Daredevil: End of Days 8, Daredevil Dark Nights 1

Daredevil: End of Days 8
Bendis and Mack (w) and Janson and Sienkiewicz w/ Mack (a) and Hollingsworth (c)

Books like this one make me feel like maybe I've lost touch with myself as a comic reader. Well, books like this one and Twitter. On Twitter, I follow both Brian Michael Bendis and David Mack and I love one of those men very much because I think he's an incredible talent who helped me realize just how much art can go into comics (the other one I nearly constantly sigh/yell at in my comic blog). David Mack particularly has been retweeting a lot of positive things about Daredevil: End of Days as a whole and the twist ending which surprised so many readers. So I had to ask myself "is this just because he tracked down the positive reviews/that only people who loved the book are taking the time to write to them about it or am I wrong about this series?" Of course, liking something is a rather objective definition whereas reviewing something should come from a neutral place and based on knowledge about what objectively makes something good or not. I know that by claiming this is a review blog, I'm kind of inherently saying I can do that but sometimes I'm not sure that's accurate. Maybe I've lost track of comics over the years and now I'm jaded and cynical. I just didn't care for this series. That's coming as someone who loves Daredevil and loves David Mack and, in the right circumstances, can appreciate an alternate reality-esque future. But I just didn't care for this series. I think, again, it kind of stems from the fact that this series was eight issues long. After issue three or four, I was annoyed by the mystery of Mapone more than I was curious about it. It kept coming up and it was clear it wasn't going to be answered in any quick way and the writing prodded the reader to keep asking "WHAT IS MAPONE," a question I was already sick of asking and I, in turn, begin to resent the fact that they wanted me to care. You know what it's like? It's like that scene in Wall-E where Eve asks Wall-E what his directive is and he shows her how good he is at compacting trash, then when he struggles through the word "directive?" she turns away from him and says "Classified." It's a great little moment in the film and would have been SO awful if he had kept asking her and she had kept saying "classified" but kept prodding him to ask anyway. Okay, maybe it's only like that if you're me.

Timothy, the little boy that Daredevil rescued once upon a time is the new Daredevil and we get a few scenes of the two of them as Matt trained him late in his life (in fact, just before he died). He explains that someone will appear to him to guide him when the time is right, just as Stick did for him, and that he'll know it when he sees it. Now, with Timothy's father Ben and his mentor Matt dead, he's desperate to find out who his "Stick" will be. He runs into people from Matt and his father's past, including Foggy Nelson, Punisher, Peter Parker, and Nick Fury, but none of them are his Stick. Fury offers him the secret of Mapone but Timothy, angry that Fury didn't give this information to Ben when he had the chance, throws the file in a trashcan fire. He returns into a bar he was visiting with Peter Parker (who attempted to help him work through his grief in a scene that can't help but have some SNAPPY DIALOGUE) to find that the red-headed woman playing pool with a bunch of hoodlums is in trouble as the hoodlums feel she's been conning them. Timothy jumps into the fight and takes out a couple of the guys before being critiqued by the woman for his fighting style. She then reveals that she's blind, the only thing her father left her, and that she can help train him to fight. Her name? Mapone Romanova, the daughter of Matt and Black Widow. If anywhere, this is where I'm jaded and cynical. The things I've read on Twitter make this seem like a huge and shocking reveal but is it? I mean, we saw Ben investigate all of Matt's former lovers and each one of them had a red-headed child. He couldn't track down Widow but should anyone be surprised she also had a child with Daredevil? Also, and I hate to be that guy, but Mapone is a stupid name.

Daredevil Dark Nights 1
Weeks (w and a) and Loughridge (c)

Daredevil Dark Nights is an eight part series that will feature three adventures for Daredevil written and illustrated by three different creative teams. Lee Weeks is heading up the first arc, a three issue story called "Angels Unaware," which focuses on Matt Murdock trying to deliver a heart to a little girl waiting in a hospital during a massive snowstorm. Matt fell asleep in the office reading the bible (getting back to Matt's Catholic roots) and wakes up to find the city effectively shut down. He decides to walk home, as his office is just a short walk, but the snow messes with his radar sense a bit. When a few muggers accost him on the empty streets, he makes quick work of a pair of them but doesn't sense the third one behind him, who knocks him unconscious and steals his money, leaving his wallet out, to be covered by the snow. A man (possibly homeless?) carries the unconscious Matt to the nearby hospital where he wakes unsure of who he is and startled to find that he's blind and everyone appears to be screaming (he doesn't remember his senses). Eventually things come back to him as he rouses himself and incapacitates the three muggers, who have turned up in the hospital lobby to ransom the people there. His doctor returns Matt to his bed and asks who he is. He asks her about the little girl who needs a heart transplant and is waiting for the helicopter that is trying to brave the snow to bring it to her. He informs the doctor that he heard the helicopter go down (the city is just about silent in the snowstorm so he could isolate the helicopter pretty easily) and that he can go get the heart. The homeless man had brought a suitcase that had been with Matt to the hospital and a member of the hospital staff had been trying to open it in the hopes it would reveal his identity (with his wallet buried in the snow). He gets it open and reveals to the doctor that the man is Daredevil. She brings him to the roof so he can try to retrieve the heart and hopefully save the little girl. He stumbles a bit in the snow as he dives off the roof so this may not be as easy as it could be for Daredevil.

This is definitely an interesting spin on Daredevil. It's very religion-laden, which could turn some readers off. That's always been a kind of interesting facet to Matt's character for me, even if it occasionally gets ignored or gets heavy-handed. Here I'd say it's more heavy-handed than maybe it needs to be, but it certainly illustrates the themes of this arc and the fact that Matt is religious. If you were picking up this Daredevil book and the only things you'd read had come from the last few years of Daredevil, you'd likely be startled to find him so engrossed in the bible and holding a chain with a cross on it. Still, it's not out of character, just a little different than what we've seen. The story is already engaging and the art varies between good and great at times. Weeks' three issues should be a good read on Daredevil's character and give us some thing to talk about before David Lapham takes over writer and artist duties for the two part "What a Day, What a Night" and Jimmy Palmiotti and Thony Silas give us the three issue arc "The Trip" to end the series.

Daredevil 25, Daredevil: End of Days 7

Daredevil 25
Waid (w) and Samnee (a) and Rodriguez (c)

I want to start quickly by saying that I like the idea in some Marvel books to christen the writer and artist as, like in this book, "storytellers" instead of "writer" and "artist." This book does it and Hawkeye does it (they don't really say "storytellers," they just present Fraction and Aja's names together in the credits) in the Marvel books (there might be more but I can't think of them) and I would bet more indie comics do it. It just feels like a nice touch and a nice response to the question of who drives a book. They're both necessary. This book has a killer team-up too, with Eisner award winning Mark Waid teamed with this year's Eisner award nominee Chris Samnee (totally deserving). Anyway, onwards we go.
Last issue ended with someone who had been experimented on turning up at Matt's doorstep (well, Foggy's hospital room doorstep). Matt has this guy, Larry, lead him to the place where the experiments were done, though he reveals as they touch down that he knows it's a trap. Larry didn't seem to know, just like he didn't know that the people trying to trap Matt gave Larry a defective pacemaker. Larry dies on the spot and leaves Matt waiting for an attack. He falls into the building below him as the glass on the rooftop breaks. There he's soliloquy'd to by a new villain, who reveals that the experiments were just the test subjects, weak and enfeebled already. They figured out the correct concoction and used it on someone more capable. Enter this guy, dubbed Ikari (Japanese for "fury") who comes in wearing Matt's father's boxing robe and wielding two Kusurigama blades (they're like baby scythes). Matt gets overconfident, feeling that he's mastered his own powers and there's no way a guy who has only just gotten them could be as prepared as he is. He's wrong, though, as he finds himself pretty evenly matched against Ikari. They do pretty equal amounts of damage to one another before Matt realizes the need to wrap it up. He flees momentarily from Ikari, disappearing into a closed sporting goods store. The store is confusing to a radar sense, with many different objects and smells, and Matt lights a match near a smoke alarm to set off a sprinkler system. Matt hides out, waiting for Ikari to get close enough and revealing to the audience that his radar sense is maybe 5% of what it normally is in rain but he anticipates that Ikari, without long training and experience, won't even be up to that. As Ikari inches closer to Matt's hiding place, Matt starts to grab at a bat. Ikari, next to him now, suggests he grab the red one. In a moment of nearly unprecedented fear and horror, Matt realizes Ikari isn't blind and Ikari beats him to within an inch of his life, allowing him to leave but warning him that the person who sent him will kill Daredevil, somehow and when he least expects it, but sometime soon.
It's another great issue with fantastic art and a lot of really fascinating ideas. Whoever is behind this (there is certainly speculation to be had on that front) knows how to scare Matt and how to enrage him. He also knows how his powers work and how Matt is trained to use them. We also get to learn a bit more ourselves about how Matt's powers work and how he uses them. It's always a fun part in Daredevil books when we reach a point where Matt explains the best places for him to fight and we can kind of see how his environment shapes the way he fights. In this case, learning about the sprinkler system (and Matt's own worry that someone would use that against him) is pretty interesting and, another bonus, negates what Daredevil, the 2003 really bad superhero movie, said on the subject, which was that his radar sense was enhanced in rain. Any separation you can get from that movie the better. This series continues to be one of Marvel's best and this issue is no different. Wonderfully done.

Daredevil: End of Days 7
Bendis and Mack (w) and Janson and Sienkiewicz (a) and Hollingsworth (c)

I am not against reading. In fact, I am very pro-reading. I also love reading comic books. I appreciate that comic books have moved away from the "block of text" style of narration because it breaks up flow. Comics are, by their nature, an incredibly visual medium. There has to be something of a balance between art and word or else you're pretty much just writing a book. Or a script. Maybe script is a more apt description for where I'm going with this. Where I'm going with this is that the first page of this issue has 22 different boxes of narration over four-ish panels of art. I say "ish" because there's one drawing on the background that goes across the entire page and focuses as one to two panels and there are three actual panels on top of it. Don't get me wrong, I like the art in this book. I like both Janson and Sienkiewicz and I continue to think that the series has done a good job spanning Daredevil art styles and even artists. The first half of the book or so, though, is like the first page, with dialogue and narration just cluttering the page like crazy. And not particularly worthwhile dialogue. This is the problem with Bendis' need for snappy back-and-forth writing. It might work in television or movies because those are inherently different. You can see the scene under the words. The words might only take a few seconds to throw out. In this, the same conversation covers up the drawings and distracts from the scene while taking pages to get through. Also, one character who talks through a bunch of the first half, a secretary at the Daily Bugle, is super obnoxious and unpleasant to read. That doesn't help anything. So the question, then, is "is all of this dialogue/narration necessary?" I'd say some of it is. Certainly not all of it. The bonus of having an inherently visual medium is that you can allow your artist to do some work for you. You want to see Urich struggling with the things he's found out and the questions that remain? Look at the pictures. And Janson and Sienkiewicz show him that way. Throw in a couple lines about how frustrated he is, sure. You don't need to cloud a page with it all. It gets to a point where you're forced to start wondering what the level of trust in the artist is. Most of these problems disappear midway through the issue or so, as Ben Urich is attacked by the Hand and the narration and dialogue gives way to action. Here we actually start to get to new information, as Urich enters the apartment Melvin Potter said he'd sent plenty of costumes to before. On the computer, he sees all sorts of files, including one labelled "Map" and one labelled "One." Don't think that this is going to bring us to the secret of "Mapone" because apparently we'd rather save that for the LAST issue, as Urich views the files and we get to see his horror. It's weird to follow a character as our main narrator and see what he sees through the series only to, at the biggest reveal, not get to see what he sees. ANYWAY, the Hand finds Urich there and attacks, but he's saved again by the new Daredevil and Punisher. The new Daredevil rushes Ben to safety before going back to try to help fight the Hand with Punisher, who is mowing the ninjas down. When Daredevil returns to Urich, the reporter has an arrow through his gut. Daredevil rips off the mask to reveal Urich's adopted son Timmy as the new Daredevil. I have some problems with this, but I'd like to see where the last issue goes before airing them. I think I've said enough already.

Daredevil: End of Days 5, Superior Spider-Man 3

Daredevil: End of Days 5
Bendis and Mack (w) and Janson and Sienkiewicz (a) and Hollingsworth (c)

I'm happier with this issue than I was with the last one. However, that's with the caveat that I got a little less happy with the last one the more I thought about it. It really was that "4 of 8" bit that got me. That teamed with the fact that it's Brian Michael Bendis, who I distrust with this kind of thing because of his Avengers run. I believe I've said it before here but I'll say it again to reiterate. I think Brian Michael Bendis has skills. I think he's good at a form of dialogue (that he uses a little too often and doesn't QUITE fit the medium), I think he makes compelling plots, and I've seen him use space very effectively as, say, Daredevil's old writer. However, his Avengers run constantly featured four or so issue arcs that could be boiled down to one or two issues if you took out the unnecessary banter, recaps, and the "well where are THESE unrelated characters right now? Who is Hawkeye going to love this week? Where is Luke Cage in all this?" (He also has some pretty clear favorites) I can't call him a bad writer because I know he's not. On the other hand, I tend not to trust a book he's writing moving slowly (more on that tomorrow).

This book moved a little faster, still lording the mystery of "Mapone" over us but giving us an explanation of Daredevil's thought process, the fact that Daredevil was training a replacement (presumably the Daredevil who's been following Urich this whole series), a prison break, some facts on Matt Murdock's life, and Urich being pushed out a window. So there's a bit more going on in here than in the past few. I will say, I'm not totally surprised by the things that are coming out in this issue which are meant as big surprises. Those things are essentially "'Mapone' was a word picked to drive Bullseye crazy" and "Daredevil trained a replacement." Both are decent plot points and obviously important to this comic but they're treated as massive thriller reveals, despite being revealed in issue five. I think 'Mapone' has been dragged on too long, letting the mystery of it fade and allowing Ben Urich to ask everyone he meets what 'Mapone' means. It makes it feel like Urich is desperately asking for us to care about the mystery. I do care. To a point. That point was sometime before issue five, admittedly. Stil, this is an engaging story. I'd just be mad if I had expected a hint at a resolution any time before the eighth issue.

Superior Spider-Man 3
Slott (w) and Stegman (a) and Delgado (c)

This was a step up from the last issue. First of all, there's less whiny Peter demanding to be heard and more Peter accepting his position. In fact, Peter finds out that he can access Otto's memories to some extent, though he seems unable to choose them. We get to see Otto and Vulture meeting each other for the first time, a rather amicable meeting as you might assume from two intelligent villains with a similar cause. That meeting drives the story as Doc Spidey figures out a plan to deal with Vulture "once and for all." All this language, on top of the moment in ASM 700 and/or 699, whenever it happened, when Peter Doc told Carlie that he was actually Peter, is driving Carlie to believe that Spidey is no longer Peter. I admit I have some trouble with this simply because I don't like Carlie Cooper, so for her to be a possible hero of the story gives me no great satisfaction.

Doc Spidey's plan for Vulture, it turns out, is simply to give him the money he wants. Not stolen money (at least, not stolen now, perhaps once stolen), his own money. In their flashback meeting, we learn that, while Doc Ock was always more driven by his genius, Toomes is driven by his want for money. It's a good plan, probably, except that Vulture doesn't buy it and gets angry at Spider-Man's perceived taunts. He has his new henchmen attack Spidey, who hits one across the room, only to break his mask and reveal a child. Vulture is using children for his henchmen, crossing a line reserved for only the craziest or the most unscrupulous villains. Peter is then tossed into a new memory, as Doc Spidey snaps into a rage. Otto was beaten as a child, a memory Peter is now forced to watch. While he's watching this memory, he's unable to see whatever fight is happening outside. The fight here involves an aerial battle between Spidey and Vulture. Spidey's prepared, but he didn't anticipate Vulture upgrading his own arsenal and finds himself outmatched. However, he uses new friend J. Jonah Jameson's spider-beacon (an homage to the Bat-signal) to blind Vulture as they fly over it (with Doc utilizing his new polarized lenses) and crash the villain into the glass and heat of the lights, nearly killing him. Carlie and a couple police officers rush to the roof to find the carnage there and Doc tries to make Carlie understand what happened. More and more, though, it seems she knows what's really happening.

This issue was a nice switch from the last. It makes the Peter-in-Otto's-head bit far more interesting than just having him critique everything Otto does. It's also another chance to see Doc Spidey handling things his way, both with science and with whatever force necessary. Peter wouldn't ever consider killing as an option, or even injury such as this. He even pops into Doc's head from time to time begging him to go easy on Vulture because he's so old. Of course, Peter wasn't there to find that Vulture's new assistants were children so jury's out on how extreme his force would have been. It's an interesting plot device of making Otto do something possibly necessary or at least driven by good motives and have Peter only come in at the end to judge the outcome without knowing the full facts of the problem. This series seems off to a good start.