Comics / Comic Reviews / Marvel Comics

Daredevil #2

By Hervé St-Louis
September 5, 2011 - 13:23

Daredevil is still trying to figure out why every lawyer in New York City has refused to help Jobrani. However, before Daredevil can find any clue, he is attacked by a much more powerful adversary that more than matches his skills. Will Captain America bring Daredevil to justice?

Normally, I would like this story. It’s a classic set up for Daredevil that involves both the life of Matt Murdoch as a lawyer and Daredevil using alternative methods to defend his client. In fact this is a story we’ve read several times in Daredevil and even seen such a scene played out in the Daredevil movie. The confrontation with Captain America was more symbolic than a real fight. We see each hero besting the other one using his opponent’s weapon of choice. It’s so symmetric, it’s interesting. But this story and the first issue of this series both lack spirit. Marvel Comics is trying to put back Daredevil to an old state, before all the crap that happened to his life. Waid’s script feels like a recent Amazing Spider-man story. The execution is perfect, the story well-thought off and constructed. However, there is no feelings, no guts, nothing magic or captivating. It feels like we are going through the motion. Larry Hama wrote similar Daredevil stories after Frank Miller’s run way back in the early 1980s. While they too were well-executed, they had the same fundamental problem.

Daredevil is not a series that can be put on hold while the next greatest writer tries to screw up Matt Murdoch’s life one more time. It’s funny because I’ve complained in the past that every writer does not feel he has written a Daredevil run unless he screws up Daredevil somehow. At the time when I wrote that, I thought Daredevil was being abused and used as a punching bag so every new hot writer of the next generation can prove he can write an epic as captivating as Frank Miller. There’s only two extremes left. Either we get bland and boring stories by the likes of Hama and Waid, or we get shit disturbing epics by writers trying to prove that they can measure up to Frank Miller. There’s a middle ground that no one wants to touch where groundbreaking stories about Daredevil can be written without screwing up his existence.

Rivera is from the Spider-man series. Maybe that’s why I felt like this was like reading Amazing Spider-man. He’s the kind of artist that works well with the choreographed action in Daredevil. I’m still amazed that Marvel Comics allows artists like Rivera to work for them. Their styles are completely non super hero mainstream, although it captures action just as well. To tell the truth, I prefer Rivera to whoever was handling the regular Daredevil series in last year’s Shadowland crossover. Pay attention to how Captain America and Daredevil spar in this issue and you will discover what real comic book storytelling is about.

Rating: 7 /10

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12