Matt Murdock/Daredevil Appreciation 2024.

[taozen]

^^^Couldn't agree more. The latest issue was truly exemplary (IMHO):

Yeah, that fight was written really well. Matt is more skilled but Logan is an unstoppable killing machine that you cannot make a mistake with.

[Keno]

Last issue was great. I am not sure Ahmed is suited for Matt more than Logan with demons as per se. Its didnt seem good on paper like before. Like Shadowland. I would rather want this book to be more grounded. The fight scene between Matt and Logan was great tho. That's the goody stuff what everyone expects from Daredevil.

[Nanashi]

Yeah, that fight was written really well. Matt is more skilled but Logan is an unstoppable killing machine that you cannot make a mistake with.

Yea. I actually liked that that aspect of the fight was acknowledged yet Matt still found a way to win.

[the illustrious mr. kenway]

Despite the spiritual angle, Ahmed and Kuder's run is pretty fun.

[Rzerox21xx]

https://graphicpolicy.com/2024/04/18...w-daredevil-8/

Oversized anniversary issue next week preview.

[Digifiend]

Whoops! Some pages were missing from #8, so it's getting reprinted.
https://bleedingcool.com/comics/marv...ages-reported/

[Devaishwarya]

https://graphicpolicy.com/2024/04/18...w-daredevil-8/

Oversized anniversary issue next week preview.

This was a fantastic read. I'm usually very wary about anniversary issues because it's just a bunch of filler for more money but every story here was very well executed.

Thee Kingpin is back!!!

[Rzerox21xx]

https://graphicpolicy.com/2024/05/02...daredevil-9-2/

[Mike_Murdock]

Whoops! Some pages were missing from #8, so it's getting reprinted.
https://bleedingcool.com/comics/marv...ages-reported/

I hope there won't be any issue getting the comic book store to replace it. They just said free for the stores.

[NK1988]

So I'm an X-Men fan trying to get more into DD. I've really liked what I've seen of Wolverine's and Spiderman's interactions and was just curious if Wolverine and Daredevil have ever had an interesting issue where thy talk to each other?

[Nanashi]

So I'm an X-Men fan trying to get more into DD. I've really liked what I've seen of Wolverine's and Spiderman's interactions and was just curious if Wolverine and Daredevil have ever had an interesting issue where thy talk to each other?

It’s not much of a conversation but DD and Wolverine do have a rather entertaining interaction in issue seven of the current run.

[K7P5V]

It’s not much of a conversation but DD and Wolverine do have a rather entertaining interaction in issue seven of the current run.

From the '80s, a personal favorite would be "Kiss and Kill" (DD #249):

[NK1988]

I figured I'd share this here, too.
Frank Miller's Daredevil and the Ends of Heroism


This was the first honest-to-god analysis of a work of fiction I ever bought. Sure we all think about the stories we read but I had never sought out a professional look at it before. The interviews with Miller and others are really an invaluable look into his creative process, IMO.

I really recommend this book for insights not just into Daredevil, but Batman and Punisher, too.

For anyone curious, here are a lot of the parts which really stood out to me - although of course I have my own interests and you might have parts of the book you love which I just passed over. The first comic I ever remember reading and being deeply impressed by was JMS' Supreme Power. To me, the best superhero stories ask "what does it even mean to be a (super)hero?" I think Miller has some invaluable insights on this topic.

Miller's problem with Spider-Man was all the angst. "All my reservations about the character are in how he talks 'cause his visual is still very confident, and very strong - it's just that he never stops whining." Spidey's self-pity, his penchant for martyrdom, and his borderline masochistic self-neglect attracted fans' identification but also made his life more or less a continual nightmare. Even worse, it made his success as a superhero hard for Miller to swallow. Spider-Man's trademark heckling of villains during fights only made his effectiveness less believable:

"I don't believe that Spider-Man would last two weeks [as a crime fighter] the way he's conceived. In order to have power over the criminals, you would have to be that rotten; [criminals] would have to accept him as almost one of them... Daredevil has to reach the point where when he walks into a room. they're terrified of him. because he has to be accepted as a force they'll respect. That isn't done much in comic books; it's around in other kinds of fiction. I'm more comfortable with that; I don't see him as being happy go lucky when he's up against a bunch of guys with guns."

[...]

Miller would probably have incited comparisons to Batman in the fan press simply by transforming Daredevil into a grittier, more deterministic series, but Miller openly stressed the parallel in his Daredevil-era interviews. In 1981, Miller draws an explicit contrast between Daredevil and Batman: "Daredevil . . . operates on a basic motive of love for seeking out justice. . . . [Batman] is punishing those who killed his parents. Batman's focus is on the criminal, Daredevil's is on the victim."27 Critics picked up on Miller's concern with Daredevil's motives, as well as the productive task of measuring them against those of the Batman. Reviewing Miller's work thus far in the Comics Journal in 1982, Ed Via wrote that Miller had made Daredevil "first and foremost a moralist, a person with a strong sense of fairness and . . . compassion, someone whose actions were as directly in line with his convictions as humanly possible."28 Even Daredevil's scuffles with criminals differed from Batman's in that they were performances rather than acts of vengeance:

"I see Matt Murdock as being a grown man and Daredevil as almost being a boy. . . . He believes in everything he's doing and he works very hard at it, but part of him just gets off on jumping around buildings."29 "I'm also trying to develop him as a guy with a terrific sense of humor, who scares criminals and has a great time doing it. Like [Steve Ditko's DC character] the Creeper, he laughs and laughs and laughs, and thinks [to himself], 'Jeez, they're buying it!'"30

Miller's favorite means of exposing his hero's antic side was to send Daredevil to Josie's Bar, a fictional dive where New York's entire population of petty thieves seems to turn up every night. Digging for clues to various cases, DD inevitably sparks fights that trash the place, hurling thugs through the front window while Josie protests (for the umpteenth time) that she just had it repaired. Sometimes he even orders a drink first, but as Miller points out, it's always a glass of milk. The milk (and the milk moustache it leaves behind) comically telegraphs Matt's wholesomeness compared to the hardened types guzzling whiskey and beer all around him, but it also underscores Miller's description of DD as Matt's boyish side, the inner child that "comes alive" while playing superhero.31

Ultimately, however, the contrast Miller once drew between the borderline psychotic Batman and the psychologically healthy Daredevil sounds like an overstatement of the argument, fronted by the Village Voice in 1965 (and echoed in Esquire the following year), that "Marvel Comics are the first comic books to evoke, even metaphorically, the Real World."32 By those lights, "real world" referentiality meant that Marvel heroes dealt openly with persecution, neuroses, and family squabbles and turned out to be their own worst enemies nearly as often as protagonists did in postwar literary fiction.

By contrast, DC didn't raise any schlemiels, with the possible exception of Clark Kent, whose inferiority complex is all an act to keep people from noticing that, but for the eyeglasses and the hunched shoulders, he looks exactly like Superman. DC stories followed the logic of such classical storytelling modes as the epic or the chronicle, where decision making is an exponent of action instead of a process inflected by character subtleties and every action thus taken is world-historical in importance. Its editors exiled strong emotion, anxiety, mortality, and other everyday complexities to the infamous imaginary stories of the fifties and early sixties.

This means of distinguishing Silver Age Marvel heroes from those of DC hits a snag, however, when we stack Batman's origin up against that of Spider-Man or Daredevil. The emotional crux of all three is the Spidey triumvirate of all-too-human gut reactions: guilt, shame, and a desire for revenge. Indeed, the most obvious precedent for Daredevil's origin is the first version of Batman's origin story in DC's Detective Comics #33 (December 1939), in which an anonymous street thug robs and shoots Bruce Wayne's parents before young Bruce's eyes. Batman's origin sets underexamined precedents for many origin stories from Marvel's Silver Age: dead parent, angry child, costume chosen to strike fear into what the Batman of 1939 touts as a "superstitious, cowardly lot" of evildoers, an initial state of helplessness igniting the desire to bulk up and do right. Not unlike the death of Jack Murdock in Daredevil's case, Bruce Wayne's extraordinary childhood loss forges Batman's determination to avenge that loss on all criminals everywhere forever after and to transform himself into a steroidal, bat-eared Sherlock Holmes.

Miller brought the Punisher, then Marvel's most homicidal lead character, into the comparison to develop a pet point about Daredevil's singularity: his duty to the legal system, for better or worse. In 1981, when Richard Howell asked Miller point blank, "Is Daredevil Marvel's Batman?" Miller answered that, no, "the Punisher is Marvel's Batman."33 Miller argued that, unlike the Batman, whose parents' murder catalyzed every major life decision he made from then on, the death of Battlin' Jack did not have as "big an effect on [Matt] as his father's life, and he is his father's son, being a natural born fighter."34 The Punisher, by contrast, shares not only Batman's desire to murdered loved ones but also his will to stop killers and drug dealers in their tracks. He exceeds Batman's mission only in that he executes the bad guys on the spot.

The Punisher, Miller tells Howell, is "Batman without the impurities. The side of Batman that makes him spare the criminals is something that's added on. It's not part of the basic concept of his character. . . . Daredevil's basic concept is very dissimilar. I see Daredevil as someone who operates on a basic motive of love for seeking out justice."35

This was not to say, however, that the Punisher's use of deadly force made him less heroic to Miller than Daredevil or Batman were. The Punisher is a hero, Miller says, but "I don't consider him a role model. The main difference between him and Daredevil is Daredevil's sense of responsibility to the law. The Punisher is an avenger; he's Batman without the lies built in."36

The "lies" Miller mentions refer in part to Batman's vow never to kill; he wields a gun only two or three times in his entire first forty-five years in print, due in each case to editorial inattention. While the no-kill rule probably helped keep Batman out of trouble with parents worried over comics' influence on young children, it exacerbated the tension between his desire for justice and his sense that the legal system is inadequate to the task of collaring mass murderers and rooting out corruption. If Batman's prime motive is to champion justice in the legal sense, to quash anarchy and restore social order, then why does he have such contempt for the police and the legal system except insofar as they can help him achieve his goals?

[...]

[NK1988]

The ambivalence about due process expressed here stems in part from Miller's decision to make Daredevil a character whose convictions don't necessarily match his own: "I don't necessarily believe that Daredevil's right about everything he says. The character is built on very strong basic principles, and it would have been a terrible violation of those principles . . . to let Bullseye die. Daredevil has to believe that the law will work in every instance, but I'm allowed to believe differently."17 Miller had much tougher critiques of Daredevil-style liberalism waiting up his sleeve, including the bleeding-heart psychiatrists in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns who claim that Two-Face and the Joker (the Joker, for crying out loud) can be rehabilitated and an unforgettable throwaway joke about liberal hypocrisy in the same book, in which a Central Casting suburbanite tells a reporter that he doesn't believe in Batman's brand of vigilante justice but then snorts that he himself would "never live in the city." But to paint Miller as a legal or social conservative would not be accurate, at least not at this point in his career. Satirically, in fact, Miller plays the entire political field, broiling John Ashcroft and George W. Bush in The Dark Knight Strikes Again (2001–2) for exploiting the Twin Towers' destruction to further their own political agenda (and while these men were doing exactly that in the aftermath of 9/11, no less).

The Daredevil run, though, is less a satire of Matt's position, or anyone else's, than it is a Brechtian experiment in which Miller draws sympathy to Murdock's point of view while examining it with a microscope at the same time, pushing harder and harder on the question of whether justice is served if lives are left at risk, while putting just as much pressure on the opposing question of whether preventive justice deserves to be called justice at all.

[...]

Matt's reaction to the death of Elektra is to bully Heather into the submissive role that Elektra couldn't play. Miller attributes to Matt not a single thought balloon to suggest that he is aware of the toll his bullying takes on her, while Miller continually draws the reader's attention to that toll via Matt's glib condescension and Heather's devastated reactions to it. The soundness of Daredevil's judgment is now more questionable than ever. Does his heroism stem from a neurotic urge to control everything around him, and is that neurosis reaching a tipping point? After all, we see him suffer a nearly dissociative breakdown when he convinces himself in #182 that Elektra somehow survived her own murder. The splash page of that issue still chills me with its full-face close-up of Matt in a cold sweat, staring into our eyes, as if pleading with us to believe something we know to be utterly false just because he believes it: "SHE'S ALIVE." By #189, only seven issues later, his demeaning paternalism has driven his new fiancée straight to the bottle.

In spite of the ugliness of Matt's abuse, and the emphasis Miller places on that ugliness, it's difficult for me to decide whether terrorizing Heather this way makes Daredevil less heroic or more heroic in Miller's definition. Miller has often spoken about the archetypical hero as something other than human, as dismissive of what others think they need as Matt is of Heather's feelings. When Miller discusses The Dark Knight Strikes Again!, which he and interviewer Gary Groth agree is nearly a parody of superhero comics, he emphasizes Batman's abstract quality, born of the kind of social isolation that Stick enforces on Matt: If Batman's "motto is striking terror" into the hearts of criminals, then "Batman can only be defined as a terrorist. . . . I don't want you to like this guy." "My feeling about Batman is that he's similar [to James Bond] in that you'd want him to be there when you're being mugged, but you wouldn't want to have dinner with him. The way he cheers Hawkman on as he crushes Luthor's skull . . . For me, [such scenes demonstrate] the idea [of Batman] coming into its own without the bullshit on top of it being a socially acceptable role model and all of that."23

Matt's disregard for Heather's emotional state during the Glenn Enterprises affair further clarifies Miller's sense of the heroic impulse: it is prosociety but deeply antisocial, convinced that Right and Wrong are real and unchanging standards but dangerously solipsistic in its interpretation of how to achieve Right at the expense of Wrong. The true hero, according to Miller, is, compared to "normal" human beings at least, a pathological narcissist. Daredevil, with unwavering faith in his own judgment, performs "necessary" services for a culture whether it asks for them or not, while those who are under his protection see him as unfathomable at best and terrifying at worst. But even if Miller thrills to his own extrication of the "lies" and "bullshit" from the Batman persona a few years later, in Daredevil he employs dramatic irony to relate the high cost, to both individuals and their community, of the uncompromising, take-no-prisoners heroism that Americans think they want. "Dirty Harry . . . is a profoundly, consistently moral force," Miller tells Kim Thompson, but that wouldn't keep him out of jail for "administering the 'Wrath of God' on murderers who society treats as victims.

An authoritative study of Jack Kirby, Charles Hatfield has suggested that Marvel Comics distinguished itself in the 1960s in part by placing new stress on the tension intrinsic to superhero comics between the hero's desire for justice and the extralegal means by which she or he pursues it.25 I would add that Marvel's Silver Age stories place the stress primarily on the plotting opportunities provided by this tension, as in the case of Spider-Man, whose good deeds only draw the ire of a public (understandably) suspicious of ununiformed law enforcement.

Miller further develops the "upstanding vigilante" paradox from a cliché of the genre into a philosophical dialectic that, though sometimes decried as fascistic, cannot be reduced to an unironic plea for authoritarian rule. The superheroic fantasies on display in 300, the Sin City graphic novels, The Dark Knight Strikes Again!, and even the controversial Holy Terror cast a clear eye on the paradox of the specifically American fascination with the superheroic ideal. All pose to the reader the implicit question, Is this really what you want? Considering the consistency of this theme dating back to Daredevil,

I think of the pre-9/11 Frank Miller as less conservative than libertarian, a posthippie refugee of the 1960s who disdains the everyone-is-special relativism of grade-school participation trophies and liberal humanism but shares with the conscientious objector and the bra burner a fervency for personal liberty: "I'm no middle-of-the-roader, but I find that people who tend to follow any party line, of the left or right, tend to all end up saying the same thing, which is 'Do what I tell you.' Quit those habits I don't like, don't use the words I don't like, don't draw the pictures I don't want my children to see. . . . So yeah, I have a very jaundiced view toward most authority."26 In any event, Miller's focus on Daredevil's unflagging moral code, and his attention to how a relentless diet of violence might change that code into an ideological prison, allows him to explore the upstanding vigilante figure from multiple angles—the broadly liberal defense of constitutional protection for criminals and victims alike; the broadly conservative ideal of defending one's own body, family, and property without impediment from the state—without readily disclosing his personal politics.

[...]

[NK1988]

Slowly and steadily, Miller was maneuvering out of Code territory into the world of frankly adult themes and pressing harder and harder on the contradictions on which a traditional concept of heroism depends. Miller's The Dark Knight Returns steps even further into that world even as it sets up new "walls" to push against, namely, the postsixties culture of liberal humanism and so-called moral relativism. Miller's Batman has all of Daredevil's desire for justice but lacks any of DD's concern for the civil rights of the alleged perpetrators; indeed, if Daredevil's primary concern is with the victims, as Jim Shooter taught Miller, then Batman's primary concern is with crushing the perps. And he gets called on it throughout The Dark Knight Returns by loads of liberal-sounding talking heads who claim that Two-Face and the Joker were actually turned into supervillains by Batman's example, that even convicted homicidal maniacs deserve a second chance, and so forth.

What Miller has done is to take Daredevil's line of legal thinking regarding the rights of criminal defendants, the same line that made him save Bullseye from being mashed on the subway tracks, and put it in the mouths of comic-relief characters such as the brain surgeons and psychologists who try to make Two-Face a productive member of society again. Miller's Batman, by contrast, is an epic hero who refuses to mistake good for evil or vice versa, and he gets to define on his own what each term means. Miller's Matt Murdock refuses such a metaphysical view of good and evil as all-or-nothing opposites on idealist grounds of a different sort. Matt believes that obscured innocence and hidden guilt have to be brought to light intellectually by finding proof and testing it, while Batman, who was at one time represented as a detective at heart, relies entirely on instinct when Miller has the reins.

To be fair, Miller presents the crudeness of Batman's worldview as a serious problem and has even done so in the midst of a conflict that seemed to many Americans to draw the brightest possible line between the national Us and a foreign Them. DC had already published the first issue of Miller and the colorist Lynn Varley's Dark Knight sequel, Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again!, when al-Qaeda operatives commandeered the planes that destroyed the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, an event that, Miller told Groth, made it impossible to leave Batman's catchphrase about "striking terror into the hearts" of evildoers unannotated. As I've mentioned, Batman's dialogue in The Dark Knight Strikes Again!—even the dialogue written before 9/11—makes the ugliness of his philosophy unmistakable: "Striking terror. Best part of the job."

Groth even points out to Miller that one Batman speech, in which he refers to American capitalists and the federal government as "tyrants" and promises that he and his team will "strike like lightning and . . . melt into the night like ghosts," sounds uncannily like "the point of view of radical Islamists" toward the United States.13 Miller doesn't take such a crack at the obvious bad guys, however. Rather, he immediately pounces on the political reaction to the bad guys and how the George Bushes, Dick Cheneys, and John Ashcrofts of the world use crises like 9/11 for their own purposes. They stand in for the heroes we think we need in tumultuous times but slip the bounds of law at every turn—and Miller attempts to reduce our sympathy for them. This Miller, chastened by the 9/11 attacks but ever the shrewd critic of the media that deliver such disasters to us, digs into the fascistic politics of superhero comics, the news media's role in sensationalizing global politics and inciting fanatical nationalism, and the real-world politics of vigilante justice all at once. He claims comics as a space to explore what "heroism" means—and not necessarily to him but rather to contemporary US culture. If the one who "saves" us from tyranny, even the tyranny of our own leaders, claims he has to act like a terrorist to do it, do we even want to be saved?

At the same time, both Miller's comics and his interviews have long scrutinized the insolubility of the paradox—heroism is necessary to restore order, but it's also authoritarian in its purest form, even fascistic—as a necessary evil. Batman seems the purer Miller "hero" in that Batman's sense of justice is unencumbered by any complicating factors. He metes it out as he sees fit, on the basis of an Old Testament version of righteousness: you take my eye, I'll take yours, score settled. This hero is no model for quotidian life, but as in such classical Hollywood Westerns as John Ford's The Searchers (1956), the frontier will remain forever a chaotic wilderness without him. Only Ford's half-wild hero Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) can save his niece from hostile Comanche in post–Civil War Texas, but his intense race hatred makes him a relic, unfit to cross the threshold into the orderly world of law, family, and home that his very wildness has helped bring to the western frontier.

The civic-minded Daredevil would be welcome in any such home, but for the later Miller especially, that taste for civilization and its rules reads as an "impurity," a liberal-humanist streak within traditional superheroism that Miller once talked about strictly in terms of character type (it's the difference between Batman and his "purer" doppelgänger, the Punisher) but that lately he describes as a moral fault, without any of the irony he mustered up a decade ago. There are signs dating back to 1986's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns that this irony was ambivalent anyway, considering the extent to which Batman adopts the Western hero's ruthless stance when taming the "frontier" of racialized criminals, right down to trading in the Batmobile for a horse.

The progressive reverence with which Miller's comics after Daredevil treat that definition of heroism has everything to do with 9/11 and the scale of twenty-first-century global terrorism as Miller has processed it since The Dark Knight Strikes Again!. Back in 2003, he told Groth, "For at least the foreseeable future, [9/11 is] the whole point of my work. I'm going to play around with doing some propagandizing,"15 but this sentiment did not prevent him from making the US government's reaction to the disaster a target for satire in his second Dark Knight story or lambasting the Bush administration for branding disagreement with its policies as providing solace to terrorists. By contrast, the Fixer, the costumed hero of Miller's frankly propagandistic graphic novel Holy Terror (Legendary Comics, 2011), doesn't care whether he gets thrown out of the house or not; his lot is to make the world safe for civilization, American style, not to inhabit it, and he likes it that way. The Fixer, a behemoth who shares a name with a character that Miller created for his high school newspaper's comics page, kills terrorists like a sledgehammer breaks pavement. There's no second-guessing motives or anything else; as far as the Fixer is concerned, if you're Muslim, you've got a bomb strapped to your midsection, so there's no danger that he will smash the wrong face.

Unsurprisingly, the character originally at the center of Holy Terror was Batman. Finally, Miller had freed the character of its impurities. To do that, he also had to burn off the "impurities" of the fundamentalist foe by painting al-Qaeda as representatives of all Islam and all Muslims and playing on every Arab stereotype he could scratch onto his Bristol board, from big noses to using Evil English to express delight in the torture and murder of "infidels." He has matched such images with political commentaries on National Public Radio, his personal blog, and elsewhere that show none of the critical distance that once made his work as jarring and energizing intellectually as the best Dashiell Hammett novel you've ever read. Our terrorist enemy, Miller has said, is "pernicious, deceptive and merciless and wants nothing less than [our] total destruction." Never mind that the majority of victims of al-Qaida and now ISIS are, in fact, Muslims.16

The hardline right position that Miller takes in Holy Terror differs so dramatically from that expressed in interviews dating back to the early 1980s that one has to wonder if he's been replaced by a Life Model Decoy from Nick Fury's supply closet. But Holy Terror was a critical disaster, prompting fans and critics alike to swear off any future Miller work and even to claim that his comics have rallied around a "sexist, fascist" flagpole since as far back as The Dark Knight Returns and possibly even before. Spencer Ackerman echoes the most scathing reviews when he writes in Wired, "Frank Miller doesn't do things halfway. One of the true comic-book greats, he's created several of the most extraordinary stories ever to grace the art form. So perhaps it's fitting that now he's produced one of the most appalling, offensive and vindictive comics of all time.

[...]
(only one more to go)