Reading Through 2021 25: Daredevil by Bendis and Maleev, vol 1

Daredevil by Bendis and Maleev, vol 1

2010

Alright, let me get this out of the way first: I don't hate Brian Michael Bendis. To the extent that I follow mainstream talk, I'm aware that whenever his name comes up, a lot of people are compelled to explain why he's terrible, and it's a pretty boring thing for Internet folks to insist on sharing with the world over and over again. He must have really hurt their feelings somewhere. My thoughts on him are this: he writes dialogue well, works well with artists, and is good at coming up with novel concepts. I've mainly read his Daredevil, Ultimate Spider-Man and X-Men, and it seems that his thing on books is shaking them up with outsider thinking. This isn't like John Byrne, who would come into a book with a "I always thought this was so stupid, so I'm going to fix it," mentality, but rather, "what if..." It means that his books tend to have a very fresh vibe. Once the novelty wears off, that's another story. But this book is mostly novelty.

I've just been talking about DD recently, and it made me feel like going back to see what this was like. I read it one time, probably around 2012, when Bendis came on to the X-Men. I liked it enough to pick up all three collections, but I also had a number of issues with them. I didn't love them. This book collects a four issue arc drawn by David Mack, a twelve issue arc drawn by Alex Maleev, and a three issue arc drawn by Manuel Gutierrez and Terry Dodson. In this collection, the "What if..." hook is "What if Dardevil's identity was made public?" And it was a great hook for the run.

Years later, some of the old problems remain, but others have disappeared. Right off the bat, I have to say it's a good read. The strength is in the storytelling.  The story is decent, but Bendis uses time jumps to let story beats play against each other and make a decent story into a very compelling one. The main arc, about a douche mafia guy named Sammy Silke trying to make his way to the top of Kingpin's empire, is really compelling. Silke is a disposable character, and in my first read though of it, I was confused that he was made to be a main character, then just gets removed, but it really works on the reread. Daredevil's life is going to go to hell, and it's not because of his arch-enemies, it's not because of his own hubris, but because of some lowlife has oversized ambitions that make Daredevil a convenient target. It wasn't the storyline I was expecting when I first read it, but knowing how it went, it all works really well. Silke is like a two-season supporting character on the Sopranos, who makes a mess for the main characters, but was never intended to become a feature player.

This is a pretty good-looking sequence. Daredevil is surprisingly not in the book that much. Matt Murdock probably has twice the page space, but it's not a big problem. 

Maleev has generally good pacing, and a good atmosphere for the book. It's gritty. Sometimes the coloring wore me down, but I liked it more than I didn't. But it did bother me just like it did when I first read it: there is way too much panel repetition and photo use in the book. Every few pages, I'd swear under my breath seeing the same photo background repeated, seeing the same faces used multiple times. This technique of repeating panels, I can accept it here and there to show a stunned character beat, but that's not what this is. This is like in the Flintstones when they repeated the backgrounds over and over to save the animators time and money. It sucks, it's boring, and I can't believe it has become an acceptable technique on mainstream books. 

A car that might simply be a stock image with a Photoshop filter, the guy on the left has two faces drawn, the guy on the right has three, plus two illustrations of the hand on the wheel. I don't know why this makes me so irritated.

It's not that I need the artist to draw every little thing on the page, but noticing how much they aren't drawing sure yanks me out of the narrative. And when the artist draws every little thing, I respect them as an artist. What Maleev does here is making comics, but I don't know that I have any interest in him as an artist.I've seen sketches he's done, so I know he can draw, but he doesn't interest me as an artist based on this Daredevil work.

When this was coming out, comics were at the point that they were already being collected and analyzed to death, and Maleev cut so many corners art-wise. Compare that to the work of previous generations, who expected the art to disappear the month after it came out, yet they drew every damn page.

I'm not a fan of David Mack either. He's super talented, but I just don't like his comic work. He slaps so much noise on the page. I know for some people it looks like art, but it ends up being filler to me. It's artsy as opposed to art. I just wasn't into the art here. I liked the story itself though!

This book did not have Mazzuchelli power going on.

Mack is quite happy to use the exact identical pic over. If folks liked it once, they'll like it twice, right?  Only the most obsessive nerds would even notice, anyway.

The other thing I noticed is that between Maleev's arc and the fill-in by Gutierrez, the text balloons switched to lower-case, a famous feature of Bendis-era Marvel. Will that carry over to book two? I think I want to read the whole run again, so I'll see when I squeeze it into my reading list in a month or two! I might rant about the quality of the art in this run, but it is still very readable stuff and very enjoyable overall, and at the end of the day, that's what's most important to me in a Marvel book. I know I've seen way worse art in a Marvel book and still loved it.