The Daredevil Re-Read, Part One — Devil of Hell’s Kitchen I: Born Again and Again

When I was thinking of how to structure my posts for this series on Daredevil, I initially wanted to go the same route I took for my massive Amazing Spider-Man re-read: chronically and by creator eras. The problem was that those eras weren’t nearly as neatly defined for DD as they were with Spidey.

While the late seventies all the way to the early nineties could easily be designated as predominantly Frank Miller’s time, Brian Michael Bendis, David Mack and Bill Sienkiewickz’s End of Days overlaps with Mark Waid and Chris Samnee’s era in the twenty-tens. And you can’t talk about the two-thousands without mentioning Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s Daredevil: Yellow, even though that time is clearly the Bendis and Alex Maleev era.

That’s when I realised what the issue actually was. It wasn’t so much that Loeb and Sale would be in the same post as Bendis and Maleev, for example. It’s that Loeb and Sale’s Daredevil is very different from Bendis and Maleev’s Daredevil.

Characters can be flexible. Batman goes from zany Golden Age antics to balls-to-the-wall superhero action during his crossover with Judge Dredd, from Grant Morrison’s hairy-chested love god to the dark knight detective under Scott Snyder. But Daredevil’s different: more often than not, he’s portrayed in one of two mostly distinct ways: the swashbuckling superhero or the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen. So, I thought, what the heck. Let’s embrace that.

This series will be a bit of both my Batman and Spider-Man re-reads: chronologically (more or less) straightforward, but also with (more of) a focus on the different aspects of the character.

So, let’s start at the same place that we started with Batman: Frank Miller. But instead of jumping straight into his seventies run on the character, I figure a fitting place to begin would be with his own take on Daredevil’s origin.

In the Beginning…

John Romita Jr.’s visual storytelling for Man Without Fear is phenomenal.

It’s not only easily the best part of this mini-series, but definitely one of the best things he’s done in a storied career filled with some pretty high highs. It certainly helps that his style here fits the story. There’s a visceral ferocity to this era of Romita Jr.’s art, and that matches what Miller’s going for perfectly.

The thing though is that, while I think Miller’s overall concept is great—retooling Daredevil’s origin to fit the street-level tone he leaned into during his initial run—his dialogue is very clearly more Sin City than Year One here.

It’s clunky and feels forced. It’s nowhere near as bad as some of his later work, and yeah, it has the benefit of being paired with some amazing art—but after several rereads, the cracks begin to show a whole lot more clearly.

Still, this story comes in the early nineties, a little over a decade after he’d first made his mark on the character. And what a mark it was.

The Man Without Peer…

Frank Miller’s initial run on the main Daredevil series, together with Klaus Janson, is not his best writing. This is not even Frank Miller’s best art. But, as far as I’ve seen, it’s the one time where both are still pretty solid together.

His visual storytelling starts off strong from the get-go, and it’s a real treat watching an already excellent artist grow and grow. Granted, you don’t see boldly interesting choices like those that he made in The Dark Knight Returns, but that’s okay, because he’s still doing damn fine work—and, if the trade off for those boldly interesting choices is better scripting, then hey, I’m all for it.

His writing balances humour and a more serious tone perfectly. Maybe some of that could be chalked up to him working with Roger McKenzie on a fair number of issues, but you can still see seeds of some of his idiosyncrasies here. None of them, however—for better or worse—ever reaches the levels that they’ll reach later in his career.

Issue one seventy-nine is probably my favourite of his issues, one of the best examples of when the quality of his art and scripts are perfectly in synch.

Worth also noting is how in sync Miller and Janson are. When the latter takes over the heavy lifting on art duties, the transition is seamless, thanks to Miller’s work on layouts, but with enough of an understanding of each other, so that Janson is given room to explore his own style. Granted, it’s not exactly miles apart from Miller’s, but that transition is a testament to the level of care Miller and his team put into the series.

… And His Friends

I’m not sure what I can say about Miller and David Mazzucchelli’s Born Again that I didn’t already say when talking about Year One. While certainly a different type of story from their take on Batman—less a hardboiled crime noir, and more a story of tragedy and… well, rebirth—it’s nevertheless just as excellent.

At most, I’d argue that both creators’ contributions are more equally matched here, which makes sense, I guess. This is the pair’s first outing together, so maybe they were feeling each other out, and by the time they reunited on Year One, Mazzucchelli clearly upped his game and Miller knew well enough to get out of his way.

It has to be said though that, like Year One, this story—arguably more than Miller’s initial run with Janson, or any of his other works on Daredevil—set the tone for the character for years to come. Where his initial run certainly dipped its toe into the darker side of the character, Born Again dives head first, fully transforming him from the swashbuckling hero that he’d been before into the aforementioned Devil of Hell’s Kitchen. Unlike Year One, however, this tonal shift was unprecedented for Daredevil.

I wouldn’t say I prefer one work over the other, but hoo boy, if you’re talking about impact, Born Again wins, hands down.

Miller teamed up with more than Mazzucchelli while working on ol’ Horn Head though. There was also Bill Sienkiewicz, and man, if Romita Jr. was the saving grace of Man Without Fear, Sienkiewicz is the absolute star in both Eleketra: Assassin and Daredevil: Love and War.

Like with Man Without Fear, Miller’s writing isn’t particularly great, but I feel like it’s downright inconsequential in these two books. Sienkiewicz’s art is some of the finest it’s ever been here—clear and solid storytelling, while still experimenting and stunning.

I’d never read Elektra: Assassin before, so it was an absolute pleasure to experience Sienkiewicz’s work there for the first time, but even with Love and War, which I had read before, I was still utterly blown away.

Not Alone, Stranger

But Miller wasn’t the only writer making an impact on Daredevil during this time. Anne Nocenti had a run on the character with Romita Jr. too.

If this re-read has done anything, it’s grown my appreciation of Nocenti’s work here. I wasn’t blown away by Lone Stranger the first time round, but I had come in without having read the rest of her work on Daredevil, and comparing her not so much to Miller himself, but to the hype surrounding Miller.

Reading it now, even without having read the rest of her stuff, I can see it for what it is: a very solid collection of loosely-connected stories. My favourites were definitely issues two hundred and sixty-six and two hundred and sixty-eight, though honestly, they were all entertaining and incredibly well-executed in their own way.

Romita Jr.’s work here was great too. You can see how much he’ll grow between these issues and Man Without Fear, but he was already a remarkable storyteller, even at this stage of his career.

I definitely want to read more of Nocenti’s run on Daredevil now, and probably come back to this collection again in the future.

Next, however, I’ll re-visit the period of Daredevil that I’m most familiar with: his time under the Marvel Knights imprint, specifically David Mack, Joe Quesada and Jimmy Palmiotti’s Parts of a Hole, and Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev’s tenure on the title.