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.