Daredevil 9, Ms. Marvel 9

Daredevil 9

Matt, Foggy, and Kirsten talk about Matt potentially writing a book with Kirsten's father, an idea Kirsten is against and Foggy worries about, though the advance check is crazy intriguing. Foggy, though, worries that Matt delving back into his life for an autobiography will dig up the parts that he's done so well to push down, a fear Matt doesn't seem to share. Meanwhile, the Purple Children are living large, walking around and scaring everyone, overwhelming everyone with their feelings, magnified to a child's level, and driving some cop cars around. Though Daredevil has more experience than most at fighting Purple Man, he's overwhelmed by the children's sense of fear and despair and loneliness and rage and grief and everything Matt's buried comes back up to the surface, wrecking him and leaving him curled up on the ground under an overpass where the healing Purple Man discovers him.

This is it, everyone. Everything Mark Waid has been building to and everything we've expected to come over the last few years of Waid's run is finally coming to a head and it's masterfully done. I've been guilty, of course, of expecting this sort of thing to come much sooner but Waid's patience is important here as every issue that Waid waited to have this sort of thing happen strengthened the payoff. This issue has a great balance of fun with Foggy, Kirsten, and Matt and of darkness with the Purple Children, a surprisingly sympathetic villain for Matt, who recognizes that the kids aren't acting like Killgrave, that they're not trying to convince people, they're just blasting their kid emotions at peak levels, as he puts it. It's too much for Matt and now we have our way in to the next story. Excellent work from Chris Samnee and Matt Wilson, whose highlight here comes in a full page juxtaposing the kids feeling their emotions and memories in Daredevil's head related to those emotions. It's absolutely incredible and it defines the issue so well. Fantastic work all around, as if that will come as a surprise to anyone with this title.

Total Score: 5/5


Ms. Marvel 9

Kamala is forced to fight in just her regular street clothes as she finds she can't change her appearance in the midst of a fight with one of the Inventor's robots going after her school. She wins the fight but passes out, not healing quickly enough to keep up. Bruno manages to force his way into the fight area and finds Kamala passed out at the center. Medusa, keeping a close eye on the new Inhuman, appears and has Lockjaw transport them all to New Attilan, where Inhuman healer Vinatos helps and monitors Kamala's recovery. He also tells her when she wakes up that her healing ability seems to revert things back to their normal form, so the more she heals the less she may be able to shapeshift. Rejuvenated and now aware that she's an Inhuman, Kamala returns home and apologizes to her parents, happy to see them. That night, she goes back to the place where she rescued Vick, prepared to free the kids inside. Doyle is waiting for her and unleashes another big robot for her to fight, which Kamala defeats with the help of Lockjaw. She finds the people inside the building only to find that they weren't kidnapped, they're volunteers.

There are few books that have developed a supporting cast as quickly and as strongly as MS. MARVEL under G. Willow Wilson's direction. Wilson has done an excellent job making us care about Kamala, about Kamala's family, about Kamala's friends, and about the heroes who have crossed Kamala's path. That's extremely difficult to do, particularly when you're building an entirely new character in her own entirely new book. If a character is created in a separate book and built over an arc in someone else's book, you can use a new solo series to further develop that character. Wilson doesn't have that benefit here, meaning that she has so much work to accomplish and she's 100% accomplished it already. My girlfriend and I recently, just because this is who we are, wrote big long lists of our favorite superheroes, ranking them in order as best we could. I don't know if you guys know this, but I love superheroes. After careful deliberation, I found that I'd placed Ms. Marvel at number sixteen. That put her between Captain Marvel and Dr. Strange. AMAZING company (worth noting that after the top like, three, the difference in position is negligible because I just really like them all so much everyone). This wasn't really a haphazard list, I really did think about it a lot and gave reasons for everyone at every position (I got up to 30 heroes before putting the list down). Maybe this sounds self-indulgent (uhhhhh, have you read this blog? Because obviously it's self-indulgent and, frankly, I'd call it self-important) as I focus on my own personal opinions of this character but I think it's important to note that, after nine issues (only seven or eight, really, when I made the list), Kamala Khan had cracked the top twenty. That says a ton about this book, whether you trust my judgment or not. Great work as ever and this book just continues to be a lot of fun.

Total Score: 5/5