The Daredevil Re-Read, Part Three — Ol’ Hornhead

And here we are—on the flipside of Daredevil.

I’ve always found it interesting how wildly different this version of Matt Murdock is from the Matt Murdock of Frank Miller, Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev, and even Ann Nocenti and John Romita Jr.—yet how easy it is to resolve those two sides.

It’s one of my favourite things about the character. Unlike the many variations of Batman, his characterisation is somehow consistent, while still opening him up for so many kinds of stories.

And just like with the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen, it seems appropriate to start where Matt’s story begins.

In the Beginning (Again)…

When it comes to the team of Jeph Loeb and the late Tim Sale, it’s never a case of which of their projects are great; it’s just about picking the ones that are your favourite—and Daredevil: Yellow is definitely one of mine.

It’s the take on Matt’s origin that I prefer, certainly. Unlike Man Without Fear, which boasted amazing visual storytelling, but fell short with the dialogue, Daredevil: Yellow looks and reads timelessly.

I could go on and on about Sale’s stunning and deceptively simple—yet effective—work. As solid as Loeb’s script is (inspired by the Silver Age Daredevil stories from Stan Lee, Bill Everett and Wally Wood), it’s Sale who elevates this to more than a revisiting of past tales, with his modern-yet-classic style.

Like John Romita Jr. in Man Without Fear, his sense of storytelling is spot-on every time, choosing to go with straightforward layouts that still know how to pack a punch.

It’s worth also mentioning colourist Matt Hollingsworth too. His choices complement Sale’s work perfectly and really complete that contemporary-retro feel.

The Man Without Brooding

There was no doubt in my mind that this was how I wanted to end this re-read, and not just because this was the last Daredevil run I was following regularly.

Waid—and an army of amazing collaborators that include Paolo Rivera, Marcos Martin and, most notably, Chris Samnee—crafts a run that feels like a natural extension of the character’s Silver Age origins, as filtered through the darker turns he takes from the eighties onwards. He doesn’t ignore what’s come before, but uses it to give his own stories momentum forward in a tone that respects those more sombre runs, but undoubtedly suits him better.

The first stage of his stint, before the series was relaunched for the Marvel NOW! initiative, was great—though if I had one minor complaint, it’d be how visually inconsistent it felt. Granted, it’s the best kind of inconsistency, when you’re jumping from storytellers like Rivera to Marco Checchetto, but without an anchor artist, the stories themselves feel a little unmoored, despite Waid’s best attempts.

Samnee was that anchor. He isn’t as inventive as someone like Rivera, but he doesn’t need to be. He’s a lot like Sale in that sense: his storytelling abilities are so solid that he makes straightforward layouts feel exciting.

While the pair worked together in the first stage of Waid’s run, it’s only during the aforementioned Marvel NOW! phase when you can see just how perfectly they complement each other. The visual storytelling and the scripts feel collaborative, and even when a guest artist comes aboard, you never lose that cohesiveness that Waid and Samnee have established.

The stories themselves, for the majority of that second stage, don’t feel as big as the first—but they really don’t need to be. They are, in and of themselves, solid arcs and that consistency does so much to elevate them.

***

And that brings me to the last post of my Daredevil re-read—and the penultimate post for Four-Colour Retrospectives altogether.

I was thinking about looking at more characters’ comics across the years, or even switching it up and looking at certain creators’ or creative teams’ bibliographies. When I scanned my bookshelf to see which comics I could re-read, however, I realised that the thought of doing any of those posts simply didn’t appeal to me.

I dug a little deeper to figure out why and I realised that it wasn’t just those ideas that I wasn’t keen on, but continuing this blog on a whole. That’s not to say that I haven’t had fun. The truth is that this blog’s simply run its course, nothing more. There’s one last post I want to make—a return to a couple of Spider-Man comics—and then I’m wrapping this all up.

I’ll probably talk about all this more in that next post, so see you then!