Matt Murdock: Daredevil Appreciation 2019

[Fearless]

The art's certainly not as appealing judging by the Issue #6 preview, but quality writing can make up for that.

Are there any team up or arcs featuring Daredevil and Doctor Strange? I know they had some interactions in Bendis New Avengers, but outside of that I either can not recall or either can not find much out there. They are two of my favorite Marvel characters and I was wanting read more of them together. I know their worlds do not cross to much as Strange deal with the occult/mysticism and DD is more of a grounded street level hero.

I didn't see anyone mention but outside of canon there's a What-If story where Stick turned Dr. Strange off the path of the Ancient One and toward the Chaste. Matt becomes Strange's disciple but is lost to the Hand at a young age. Elektra comes under the mentorship of Strange and you get hero Elektra with villain Daredevil.

I hate when continuity is forgotten...For example...in the Man Without Fear limited/trade...DD kills a hitman....deflects a bullet right back into his head to save a kid....but now Matt is acting like he never dropped a body.

Man Without Fear isn't canon.

I wish more had been done with Echo. She was such a fascinating character when she showed up.. that it actually took some of the sting out of losing Karen Page a few issues before.

I've always HATED Elektra and Mary and Milla and Natasha… but especially Elektra I was really kind of excited for a NEW kick butt female love interest but... it just dropped off and went nowhere.

Echo was really interesting and I always expected more to be done with her. I think Milla only really served as an outlet for Matt's breakdown, but I do like Natasha's relationship with Matt. That's another that seems like it has potential that could've been revisited in more modern books.

Whether he did kill the guy or not, he’s been significantly affected by his death. To me it looked like he’d embarked thoroughly on the five stages of grief. Issue #2 was all about denial, the fight with Cole was anger, and I figure he hit the bargaining phase with Punisher. Right now I’d say that he’s juggling depression and acceptance.

I guess he’d consider that his 360 degree radar means that it’s no excuse that all he did was shove back an elbow into the body of someone attacking him from behind, who then fell back and hit a wall. It was one less coordinated move while his attention was on the other people he was fighting. And that does seem to be the level that he’s off his game. He’s almost there, but not quite, and that not quite makes him dangerous to himself and others.

So far this run is turning into a grand tour of all aspects of Matt’s life and relationships, though mainly on the Daredevil side. I’m hoping that if he’s hung up the horns for a while we might get to see him do some lawyering in the near future.

This is a great take and I think it makes the significance of that guy's death work either way. It's interesting to note that Marvel's social media were posting articles of other times heroes have been falsely accused of murder while promoting the recent arc.

[Mike_Murdock]

Man Without Fear isn't canon.

I wouldn't state that as an absolute. I'd argue some of it is while some of it is not. Other writers have at least referenced it.

[Chris0013]

Man Without Fear isn't canon.

I look at it like the distillation of all the parts of his origin being brought together.

[Mike_Murdock]

It's a distillation, but also a deliberate retcon. Elektra is a very different character and her chronology doesn't entirely make sense (I think D.G. Chichester tried to reconcile all of it in Elektra: Root of Evil, although Scott McDaniel's art is too incomprehensible for me to be confident of anything in that story). The timeline of things are changed pretty dramatically as well.

It was intended as a movie script originally and it works very well in that context. It works in the same way Captain America: The First Avenger tells Captain America's origin story.

[phonogram12]

I wouldn't state that as an absolute. I'd argue some of it is while some of it is not. Other writers have at least referenced it.

Yeah, I've noticed in various Marvel Universe entries and Brubaker's run, Matt was on the verge of graduating from law school when his father was murdered as opposed to on the verge of graduating high school like in Miller's version. That said, I've always preferred Man Without Fear, so that's my choice of head canon.

[Nanashi]

Hhmmmm....?

https://twitter.com/inkdropinc/statu...876451328?s=21

[cc008]

Hhmmmm....?

https://twitter.com/inkdropinc/statu...876451328?s=21

Interesting!!

[jsg2295]

I am really enjoying the stories written by Zdarsky...but in the back of my head I am thinking...what the heck are they going to do next with Matt. Every subsequent storyline keeps putting Matt in a darker place.
I wouldnt be surprised if the next writer didnt just eviscerate him in the first issue and the next few issues have him use abilities taught by stick to form a new body.

[Arsenal]

Eventually they gonna push him so dark that Matt’s gonna go full camp.

[The Overlord]

It's a distillation, but also a deliberate retcon. Elektra is a very different character and her chronology doesn't entirely make sense (I think D.G. Chichester tried to reconcile all of it in Elektra: Root of Evil, although Scott McDaniel's art is too incomprehensible for me to be confident of anything in that story). The timeline of things are changed pretty dramatically as well.

It was intended as a movie script originally and it works very well in that context. It works in the same way Captain America: The First Avenger tells Captain America's origin story.

I feel like Elektra probably should have stayed dead in the 80s and the writers have a tough time justifying her presence past her original death.

I think Frank Miller wrote Elektra more as a plot device than as a character because her motives from A to B do not make sense if you think about them. Elektra's father is killed by terrorists and then she becomes an assassin for hire. If she is mad that her father was cruelly murdered, why is she someone who cruelty murders people for a living? Wouldn't that just make more orphans and widows in the world? They have tried to make her an anti-hero after she came back, but that doesn't jive with the fact that she has been willing to murder innocent people for cash in the past (she tried to kill Ben Urich). She just comes off as a selfish psychopath who uses her father's death an excuse to be a bad person.

Elektra being a bad person who Matt was in lust with for purely physical reasons, who dies after doing one selfless thing, is a better story then all the antihero stuff they try to justify her presence with nowadays. Daredevil giving Elektra a pass ''Because she's hot'' and the rest of the superhero community giving her a pass because ''she has useful skills'' makes me lose respect for DD and heroes in general.

Man Without Fear trying to use mental illness to justify her motives, seems like a step in the right direction, not a perfect one, that can be full of pitfalls, but hey, mental illness would make her kinda sympathetic and in the original Miller DD run I did not find her very sympathetic at all, like I think she would be a worse person then the Punisher in those early issues (she would be better than say Bullseye).

[jules]

EXCLUSIVE Preview: DAREDEVIL #6
https://13thdimension.com/exclusive-...w-daredevil-6/

Shame that they couldn’t have recruited someone with a more similar style to Checchetto for the art rotation.

spoilers:

The book store scene interests me. I guess “retirement” is going to leave Matt with an awful lot of time on his hands, which reading the complete works of Dickens via touching the ink impressions on a page should fill nicely. (If he can handle the extremely small print he’s inevitably going to find in most editions.) Of course, Bleak House has a very famous and convoluted legal case at its heart, so he might just be dipping into fictional lawyering portrayals. Is this him trying to get into the mindset for being a full time lawyer, or will he branch out into crime fiction at a later date?

end of spoilers

[Mike_Murdock]

I feel like Elektra probably should have stayed dead in the 80s and the writers have a tough time justifying her presence past her original death.

The biggest reason to let her stay dead is we might get Frank Miller to write a Daredevil story again (not that he's the same Frank Miller he once was). I tend to agree that she doesn't bring much. There was a lot of fanfare when she came back during Fall From Grace, but I don't think they did much with her after that. Maybe some Wolverine stuff. I haven't read many of her solos, though.

Man Without Fear trying to use mental illness to justify her motives, seems like a step in the right direction, not a perfect one, that can be full of pitfalls, but hey, mental illness would make her kinda sympathetic and in the original Miller DD run I did not find her very sympathetic at all, like I think she would be a worse person then the Punisher in those early issues (she would be better than say Bullseye).

I have two complaints about the mental illness angle. First, it undermines the themes of the character. Elektra was the anti-Matt. They both lost their fathers, but they reacted differently. Matt continued to believe in the importance of the law despite his willingness to break it from time to time. Elektra no longer believed in the law and became completely selfish instead. She has a bloodlust and always had a bloodlust undermines that original story (and it makes Matt look bad for ever loving her). Second, I've heard people complain that Typhoid Mary is an Elektra ripoff. I didn't get it at first, but I eventually realized that they have to be comparing Typhoid to the Man Without Fear Elektra. Those characters have a lot of similarities, although Typhoid came first.

[Chris0013]

DAREDEVIL #9
CHIP ZDARSKY (W)
LALIT KUMAR SHARMA (A)
Cover by JULIAN TOTINO TEDESCO
Bring on the Bad Guys Variant Cover by TBA
• There’s a new DAREDEVIL in town, and Matt Murdock has no idea who it is!
• Neither does Cole North, the tough-as-nails detective who’s been hot on the Guardian Devil’s trail for weeks.
• Can Matt Murdock truly live a life without Daredevil? Can Cole?
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99

DAREDEVIL #10
CHIP ZDARSKY (W)
LALIT KUMAR SHARMA (A)
Cover by JULIAN TOTINO TEDESCO
Bring on the Bad Guys Variant
Cover by JUNG-GEUN YOON
“NO DEVILS, ONLY GOD” CONCLUDES!
• Matt Murdock comes face-to-face with the choices he’s made.
• Hell’s Kitchen rises up to fill the void!
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99

Someone else running around it DDs suit....Bullseye maybe??

and take the title off that pic and t would be an amazing poster.

[Nanashi]

Exclusive Marvel Comics Preview: WAR OF REALMS: WAR SCROLLS #2

https://monkeysfightingrobots.co/exc...war-scrolls-2/

[The Overlord]

The biggest reason to let her stay dead is we might get Frank Miller to write a Daredevil story again (not that he's the same Frank Miller he once was). I tend to agree that she doesn't bring much. There was a lot of fanfare when she came back during Fall From Grace, but I don't think they did much with her after that. Maybe some Wolverine stuff. I haven't read many of her solos, though.



I have two complaints about the mental illness angle. First, it undermines the themes of the character. Elektra was the anti-Matt. They both lost their fathers, but they reacted differently. Matt continued to believe in the importance of the law despite his willingness to break it from time to time. Elektra no longer believed in the law and became completely selfish instead. She has a bloodlust and always had a bloodlust undermines that original story (and it makes Matt look bad for ever loving her). Second, I've heard people complain that Typhoid Mary is an Elektra ripoff. I didn't get it at first, but I eventually realized that they have to be comparing Typhoid to the Man Without Fear Elektra. Those characters have a lot of similarities, although Typhoid came first.

Here's my problem though, if Elektra is just motivated by blood lust, what makes her different from any other psychopath assassin DD fights? It seems like DD makes little attempt to bring her to justice, heck it seems like the entire hero community just gives her pass, despite the fact she has been willing to kill innocent people in the past (she killed that information that tried to rat out the Kingpin and tried to kill Urich as well).

What purpose does the character serve after her original death? It seems like the writers tried to turn her into another ''hot badass anti-hero girl'' in the 90s, but again, it does not work because she tried to kill innocent people in the past and no one seems interested in bringing her for that.

Again, at least mental illness could mitigate her actions, without, she seems like a villain that the writers are trying to sell as an anti-hero and it doesn't work, both DD and the rest of the heroes seem like total hypocrites just letting her run around unchecked.

If Elektra had stayed dead, none of this would an issue, she would have paid the ultimate price for misdeeds and her last act being heroic would have made the character tragic, bringing her back undoes that and defeats the character's original purpose.

Really I think some Miller characters, like Elektra and the Hand, need a revamp to be compelling beyond the stories Miller used them in.