Hey, Daredevil again! We’re back to the historic Bendis/Maleev/Hollingsworth Daredevil. The dream team actually took 5 issues off right before this, letting Bendis’ good friend David Mack do a 5-issue Echo story that genuinely barely had Daredevil in it and should have been a miniseries and not 5 issues of DD, but maybe the team wanted a break, I dunno. Wolverine is a bigger part of DD, Vol. 2 51-55 than Daredevil is, it’s silly. But the boys are back in town and ready to rock. DD 50 featured a shocking conclusion wherein Matt Murdock decided the only way to truly curb the underworld in New York was to declare himself Kingpin. And that’s where we meet him here. And his superfriends are not sure what to make of all that, so a certain wallcrawler is bound to show up. But he’s really only in 2 of these issues, so this is going to be the most summarized summary I’ve ever done. Another thing that’s changed for Matt since last we saw him is he’s started seeing a blind woman named Milla. Because DD 51-55 were essentially fill-ins, this is picking up right after 50. But it’s also jumping forward in time an entire year, which is very ballsy, and begins with Ben Urich meeting someone we don’t see to talk about what’s happened to Matt since declaring himself Kingpin.
Daredevil, one of the hottest books in comics, looks like this, and they’re letting Humberto Ramos draw pigface Doc Ock in TAC. Ben says in the 6 weeks after Matt declared himself Kingpin, DD went on an unprecedented streak of violence, cleaning up every corner of the city. Then Matt and Foggy donated all the money they made from a huge class action suit earlier this run to Hell’s Kitchen, and Milla, Matt’s lady, works in the house commission and helped put it to use. She made a bunch of good calls, the mayor got involved, things turned around remarkably.
You could always tell when Maleev was pressed for time, because the obvious photoshop tricks in place of actual drawing would take over, like on this page. But at least he’s using his own photos and not just tracing pictures of celebrities with no thought toward composition like the Greg Lands and Salvador Laroccas of the world. Then Matt learned he was going to be asked to run for mayor by the Democrats. And then Luke Cage called.
So that’s our first reason for being here. Tense! Matt walked off, sacred the FBI guys tailing him a little, but without actually doing anything, and then we hop to later, when he’s walking down the street with Milla and suddenly told her to go to the safe place they had discussed, and we see that Matt is suddenly surrounded by a small army of Yakuza guys, and that’s To Be Continued.
Matt then spends the entirety of this issue fighting the army of Yakuza guys. It’s like that scene in that one Matrix movie, only not lame.
Even 100 Yakuza guys probably wouldn’t be enough to beat DD normally, but back in Alias, Bendis invented MGH, Mutant Growth Hormone, which gangs were extracting from hapless mutants and peddling as a drug that gives people temporary superpowers. It spread through comics as a convenient plot device, but no one used it more than B himself, and these Yakuza guys are hopped up and scarier than they should be.
Things went down hill form there, Matt got shot a few times, and the Yakuza moved in for the kill. He was in bad shape until the backup his FBI tail called finally showed up and teargassed everybody. Matt escaped in the chaos. And then Bendis finally reveals who Ben is talking to, and it makes like half the things he told her/us pointless, because she already knew.
Husband!
It’s such a strange thing. A comic book company almost never gives creators latitude to do really insane things to their characters, but that’s the history of Daredevil. Frank Miller elevated DD to the big leagues by doing unprecedented things. Ann Nocenti did insane things, DG Chicester did insane things. And they were all just opening acts for Bendis outing Matt, making him Kingpin, and now marrying him off-panel. Huge, seismic shifts. This issue opens by telling us Milla and Matt have been married for 4 months, and that Matt stopped talking to Ben half a year ago. They talk about Matt & Ben’s relationship, Matt’s history, Milla giving a blind person’s perspective on Matt losing his dad and having to feel his ruined face to even find him, intense conversation. Ben promises to find Matt. then we see a Yakuza guy being interrogated, and then Ben goes to see Foggy, and has to get past some pretty scary bodyguards to do so. He tells Foggy he’s trying to reach Matt.
Foggy really is the most put-upon member of any superhero’s supporting cast, ever. He’s a real friend Matt doesn’t deserve for all the decades of madness he’s put up with. So Ben goes to see the Night Nurse. This is a thing people were using around this time, a repurposing of an old Marvel name, now applied to a woman who…
Maybe he did!
This one starts with Matt’s usual FBI tail watching their Yakuza guys walk free, nothing to hold them, but then a van pulls up and the Yakuza guys ventilate the car, obliterating one of the agents and blowing up the car. But elsewhere…
Matt falls asleep so the conversation ends. Foggy shows up, Ben gets a call that the Yakuza have gone crazy and tells Foggy not to leave. Cut to 9 days later, and Matt is doing better, reunited with Milla. They have a nice moment, and then he calls Foggy, finds out the Yakuza have been on a rampage the last 9 days, and asks Foggy to bring him his suit.
So, we cut to those Yakuza guys discussing what they’ve been up to and whatnot, still lamenting that they didn’t kill Matt, and then someone starts beating up their security.
Hey, it’s our man! And DD and Luke and Danny! And they all look really cool! That would be a triumphant cliffhanger, but the next page is Foggy and Milla, and Foggy awkwardly asking if Matt has ever told her about Karen. Yikes!
What a cool cover. Maleev really did well with the whole “iconic image” cover period.
Some writers have such a good time putting Spider-Man in the background of a scene, reacting, and Bendis is surely one. The Yakuza guys are dumb, and decide to fight.
This spread got me because Hollingsworth, who I have the utmost respect for, didn’t color the stripe on Spider-Man’s arm. We all make mistakes! The boys get to fightin’ for a few pages.
While they’re doing that, DD hunts down the leader, who cut him in the big street fight, and is slapping him around when…
DD catches the guy and beats him handily, but then he pops a MGH pill and gets glowing green eyes. You’d expect the fight to get tougher, but DD continues to humiliate him. He’s fought way tougher guys, and this time it’s 1-on-1.
DD makes the guy confess to killing the Fed last issue in front of the assembled cops and then hands him over to them and bounces.
The heroes victorious, Matt returns to Milla, and is worried that Foggy’s not there, but she told him to leave, because she needed time alone after hearing Ben’s theory. She asks Matt if he had a breakdown, if their marriage was part of it, and he has to admit it could be true.
Man this was such a good series. But, in truth, it kinda felt like this was as far as B’s original plans went. The book seemed a little rudderless after this, but the team pulled it together before the end, a shocking end in which Matt couldn’t outrun the fact that he had been outed as a lawyer who breaks the law every night, as the guy who declared himself Kingpin, and so on, and goes to jail! That was how they ended their run! B worked it out with his good friend Ed Brubaker, who was taking over from him, and they were able to give one of the top 3 runs on this book ever a truly memorable ending. And believe it or not, that ending will actually have repercussions on this blog in surprising ways. Well, that wraps up this very long post. I think. Is it very long? I may have had longer despite how many issues this covered, I dunno. Next: John Romita, Jr.’s final arc on (this version of) ASM.