Reading Through 2021 92: Thor: The Black Galaxy, by Tom deFalco and Ron Frenz

Thor: The Black Galaxy (Epic Collection vol. 18), by Tom deFalco and Ron Frenz

1990, collected in 2019

When these comics were new, I absolutely hated them. I had many things to learn.

It's 1990. McFarlane is doing Spider-Man, Liefeld is doing New Mutants, and Lee is doing Uncanny X-Men. Walter Simonson hasn't been on Thor for a few years. This was a cold book to my teenage eyes. 

The brashness to label the first issue of a storyline a "saga"... So so good!

And I get why I didn't like it then. This was old school. Writer deFalco had been working under Jim Shooter, and was made editor-in-chief around this time. His policy as the head of Marvel Comics was to just keep doing what Shooter did. There is nothing in this book that would have been out of place in a 1980 Marvel book.

I'm here for it, Count Tagar. The inking here is incredible work by Joe Sinnott, but the colors on it pop as well

For me at that time, that meant the book lacked any freshness, especially compared to the soon-to-be Image artists that were the stars at Marvel. Thirty years later, I'm reading these simply as comics rather than as a barometer of the times, and they they read a lot better than, say, all of McFarlane's Spider-Man run. 

That's how you do a double-page spread

This work is a refined, classic Kirby homage with a quality of craftsmanship that would be hard to find today.  Frenz was an artist I loved on Amazing Spider-Man (he was the artist around the mid 200s, the time of the black suit Spider-Man), but he evolved into a much more retro artist on Thor. The first half of his run had Joe Sinnott inking with bold lines and dynamic feathering, giving it even more of a Kirby-esque vibe. And probably older Marvel fans were loving it, but at my comic shop, it was not part of the conversation.

Asgard crosses over to the Negative Zone

To really put this in perspective, two years later, Alan Moore would be making 1963 for Image, doing a similar homage to classic Marvel and be hailed for it. Around the same time, Mike Allred would also start mining Kirby, pairing it with ginchy kitsch and getting praised left, right, and center. At the very same time, deFalco, Frenz and Sinnott were making the real deal and getting no credit for it. The argument might be that Moore was choosing to make Kirby-esque comics, while the makers of Thor were simply making what they made, but that's a disrespectful argument. It's the same snobbery that gave Roy Lichtenstein credit for ripping off 50's comic art but not the artist who actually drew it, or gives a trendy restaurant credit for seeing the beauty in street food when it puts it on a nice plate and sells it at four times the price.

There's a bit of Kirby in this

No, this Thor run is the real thing, not a distillation of it. DeFalco and Frenz weren't slumming, they were being the thing itself.

This collection is the third of four Epic Collections that have most of their run. I have collection 16, War of the Pantheons, which I only bought because it was 50% off, and shocked me how much life and energy I found in it. I missed volume 17, In Mortal Flesh, and it's now unaffordable in the current Epic Collection collector's market. This volume is, relative to Epic Collections, pretty good. Some volumes have a lot of filler, and these don't. It starts with an annual which was not done by deFalco and Frenz, and it's not great. The annuals of the early 90s at Marvel were generally just places to give gigs to aged-out veteran artists or try out younger artists. Here, 70's Herb Trimpe does a competent but uninteresting chapter of a lackluster crossover.

I'm not going to dog on Trimpe's art. Instead, check out what Hercules does on his day off!

A number of the Thor issues in this were split in two with a back up Tales of Asgard story, written by deFalco  and drawn by someone I've never heard of, Gary Hartle. I think I get what he was trying to do, get a chance to write characters like Balder or the Warriors Three, and give Frenz and Sinnott some time to make deadlines, but these also just lack the energy of the main Thor stories.

The impact in panels 1 and 4 is amazing, but the perspective and composition in the third panel really puts you in the action

The main title goes through roughly two arcs in the course of the 18 issues contained in the collection, with some smaller arcs in between. The first arc is the Black Galaxy Saga, which really wears the Kirby on it's sleeve. Thor investigates an organic galaxy being researched by the High Evolutionary, and witnesses things no man has seen before.

Again, the colors! You couldn't do this better using Photoshop

It involves one of Kirby's greatest creations, the Celestials, and Frenz is more than capable of bringing an epic quality to the work.

Double-page spreads should blow your mind

After the saga has ended, Thor returns to earth and fights the Wrecking Crew, one of Kirby's much less interesting creations. There is a crossover with Excalibur where they fight at a New York pier, and for me, this was a lull in the book. Thor fighting at street-level in New York isn't half as interesting as him having adventures in space or in Asgard. I'm here for the crazy stuff I can't get anywhere else. I was losing interest, when suddenly Excalibur's mission to recapture the Juggernaut takes them to an alien planet where Juggernaut has been proclaimed the almighty leader. And just like that, I'm back on board!

The back of the book reprints some of Sinnott's original inks

All in all, I loved this book and am looking forward to more, with a few massive caveats. I love what deFalco and Frenz were doing here. It was authentic, high-quality old school Marvel Comics. They weren't trail blazing, but they were doing a great job on what they were doing. As the volume is ending, the atmosphere of the book starts to shift, and it's a little troubling.

That is a 2/3's of the page panel. Look at that ink!

The first is that Al Milgrim starts stepping in on inking duties. Joe Sinnott was a classic heavyweight inker. Milgrim was a Marvel editor whose art and inking I associate with books on a deadline. I'm sure he enjoyed the job, but he was always competent, never much more than that. I have volume 19, and having flipped through it, it seems like Milgrim became the regular inker. It's not a deal breaker, but Sinnott was a pretty key member of this creative team for me.

A double-page spread with Milgrim inks lacks a lot of the power of previous ones 

Another downturn for me was the appearance of a superpower enforcement police team. They don't have powers, they just specialize in cases involving powers, and they aren't inspired in any way. As a kid, I was never into G.I. Joe or any men in uniform type characters, so maybe they worked for others better than for me.

That's not gonna work on an Asgardian god, you fool!

Lastly, whether it was pressure from the bean-counters at Marvel, or simply deFalco and Frenz wanting to create something that'll connect with the kids, the book starts trying to be "cool" toward the end. Make no mistake, deFalco and Frenz were not cool guys. And their uncoolness is part of what makes this run so great. And I understand their impetus to make something that jives with the kids like Cable did. But it's not great stuff.

This probably lost as many readers as it gained. Maybe it gained a little more, since it was 1991

In the Black Galaxy Saga, deFalco tried writing a cool, young character, and the silence was deafening, the character swiftly disappeared to the planet Poochy went to. A god created mere days ago using youth lingo. It has strong "Hello, fellow kids!" energy.

Frenz gets credit for Juvan's hairstyle

That said, I think this is one of the best runs from the era. I had this image of Tom deFalco as a hack for most of my comic-reading years. Actually, I have that image of a lot of the artists and writers at DC and Marvel from the 70s and 80s. Mainly the guys who worked there until they got pushed out by younger styles. I judged them a lot on what they couldn't do, which was stay fresh and dynamic forever. Now that I'm in my 40s, I'm reading their work a lot differently, and not judging them for not appealing to 13 year olds forever. Looking at the work now, I see the craftsmanship and passion in it, but I also see the fun. It's when it's trying to be cool that it starts being very uncool, and losing some of that fun. 

"It's the nineties, pal! Those days are OVER!"

This book isn't flawless by any means, but it has a lot of great work in it. It's nearly 500 pages of Thor, and I'd estimate about 300 of those are awesome, and the rest ranging from mediocre to solid. But it's a must-read for anyone looking for a Kirby fix. Of course, go get the Kirby reprints first, that's the source, but if you are into Moore's 1963, or anything Tom Scioli does, this belongs on the shelf with those.

Thor gets political

Reading Through 2021 88: The Playboy, by Chester Brown

 The Playboy, by Chester Brown

1992, revised edition 2013

When I last read this book, I was a boy; now I am kind of a man.

The cover is a repurposed panel

Sometime around the mid-90s, I got turned on to the output of Drawn & Quarterly, and without a doubt, it changed my life. For one thing, it was the leveling up I needed to see from comics to justify keeping up with them. I love genre, but I couldn't subside on genre alone. I needed something with a deeper motive and a greater ambition to keep me from giving up on them all together. D&Q was that thing. It also helped that they were Canadian and helped me to see Canadian art as different than merely government funded would-be American art (there was a lot of not-so-great CanCon movies, music and TV in the 90s).  This book, along with the work of Seth and Joe Matt, gave me something to aspire to, though the work of those three is a pretty narrow spectrum through the lens of 2021.

The current version is smaller in size, with a lot more pages than the 90's version

So I had this, and all the rest of the D&Q books of the time, but I think I gave my copy of it away around the year 2000. It was long gone, anyway. More than once, I looked on my bookshelf for it and couldn't find it, so I finally just ordered a new copy. First thing I noticed was it's a new edition. The old edition was bigger, more panels on the page, black backgrounds, and if I remember correctly, a comment by Hugh Hefner. The new one has one or two panels per page, it's been re-scripted, and other subtle alterations which I missed.

I like the paper the new one is printed on, simple newsprint like a cheap novel has.

You can't buy pornography at the store near your house, for obvious reasons

The book in a nutshell is this: Brown tells autobiographical anecdotes about buying Playboy from teenage years to adulthood. It involves a lot of shame and being extremely conscious about all of it. Where to buy it, how to talk about it, how to dispose of it, how to carry it so that nobody thinks you're doing anything abnormal.

Hiding stuff in your shirt is a terrible idea. You hide it out in the open

Of course, he has his own personal details as to how he did things, but this hit home to me like few things I'd ever read at the time. Even today, it hits home. Pornography is pretty near universal in male experience, but in most circles, it's not something men want to talk about or acknowledge. It's embarrassing, verging into shameful. It depends on the person and their upbringing how much shame there is, but I was raised pretty non-religious, in a fairly open house, and I was mortified that someone might think I wanted to look at naked women. 

The use of pornography at the very least is universal, and if there is a guy who says he's never, then chances are he was simply using Sears catalogs instead. And it's a part of human experience. I studied the history of art, and one of my favorite quotes was by David Hockney (if I remember correctly), which went along the lines of, "It's only pornography for a hundred years, then it goes into a museum." It's been a constant in human culture. 

That's the kind of stuff I had to remind myself to not just feel like a skeeve.

The rituals of calculatedly disposing of his pornography is painful 

Brown lays it all out in detail the efforts he would go to to destroy evidence of having bought a Playboy, being haunted by not having it, and repurchasing it again, and eventually getting rid of the evidence again. It's painful, because he was doing it to himself. He wasn't being preached at by his parents or a reverend. He had just internalized this idea that wanting, having and using pornography was wrong.

So painful

The biggest takeaway is the honesty Brown shows throughout. Even as an adult writing about it, he isn't comfortable with it. In a Maus-like reflection of people reading his work in progress, he feigns not knowing about Playboy history in conversation with a guy who will likely read his comic a month later and see that he was lying. He's tackling the topic, yet he hasn't come to terms with it. It makes the whole project fascinating, and fairly unique. Autobiography was still a minor genre in comics, and rarely does the artist show themselves to be barely able to acknowledge in life what they're acknowledging on the page. Most autobiography is about topics someone has come to terms with.

Porn in forests and parks will never change. I've seen it in Japan lots too

My thoughts on this book, over twenty years after I last read it: it's much smaller than I remembered. At that time, trade paperbacks were still somewhat new. The original book was maybe 160 pages, which felt pretty substantial at the time, but feels quite short within the world of comics today, especially as Brown doesn't use half of the paper on the page. The landscape of comics has evolved a lot in the past 25 years and if it were released today, I think it would still get a lot of praise, but it feels slight compared to most alternative comics I buy.

How foolish of him to try to dispose of a magazine in the family fireplace

The book feels as personal now as it ever did. I've read a number of autobiographical comics this year, and all are revealing, some more than others. Maybe for me, because this resonates so deeply with my own experiences, it just feels that much harder of a book to have made. At this point, I could tell some of my own stories like this, but having read this book would make it easier, and I'd have to have some ironic distance from the "me" I were talking about.  Brown does have his own ironic distance as well, as he narrates the book in the form of a demon.

I imagine an eighteen year old today would still relate to this, though some of the details would be harder for them to imagine. Do young men buy magazines anymore? Maybe a young man today just amasses files on their hard drive, which they purge and rebuild repeatedly. I don't know, I don't talk to any teenagers. Maybe their porn is in the cloud. 

Can't just throw pornography out with your garbage. Someone might see it

This wasn't a book I was dying to get back, it was languishing in my online wishlist for about two years, but I just decided I should have it back on my shelf. Reading it reminded me how important it was for me, because I saw myself in a comic as much as I ever had. My own life had drama and conflict that I had never recognized.

I Really Should Read This 23: Metabarons, by Jodrowsky and Gimenez

Metabarons, by Jodrowsky and Gimenez

1992-2003, collected in 2017

This is a big one. 

I read through a ton of comics and rarely would I ever attach the word "staggering" to anything I read. Chris Ware might get that word, probably Charles Burns' Black Hole. And Metabarons is staggering. I'm not even sure how much I liked it, but it is not something I will ever forget.

There's not so much to relate to on a human level

I read a minor Jodorowsky book in February, and it was enjoyable, but I had a feeling with that one that it was a pretty shallow book. Jodorowsky works with very potent iconography. When characters are fucking and dying, it can feel like something, but how effective that iconography is will depend on the reader. If you're looking for a nuanced portrayal of people, this is not the book for you.

The beautiful are beautiful, and the ugly are grotesque

The male leads of Metabarons, the Metaborons themselves, are the strongest, most powerful men you will ever see. They marry the most voluptuous women you will ever see. They care not for the lives of ordinary folk. They live on a scale we couldn't handle. 

They suffer as well

Metabarons covers roughly four generations of the Metabarons, as they disrupt the balance of the galaxy depending on which path they decide to take.

As I read the book, I was trying to figure out what exactly it's comparable to. At first, I was thinking that Metabarons was to Star Wars as Game of Thrones is to Lord of the Rings.  It's not an unfair comparison. Metabarons allows for an idea of sex and death far beyond what traditional Hollywood fare does and is firmly in the realm of science-fantasy. There is no attempt at scientific realism. Technology exists for whatever the story calls for. 

Perpetually dividing yourself is a good technique for overwhelming the enemy

As I got a few books in, I started to see the book as clearly in the tradition of ancient mythology, where stories of very human emotions are thrust against the impossible. Think of the sirens of odysseus or narcissus staring at himself in a pool until he died. Or Oedipus fatefully, impossibly killing his father before blinding himself. Metabarons is telling stories like that, stories you are meant to relate to on a metaphoric level more than on a personal one.

When the first mother of the Metabarons is shot with an anti-gravity injection at the moment she gives birth, the baby is born without weight. After seven years being raised in a cave without love or kindness, his legs are destroyed and weighted boots are attached so he can be a warrior.  That's an actual story in the book. 

When the genitals of a Metabaron are destroyed, he attaches the steering handle for his phallic spaceship in the empty slot to pilot it. It's stated as a normal thing.

Baby Metabarons are no joke

Basically, the book takes a very old way of storytelling and thrusts it into science fiction, with a fascinating result. It's decidedly unmodern in the story it's telling, and that makes it refreshing. It's a kind of escapism very different from the kind of escapism that overwhelms mainstream comics. 

Which one of those two would you suspect is the clone?

What's great about what Jodorowsky and Gimenez did with this book is that they aren't telling sci-fi versions of classic mythology. They're actually building up new relationships and dynamics with the weight of classical mythology using science fiction. There is genuine inventiveness in the major events of the book.

That's a pretty good picture!

The art by Juan Gimenez is astounding. He's tasked with drawing battle after battle on a massive scale, either with figures or vehicles, and he cuts no corners. Very occasionally, some images get muddy as dark creatures spurt blood or something, but it's such a minor thing to even mention and it occurs less and less as the series goes on. He illustrated this over roughly ten years, and he must have put in an uncountable number of hours.

As someone who hasn't read a lot of Humanoids or Euro comics, I wasn't familiar with Gimenez, and I was sad to learn he died of COVID complications in 2020 at the age of 76. I'm sure he was proud of his work on this book.

There's a lot of stuff like this: Tecnopapal Temple on the Techno-Techno Central Planet

If I have a criticism, and it's a minor one, like complaining about the garnish on a five star meal, it's the robot narrators and the use of vocabulary. 

The story is told by two robots with enthusiasm and respect for their legendary Metabaron master, and repeatedly they envy human biology. At one point, one is so enthralled with the story it pines for a bladder so that it could piss itself with excitement. 

I can't tell if it is humor, or a statement about the magic of human emotion and biology that AI will envy our experience of life. I suspect it's a bit of both, but it was relentless. 

The vocabulary is full of prefixes which started to become like a parody of science fiction. Things that were rooted in Earth were prefixed palio, tons of stuff was prefixed techno and cyborg, and there was other stuff as well. I just didn't get it. I don't understand why a future human society would tell people to go to paleo-Hell. So much of the book I got with after a while, but I didn't get with that. It's a choice, and I don't have to love every one.

*meca-gulp*

But this was a book that demanded a lot from me as a reader and gave a lot in return. There is a lot of stuff in the "Jodorverse", and I'm going to look into some other series, specifically Technopriests and the sequel to this. It might be good, it might not, but I doubt it'll be boring.

I Really Should Read This 22: Ping Pong Volume One, by Taiyo Matsumoto

Ping Pong Volume One, by Taiyo Matsumoto

1996, English Edition 2020

I consider myself a fan of Taiyo Matsumoto's work, that I've read in English. I have Tekkonkinkreet, Sunny, and Cats of the Louvre. I'm not always taken by the story of these books, but I love the atmosphere and emotion of it. His work has an alien quality that I need to appreciate in a different way from conventional comics or manga. 

The cover of the book isn't very good; this is a better taste of the book

But I was hesitant to get Ping Pong. It's older work of his, done in the sports genre, which was made into a movie and into anime. Without reading it, I just assumed it was more conventional manga made before he became THE Taiyo Matsumoto. And maybe it is more conventional in some ways, but I loved reading every page of this book.

Ping Pong Vol. One 

I'm no judge of the genre of sports manga. As someone who has never watched or played sports, my main experience of them is their use in movies and TV. I was worried about what I would latch onto when I couldn't care who won a match. Ping Pong doesn't seem to care that much about it either. Certainly, it features table tennis matches, but when the tournament comes up, it skips a lot of them too. It puts more focus on the first round of matches than on the final.

Instead, the book focuses on the egos of the players involved. How they feel about winning and why is more important than the games themselves. The book covers the table tennis teams between high schools in a smaller city in Japan, and many players have relationships stretching beyond their extra-curricular team. Only one player, a Chinese transfer student Wenge, is disconnected, but even he has a connection of sorts in that he relies on being better than the Japanese to sustain his ego. Every kid in the tournament calls him "China" to exacerbate that status.

That line on the ball as it impacts against the paddle is exquisite

Matsumoto is a poetic artist. Where a lot of manga is mechanically precise in its illustrations, Matsumoto has what I'd call an "artistic line." He lets the pages breathe. The only perfect lines seem to be in the ping pong balls themselves, which are smooth circles. He also practices extreme perspective throughout. Not Jack Kirby style, but I think Kirby would like what he does here.

The book is worth buying just for the scenery

And of course, he draws the hell out of the table tennis matches. It helps that Matsumoto isn't an artist intent of copying his own work and repeating faces and scenes. Every picture seems new, no matter how repetitive the content is. The art breathes, there doesn't seem to be a better word to express it.

The little nibs on the paddle create a texture on his finger. There's so much love in every image

In the writing too, there is poetry. I don't want to belabor it too much because it may not stand up to deep analysis, but Matsumoto works in ideas that color the overall work. The main two characters are Hoshino and Tsukimoto. Hoshino goes by the nickname of Peco, which is Japanese slang for hungry (ペコペコ). He is an aggressive player and wants to be the best, but he's just as happy goofing off. Tsukimoto goes by the ironic nickname Smile, because he never smiles. He is the best player, but has no hunger to win. He seems to play to be closer to his friend Peco. At the same time, the kanji for their names use 星 and 月, star/hoshi and moon/tsuki. Those are not uncommon last names in Japan, but it seemed too cute to be coincidence. As I read, I saw star and moon motifs used in the book, including a pattern in inner cover, so yeah, they are a hungry star and the unsmiling moon.

And I love how Matsumoto gives players gestures. Smile is constantly pushing his glasses up. It's a choice to have him adjusting himself. 

There are probably 100 pictures of him doing this in the book. Note the moon on his shirt

The closest thing to an antagonist in the book are the students at the Kaio/Neptune school, and their star players, Demon and Dragon, but they are students who want to win more than real villain characters. 

Again, I don't want to belabor the metaphor too much, because these are all human characters. Perhaps Matsumoto uses these grand ideas (star/moon/Neptune/China) to root his characters before he gets to work fleshing them out 

Peco gets a little fat

This is the first half of the complete series (and I love manga like this that clocks in at 1000 pages). I don't know what resolution will come of it. In the first half, no real problem has arisen. Smile is the best player, but has little ambition to win. Maybe he will want to win, but I suspect not.

My favorite part in the whole book is a coach speaking to a student who has lost and will no longer be able to compete in high school table tennis tournaments. The player tells the coach he feels like a pathetic loser. The coach laughs, and tells him as a friend, not a coach, "you're life's just started. You've just arrived at the starting line." For all the emotion these players are putting into this game, it'll end up only being a footnote in their lives.

Reading Through 2021 62: Daredevil Epic Collection 15: Last Rites, by Ann Nocenti, D.G. Chichester, and Lee Weeks

Daredevil Epic Collection 15: Last Rites, by Ann Nocenti, D.G. Chichester, and Lee Weeks

1990-1992, collected in 2020

Holy, this was a lot of book. 

The cover is the original cover of issue 300, not recolored!

I'm a fan of the Marvel Epic Collections, they are dense collections offering a snapshot of their time period. Unlike themed collections which collect a single storyline, this is all the Daredevil that was being published in the featured time period. Probably more than any Epic I've read, this was an unfocused book. It covers the transition between Ann Nocenti and D.G. Chichester as writer of the book, and is divided by an annual with a third writer, Gregory Wright. As a result, even though I'm reviewing one book, it feels like I'm reviewing three.

Before picking this up, I was already a fan of Nocenti's DD run. The incentive to read this was to finish reading her run, as I'd fallen off when it came out in the 90's. I've never read anything by Wright to my memory, though if he was working at Marvel in the late 80's to early 90's, I must have. Chichester I only know from the Midnight Suns comics line of the time, which I never read more than an issue of. And I know he was writer when Daredevil got his "realistic" black armor in the 90's, so I never really gave him a chance at the time, and haven't given him much thought in the decades since. With these Epic Collections coming out, I've heard people say they have affection for his run, so I went into this with an open mind.

This feels subversive today! If Cap complained that America was cutting social programs in an issue today, it would be the next right-wing Twitter cryathon. "Is this what they're indoctrinating kids with now?!"

Ann Nocenti's Daredevil has it's problems, but I love it. She wore her feelings on her sleeve, and the editor, Ralph Macchio, must have just not cared at all or been extremely sympathetic. Since the stories make sense, the spelling is correct, there's a fight or two every issue, let her talk about how white collar crime is way worse than the petty crime that takes up newspaper ink! Every time people online today complain about politics in comics, the appropriate reply (if I had time to talk to a brick wall) is: not being "political" is a form of being political, and comics have always been political. Ann Nocenti made some of the most political mainstream comics of the time.

For a scene written by a white person that was mostly read by white kids, it's good? This sort of thing was not on the Cosby Show

As an adult reader, a lot of it is heavy-handed, but when I was a 15 year old reader, I was dense, and I needed something this clearly stated to get through. Sometimes it is just soapboxing, but in other places she weaves it in to the story naturally. One of her best characters, Bullet, is a bad guy, an enforcer, but he's also a single father unequipped to raise his son. His son rarely leaves their apartment, and constantly worries about the bombs dropping in a new world war. That sunk in to me as a kid at the time, and their portrayal in this collection was similarly sympathetic. I still remember a lot of the comics I read in the 80's, and often it was the hamfisted morality they espoused that set me on the path I went down in life. I was impressionable when it came to comics.

Even the drug lords tire of the war on drugs

Unfortunately, the bulk of Nocenti's stories here aren't great. In her main arc, Daredevil returns to New York and immediately gets amnesia for reasons I couldn't understand. I flipped back and forth to get what I was missing, and couldn't find it. Fine, I'll go along with the story anyway. So Bulleye steals Daredevil's costume and goes out into the city as him to ruin his reputation. Meanwhile Daredevil, now using his father's name Jack Murdock, becomes a blind boxer and boxes at a massively hyped match at Madison Square Gardens. That's character breaking stuff. Whenever he goes back to the status quo, there are still newspaper articles and photos of him using his own last name boxing blind. How could he ever have a secret identity again? It's weird. 

The story ends with DD wearing Bullseye's costume and beating up "Daredevil", while the two of them have trouble remembering which person they really are. The ingredients of a good story are there, but it's underbaked. The penciler who replaced John Romita JR on the series, Lee Weeks, can't carry it with his art either. I'm not a Weeks fanboy as I don't have much of his work, but what I'd seen was fairly good. The stuff here is not very strong. And it was inked by the excellent Al Williamson, who did such an incredible job with JRJR's run. I was not feeling great about the rest of the collection.

From Weeks' first issue on Daredevil. It's very 80's Marvel

Then the book takes a break for the 1991 annual. In the 80's, annuals were delightful issues where the writer got to play and make something special, often with artists who didn't do the monthly series. By the 90's, the Marvel editors had decided they could sell more through crossovers, and they were usually uninspired rush jobs with a bunch of filler backup stories, and that's what this was. It was pretty bad.

What editor thought these three characters could support a four series crossover? "It's like those G.I. Joes the kids like."

I don't know who Gregory Wright was, but I feel like he hated his job, or he thought he was writing for kids so he didn't have to try. It's lazy, and while there was a ton of places I got irritated with it, there was only one part that was written even a little interesting.

Hey, crooked cop! Don't take your bribe on the crowded street five meters away from New York's greatest reporter

One of the bad guys created for this story, the Crippler, is not a good character at all. He's Punisher, but he likes making criminals suffer, not just killing them. But, in his origin, we see that before he was a psycho vigilante, he was a cop and a marine, and then he joined Hydra. 

That is throwing some shade on authority figures, and I doubt that would be allowed in a post-9/11 mainstream comic.

The Crippler was too much of a bad boy for Baron Strucker

Still, that annual has little redeeming value beyond a Mike Mignola cover.

"And then, Baron Strucker stands up and cackles maniacally." Take that, Frank Miller

Thankfully, Marvel decided not to publish the other three connected annuals in this collection as they have in some other Epic Collections. I'm figuring the villains were the connecting tissue and DD doesn't appear in them. Moving on.

We then start D.G. Chichester's run, with Lee Weeks carrying over from Nocenti's. The first few issues have some stunt casting. The first story has Punisher, and the next has Ghost Rider. The Punisher story features Tombstone (mainly a Spectacular Spider-Man villain) and Taskmaster (who I only knew from Gruenwald's Captain America run back then), and it was nice. A new writer injects some fresh blood into the stories, and both villains are appropriately down to earth for DD to fight. The two villains are trying to take down criminal targets meant to get them into a fraternity of criminals. It's alluded to more than explained, and it seems to be the ninja organization the Hand, but it's never really clear, and the whole "street level criminals are killing targets to get into a mysterious organization" just disappears. Maybe it's picked up again in the next book, but it's just as likely he had an idea, then decided it wasn't very interesting. I didn't think it was that interesting anyway.

At the end of Nocenti's run, she starts seeding a subplot where Kingpin wants some legitimate business. Chichester picks it up and makes it the center of the last eight issues of the book, culminating in the four part Last Rites storyline. And the book starts getting good.

Weeks' art a year into his run is much better

Weeks' art gets better from issue to issue, and Al Williamson seems to get more in sync with it. The JRJR work was very much rooted in line, and Weeks' work is rooted in shadow. Williamson starts using a brush more liberally on clothes and backgrounds. There are still the odd janky faces in the book, but on the whole it looks good. Drawing 22 pages a month is a great way for a young artist to get in shape, and you can see it here.

The Kingpin story is good too, with a bit of Marvel goofiness on the side. He decides to buy a TV station to influence the public. Because he is a crime lord, he needs legit investors to avoid the FCC, and is duped into opening his bank accounts by Baron Strucker in a Texan costume (white Colonel Sanders suit and goatee with a white cowboy hat) and a Foghorn Leghorn accent ("I say, I say"). The Nazi super-criminal was able to fool the Kingpin into thinking he was a Texas business man. Don't think about it too much.

Long story short, Hydra and everyone who hates Kingpin go after him at once, and DD piles on to make sure he hits rock bottom. The DD in this is kind of malicious. It's a bit out of character, but at this point in DD's history, DD barely knows who he is.

He said it! He said it!

The best story in this, as in, I had to stop and wonder about what I'd just read, was the taking down of Typhoid Mary. Mary is Kingpin's enforcer, but she's sleeping with him too. Kingpin pines over his wife Vanessa, who wants nothing to do with him. He's receptive to Typhoid Mary on a physical level, but he has no love for her. You can feel some pity for her, despite being a villain.

Daredevil, as Matt Murdock, tries to rekindle his relationship with Karen Page, but she isn't receptive. She likes him, she probably loves him, but knows a relationship with him would destroy her. Cut from that to Typhoid Mary taking out some low level mafiosos. Matt/DD has a history with Mary, so rather than fight her, he decides to do things differently.

Weeks and Williamson earned their pay on this page. Did it need captions?

He takes her to a hotel, sleeps with her ("sleep" is such a weak word, Daredevil bangs), then sneaks out while she's sleeping. He then forges her name on a psychiatric admission form, calls the cops and has her locked up in a psych ward.

The issue ends with Matt crying on the floor of a bathroom next to a dirty toilet.

That's crazy. I don't know if it's a sign that Matt is full of vengeance, foreshadowing the his cruelty to the Kingpin. Maybe? But it's not normal for a super-hero. Just to reiterate: he was turned down by one ex, he then slept with another mentally ill ex-girlfriend, forged her signature, then had her admitted to a psychiatric ward. It's not what the hero would do. 

That's why I like it. It's what a person might do, and Matt Murdock is not a flawless hero. He's got issues.

I think I want to read some more of Chichester's run.