Daredevil: Black Armor #1 - Marvel Comics

DAREDEVIL: BLACK ARMOR No. 1, January 2024

Announced at the San Diego Comic-Con in July 2023, and set during D.G. Chichester’s “landmark run” with Daredevil, this first in a four-issue limited series arguably does a good job in both updating those readers who aren’t too familiar with the American author’s “fan-favourite era”, whilst simultaneously stimulating those bibliophiles who remember the Man Without Fear wearing his armoured costume with a previously never-before-seen adventure. Sure, it does take the Connecticut-born writer a good ten pages to recount the numerous changes made to Matt Murdock’s character during the Nineties. But that still leaves two thirds of this book with which the audience can be thrown into the “non-stop intense action and brutal fighting” of Jack Batlin’s mission to thwart a series of mysterious abductions across Hell’s Kitchen.

Furthermore, once the storytelling does finally get going it wastes little time in throwing the blind vigilante up against the formidable Sabretooth in a mouth-watering confrontation that arguably shows the mass-murdering mutant at his most terrifyingly savage, and wearing Jim Lee’s “instantly iconic costume” redesign to boot. This sadly short-lived skirmish proves an excellent hook to the upcoming shenanigans, particularly when it alludes to a master super-villain capable of stopping Victor Creed’s ferocious alter-ego dead in his tracks with a single command, and ordering him to “disengage” from a hero who has already humiliatingly battered the brute with his trademark batons.

Just as tensely penned is probably this publication’s almost obligatory exchange with Wilson Fisk, who is seen as a down and out Kingpin of crime scrambling around for a quality limousine in a disreputable garage. Seeming to not know the (new) incarnation of Daredevil isn’t the same blind lawyer he’d repeatedly locked horns with in the past, the dialogue between these two long-time foes is still top-notch, with the once “powerful crime lord” lacing his polite words with plenty of deadly menace and threat; “Time to earn some respect.”

Helping to add plenty of “Snappkt”, “Tnnk” and “Trrk” to the proceedings is the artistic team of Netho Diaz on pencils, J.P. Mayer with inks, and colorist Andrew Dalhouse, who together make Murdock’s “sleek new armoured costume” wholly believable. In addition, some of the splash-layouts showing Matt’s highly emotive struggle with his Catholicism and dedication to the law are incredibly well designed, and provide some wonderful insights into the titular character’s conflicting motivations.

Writer: D.G. Chichester, Penciler: Netho Diaz, Inker: J.P. Mayer, and Colorist: Andrew Dalhouse