Another big-budget Hollywood adaptation of comic book superheroics looming, and you can hardly blame the company that spawned the character for wanting to cash in on as many high-end reprints as possible. It occurred last year w./ Spider-Man; it's happening once more around Marvel's Daredevil. Not a bad way for those of us who haven't been following the guy to catch up on the last few years, actually.
Over the past six months, Marvel has put out three hardbound collections devoted to the "Man Without Fear." Alongside two Marvel Masterworks collections still available (reprinting the character's first two years of comic book adventures) plus three Marvel Visionaries books collecting writer/artist Frank Miller's first run on the title, you have a decent crash course in the lives & times of blind lawyer Matt Murdock.
As a comic book lead, Daredevil's career has been irrefutably spotty: took years for Marvel's creative staff to figure out how to handle him, and, even then, the results have been variable. Read the first two years repped in the Masterworks books, and the main thing you recall is the art, produced by old pros like Joe Orlando, Bill Everett & Wally Wood, then that master of shadowy pulpishness Gene Colan - definitely not the stories. Scripter Stan Lee floundered between soggy romance comics cliches ("If only I dare tell Karen how much I care for her - but how could she love a blind man?") or fight scenes that strived for the Root for the Underdog feeling of classic Spider-Man but merely came across as desperate. The blind lawyer/superhero wouldn't rise out of third tier status 'til Miller put his stamp on the character.
What he added wasn't a lot, but it was enough to elevate the character into something interesting. The basic set-up remained the same: Matt Murdock has both been blinded and enhanced by accidental exposure to radioactive materials - the rest of his senses have heightened tremendously, but outside of a Bruce Wayne-like regimen of physical training, he lacks the mega-strength of his peers in the superhero universe. Alongside his college chum, fat romantic fall guy Foggy Nelson (you can tell Fog's doomed to forever be a chump just by that first name), and blond nice-girl secretary Karen Page, our hero is a lawyer by day/red-suited vigilante by night. The Nelson-Murdock law firm provided ground for plots (one of the silliest in the early days involved underwater superhero/villain Submariner suing surface dwellers for control of the Earth), but where Miller made his mark was by more clearly New York-ing the characters.
Article comments
1 - berkeley joe
i really enjoyed that - you break down the whole daredevil mythos quite nicely. and even though it seems like the reviews are bashing it, i liked the movie, even though they totally gutted the elektra character. wellie wellie well then, again, good job.