Daredevil (2011) #1 by Mark Waid and Paolo Rivera and Marcos Martin
I’ve been reading Daredevil since around 2000. Before even getting into his films, I remember reading Kevin Smith’s Guardian Devil in Barnes and Noble eleven years ago and falling in love with the characters. When I started reading comics on a regular basis a year later, Daredevil was one of the first titles I picked up. This was the beginning of the much-beloved Brian Michael Bendis/Alex Maleev run, in which Matt Murdock’s identity as Daredevil was blown, thus sending his life into a seemingly never-ending spiral.
Ten years later, and we’re still dealing with the ramifications of that event, but, oddly enough, superhero comic traditionalist Mark Waid has finally injected a new energy into the proceedings. It’s not that Daredevil has been bad this past decade—in fact, Bendis’s run on the character is one of the best in his history—but consistently piling terrible shit on Matt Murdock for that entire time had gotten old, as proven by Andy Diggle’s disastrous run on the title, which actually led me to drop one of only three books I’d been buying for the entire time I’d been reading comics (the other two are Amazing Spider-Man and Uncanny X-Men, for the curious).
Waid’s book is a fresh start, both as a publishing venture (new #1) and as a story. This is a Daredevil we’ve not seen since before Frank Miller took over the title in 1978. Ever since Miller, we’ve pretty much gotten variations on the themes of his run (and his later 1986 landmark Born Again). Waid is writing Daredevil as a superhero. Matt Murdock is having fun, making wisecracks and beating up criminals with a smile on his face. The great thing about Waid, though, is that he’s able to start things anew without forsaking everything which has been going on in Daredevil for the past ten years. People haven’t forgotten that Matt is Daredevil, and that’s still hurting his law firm and creating conflict with his partner, Foggy Nelson.
This issue is split in two halves. The first sets up the ongoing storyline (classic Daredevil mob plot), but the second is more about not only setting the tone for the book, but explaining it. Matt seems carefree, but, as he tells Foggy, he’s well aware of all of the terrible things that have happened to him over the last few years (identity revealed, hundreds of dead girlfriends), but now he’s simply ready to forget about all that stuff and throw himself into his work. Not a particularly healthy attitude, and I’m sure it will result in some heavy shit later on, but for now, it’s nice to see Matt being happy, even if it its forced.
The art in the first section was by Paolo Rivera, an artist I’ve come to love from his insanely good fill-in issues on Amazing Spider-Man over the past few years. Javier Rodriguez’s colors make the change in tone completely visible, with bright, primary colors, evoking the look of ’60s and ’70s Marvel books, while still utilizing today’s superior coloring technology. The second story is drawn by the incomparable Marcos Martin, who I can safely say is the best Spider-Man artist to come along in 20 years. His aptitude for Spidey transfers well to Daredevil, who moves in a similar way. There is an absolute tour de force of a two page spread of Matt and Foggy crossing an intersection, with Matt pointing out the various sounds and smells he experiences. Aside from Mike Allred and J.H. Williams III, I can’t think of anyone in the past ten or twenty years who has played so much with the comic book medium in a book from Marvel or DC.
As a somewhat lapsed Daredevil reader (I only dropped the book a year ago), Daredevil #1 doesn’t so much feel like coming home at the end of a long vacation—this is a very different book from Frank Miller’s or Kevin Smith’s or Brian Bendis’s—but it feels like moving to a new town, where everyone seems really nice and there’s new places to visit and new things to experience. It feels like a fresh start.
