Reading Through 2021 78: Daredevil by Bendis and Maleev, vol 3

Daredevil by Bendis and Maleev, vol 3

2010

I re-read vol 1, I re-read vol 2, it was only a matter of time before I re-read volume 3.

I like that they went with the yellow and red for the cover 

Just up front, I'll get it out of the way: I still get tired of the photo references Maleev uses, and his two-page spreads still aren't very good, for reasons I wrote about in my write-ups of the first two books. Those problems are here, but less so. Maleev cuts and pastes his own art far less (noticeably) in this volume than in the first two, and there seem to be fewer spreads that disturbed the reading experience. That's good!

In this book, we get a lot more graphic experimentation, and that's very good!

The 70's flashback uses yellowed paper and dot-coloring, but strangely chose not to let the letterer in on that fact

The book has three arcs. The first of which has a gangster from before Kingpin's time escape from jail and go looking for revenge on Daredevil as a last hurrah. The story uses two flashback structures to support the story, one in a 1970s style period, and the other in a 1940's style period. This is the Marvel elastic time scale, so I think readers can handle the idea that Daredevil has been fighting since the 70s yet is always 30 years old. The 70s style is a faux-era recreation, and Maleev chooses not to ape Marvel's house style at the time, but is more traditional in his panel layouts, which use a grid without bleeds, and in his action dynamics. Where he often uses a "held camera" view for action, he has a more dynamic perspective, reflecting the comic art of the era. 

Colorist Dave Stewart, who was exceptional throughout the book, has a nice newsprint palette to match the action.

That's the 21st century Maleev action scene

The 1940's flashbacks are in black and white, and graphically closer to the modern setting, but feel a lot more like illustrations than Maleev's usual work. Maleev lets the tools show their texture. I like this all very much. I just haven't read much Maleev outside of Daredevil, so I don't know what kind of artist he really is, but when he's loose, it's the style of realism that I can appreciate.

That is not Daredevil

The story itself is solid. The antagonist first appears and leaves the book here, so the arc would be considered a detour from Bendis' overarching narrative, but it was a good detour.

The second arc, Decalogue, is also a detour, about self-help group for people who have had run-ins with Daredevil. They meet in the basement of a church. It's a nice, smaller story with a not very interesting villain. In the early issues, It reminded me of Twelve Angry Men, as each person tells their story of Daredevil and how differently they perceive him depending on their life experience.

The story has panels, the flashback has a looser and scratchier vibe

Maleev again pushes himself to do some stylistic differences, and with the help of Stewart's colors, really nails the tone. Each person's flashback has a slightly tweaked color scheme and rendering style. Maleev isn't able to switch styles like a chameleon, but he does the job well enough.

Great colors on this page, a great noir pic of Daredevil

The final arc is the capture of Daredevil, leading into Ed Brubaker's excellent run. This story works nicely as a capper to Bendis' run. The only issues I had with it were some of the characterizations and some stylistic choices that I chocked up to being typical of the time it was made.

Not feeling this

Ben Urich gets so mad at Kingpin, he promises to kill him, and I just don't get that. It didn't feel like Urich had been brought to his breaking point. That's a quibble, because Urich has been one of my favorite things in the whole run so far.

Maria Hill is Bendis' character, so he would know how to portray her, but I just found the leader of the largest, deepest government military agency showing her cleavage off to be so embarrassing. I'm not crazy about the Black Widow showing it off either, but with BW, there's an argument that her sexuality is a strategic asset. For Maria Hill though... I was trying to think of what was out at the time, and around the year 2000, mainstream comics were still capitalizing on sexuality heavily, so this probably didn't read as strange at all. In the year 2021, reading this comic that wants so much to be "realistic", Hill's uniform stuck out like a sore thumb.

FBI guy, whose name I've forgotten, is such a transparently douchey character. Bendis and Maleev must have had fun thinking up ways to make him more hatable. His main goal is to put Daredevil away, and never has much of a motive other than he doesn't like how Daredevil does things. It's never about the law or doing good.

Elektra's another character whose costume doesn't work that well in "realistic" comics

Confession: I've never read the original Elektra Daredevil run, or pretty much anything with Elektra that was published before 2000. I don't find her interesting at all, and the portrayals of her after coming back from the dead haven't made me interested in knowing what she was about originally. Those Miller/Janson books are a blind spot I wouldn't mind filling, but I haven't liked Frank Miller in 20 years, so it's hard to make an effort with it either.

Anyway, I think Bendis' Japanese without subtitles is a pretty silly remnant of the era. When I was a kid, language was simply translated in brackets. These days, they usually have the foreign language in the balloon, with English in a translation box. But some time around this era, just having untranslated language was the thing to do.

What's she saying?

"It's me. Come to the Night Hospital at Rockaway and 91st." "What?" "Yes! Now! Bring the damn bag!"

She uses a neutral imperative to come, but then an impolite imperative to bring the bag. And bag is written bag instead of baggu or kaban. So I imagine she slipped into an English accent to say bag, while the rest is in Japanese. Hey, I do that all the time when I have a word I don't usually use in Japanese. But not on a beginner word like bag.

Long story short, I think I liked it better when they just used translation brackets, unless the whole point is to alienate the reader. 

Ultimate Punisher shanks an inmate. He's much more unhinged than the 616 version

The book also has some odds and ends from Bendis' Daredevil years in the form of an issue of What if? and three issues of the Ultimate Universe' Marvel Team Up.  

The What if? asks What if Karen Page had lived? I had no interest in this, as I mainly know Karen through Born Again, and she was either not in, or dead in all the other Daredevil I've read. Micheal Lark is on art, but he'd do far better work in the next Brubaker run.

The MTU issues feature Bill Sienkiewicz on art, and are worth a read just for that. It's not his best or most exciting work, but his bad work is better than many artists' good work. It ties together Punisher, Daredevil, and Spider-Man.

Not going to lie, this doesn't work for me at all

Punisher escapes jail, Daredevil goes to catch him, Spider-Man gets in the way. It's nothing special in the writing, but the pleasure in MTU was in seeing characters you like crossover, not in getting coherent stories.

At the end of this Bendis run, I'm glad I read it in the first place, if a decade after most people did, and I'm glad I re-read it this year, because I only remembered half of it.  It's good, easy to read book that has solid characterization over all. At times, Daredevil is a guest star in his own book, but that just means the supporting cast is getting a lot of room to tell their stories too.

I can't imagine having this on the bookstore rack next to, say, Chuck Austen's Uncanny X-Men, to choose a punching bag few would defend. Coming out as The Sopranos and other better-written cable television flourished, it must have seemed like a mini-revolution for mainstream comics. As those TV shows wrote for the season, Bendis definitely was writing for the trade. Single issues may seem slight, but work very well within their arc. 

It doesn't feel revolutionary now with all the made-for-trades comics out now, but it's still a good read.