writer’s plot concerning Matt Murdock’s “past paramour” being tricked into believing she had a daughter and that the costumed crime-fighter was responsible for the child being taken away; especially when this ‘mind control’ actually makes the deadly assassin believe that video footage documenting Iona’s abduction exists on an empty cell phone..?

Just why the Milwaukee-born writer believes such inexplicable, illogical nonsense would make for a good read is far from obvious, and disappointingly, seems to have been crow-barred together simply to provide an extremely contrived motivation for Elektra to savagely attack the comic’s titular character. It’s certainly hard to ‘buy into’ a narrative which depicts Natchios not only immediately locating the culprits behind her delusion within “the most populous city in the United States”, but also having her mind conveniently “unlocked” so as to realise everything which she believed “was all a lie” when one of the villains uses the expression “the tangled web we weave.”

This woefully ludicrous and opportunely organised resolution is arguably then made all the worse by Soule portraying Frank Miller’s creation as being positively delighted that she didn’t have a child and actually informs Daredevil that it's “a happy ending.” In fact, the Kingpin’s former employee even goes so far as to start crying in relief, despite her never thinking she could feel such pain; “They did that to me… Gave me a child… And made me think I’d lost her.”

Perhaps far from enthused by such an artificial adventure, Matteo Buffagni’s artwork lacks any semblance of life or energy, despite a fair portion of the publication detailing the lead protagonist’s confrontations with both the ‘Man without Fear’ and subsequently, one of the men who gave her the blank phone in the first place. This absence of any atmosphere in the breakdowns is perhaps best seen early on when a particularly wooden-looking Elektra repeatedly threatens to stab a transfixed Hornhead with one of her trademark bladed Sais over the course of a number of frames; all of which lack any sense of the overly-emotional assassin’s inner turmoil and restrained need for violence.

The variant cover art of "DAREDEVIL" No. 7 by Khoi Pham