edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
Elizabeth Culmer ([personal profile] edenfalling) wrote2015-07-14 11:56 pm

wherein Liz reads a handful of Daredevil comics

I mentioned I'd checked out some Daredevil comics from the library, right? So far that means Waid's run up until Matt moves to San Francisco (they don't seem to have anything more recent, alas), the first three collections from Brubaker's run (the fourth is on order and will be mine the moment the person who currently has it checked out returns it), and Shadowland.

I was surprised to recognize some of Brubaker's first two story arcs. He took over the book in, I think, 2006, which was right about the time I started working at the smoke shop and kind of adopted our minimal comics section as my private fief because its previous utter lack of organization annoyed me. And there was often time to kill during closing shifts and lunch breaks, so I read a LOT of magazines during my years there. Sometimes this included comics. I was not consistent about what I read (nor was our parent company consistent in which titles they sent us), so the story of Matt's time in prison and his quest to get his life back was an interesting jumble of stuff I vaguely remembered and stuff I'd never seen before.

We presumably stopped getting Daredevil for a long time after that, because I didn't recognize Brubaker's third story arc at all and the next time I remember seeing any kind of Daredevil comic on our shelves was, IIRC, an issue of the Daredevil Reborn story arc. And I don't think we got all of that, either, nor anything thereafter because that was about the time Marvel quit distributing to anybody but direct market specialty comics shops.

Anyway, my impression of Brubaker's run so far is that it's very dark, and I mean that literally as well as tonally. Michael Lark's art is very desaturated and leans heavily toward gray and black with occasional sepia interludes. It also feels weirdly static to me. I've been trying to figure out what's causing that impression, and I think it's a combination of his choice of poses -- he draws people between motions rather than catching them mid-motion -- and a relatively naturalistic approach to faces which removes some of the vividness that a bit more stylization can bring.

I am also really annoyed at Milla Donovan's treatment. She doesn't seem to have any life outside of her relationship to Matt -- seriously, what does she DO all day??? -- and there's a head-banging moment in the breather issue between 'The Devil in Cell-Block D' and 'The Devil Takes a Ride' where Foggy first identifies her by her relationship to Matt rather than by her name, and then explicitly says he's worried about people targeting her because of how that might affect Matt. Hang on, let me look it up... Yeah, he says, "What about Matt's wife?" and the FBI guy is the one who has to supply her name, and then on the next page, "Matt doesn't deserve to lose her, too." Which, wow. I get that Foggy is going to care more about his long-term best friend than about someone he's known relatively briefly and only via that best friend, but this is still a human being with her own life we're talking about here! Can we please show some basic decency (and respect for Milla as a person rather than an appendage) and say, instead, that she doesn't deserve to die?

I'm not going to say anything about the 'let's drive Milla insane' arc until I've read its conclusion, but so far I'm not impressed. I like Becky Blake and Dakota North, though. They're cool and I want to see more of them.

Moving on!

Shadowland is... well, it's an interesting idea with terrible execution. And by terrible, I do mean terrible. It's all tell and no show; everything happens way too fast with too many people on-page and no time for any of them to get anything remotely resembling an emotional arc. Andy Diggle needed either two more issues, minimum, or half as many characters.

If we assume there was a hard limit on the available pages, I'd start my ideal-world edits by cutting everything related to Fisk and Ghost Rider. It's clutter, nobody cares, and you can get Fisk back in charge of New York's underworld easily enough some other way. Actually, you probably don't even need to explain that. You can just say, "Oh, Fisk is back" and people will buy it because that's who he is and what he does; we don't need to see him doing it. Moon Knight is also narratively irrelevant, and I'd probably chop out Shang-Chi, Master Izo, and Wolverine to boot. Elektra could be the one to reveal the twist about what's really going on with Matt and the Hand, and then you're left with... uh... Iron Fist, Luke Cage, Spider-Man, Elektra, and the Punisher. Also maybe Misty Knight and Colleen Wing? Though they vanished mysteriously between the first and second confrontations within the castle, which just goes to show that there are too many people for the story to support.

Anyway, those cuts would allow more time for Matt's friends to agonize over his changes -- and, you know, to show Matt reacting to the changes, which would create some actual set-up for the finale instead of having it come out of nowhere. They'd also allow space to actually show the evil influence spreading through Hell's Kitchen and maybe something about Foggy realizing things are wrong and fighting his way through to the castle instead of just having him randomly appear, deus ex machina style, climbing the walls.

Also, and this is completely random and tangential, every time I see Elektra's outfit, it annoys me more. It is SO INCREDIBLY STUPID, and also quite possibly the least functional thing she could wear given her choice of career. Well, no. It does at least have one shoulder-strap. She could be wearing a strapless bikini top or something. But if that's the only positive thing I can say? It is a BAD COSTUME.

Moving on again!

So, I can easily see why Waid said to hell with the endless grinding misery and went in a brighter direction -- and as with Brubaker, I mean that both thematically and literally. There is color in this book! The panel backgrounds aren't an eternal dark gray! Chris Samnee's art also feels much less static than Lark's, which I think is partly because he poses people in motion, and partly because his style is less naturalistic and more sort of... simplified and stripped down. This lets him exaggerate expressions a touch without looking ridiculous, because everything is already a little exaggerated away from strict realism. The stories are likewise a little exaggerated away from the grimdark crime stuff of the previous runs, but I think Waid manages not to get too ridiculous. Well, not too ridiculous considering the general backdrop ridiculousness of the 616 universe, which is pretty damn high to start with.

(The grimdark crime stuff was pretty damn ridiculous in its own way, to be honest. There's a reason one technique for countering anxiety is to take a scenario and make it worse, and make it worse, and make it worse until you have passed all bounds of plausibility and burst out laughing.)

I like what Waid clearly meant to do with Kirsten McDuffie -- create a love interest who has her own life and doesn't let herself get subsumed into Matt's drama -- but I don't think he pulled off the execution so far. Kirsten doesn't get any plot arcs of her own (the 'I will prove you're Daredevil' thing doesn't count since it's centered around Matt) and also doesn't get enough page time to properly establish her independent life... which she then throws away to accompany Matt to San Francisco, so. Um. I mean, she has reasons of her own to leave New York, but they are not exactly highlighted, which means the overall impression is that she's moving as his girlfriend instead of for herself. *headdesk*

I think I'd also appreciate Kirsten more if she got to interact with other female characters. And on that note, I must find out what happened to Becky Blake and Dakota North, because it feels like a sadly missed opportunity not to have them around.

Also, Foggy is really inconsistent. There's an attempt to justify his weird behavior toward Matt as him taking out his own fears over his health problems on the person he desperately needs to be there and be stable, but that's a handwave after the fact for stuff that needed to be made obvious a lot earlier. Then again, I'm not wild about how Brubaker writes Foggy either; the whole Wit-Sec interlude is just, I dunno, kind of off. Apparently it's hard for writers to strike the right balance between showing why Foggy and Matt are friends and leaving space for them to have occasional drama? Which is weird; you'd think close friendship would be easy. I mean, almost everyone has friends. Yay friends! But yeah, Foggy deserves better than to be treated either as cowardly deadweight or as a judgmental asshole.

Those complaints aside, I enjoyed Waid's initial story arcs a lot. They have a sort of contagious kinetic enthusiasm even in their darker moments. I also really like the increased focus on Matt's blindness -- which felt like an afterthought in the three Brubaker volumes -- and the attempts to portray the way he perceives the world, insofar as that's possible in an inherently visual medium. (Oh, and on that note, one thing I did like about Shadowland was the few panels from Matt's POV, where people were drawn as infrared impressions; that was cool.)

...

I am thinking really hard about subscribing to Marvel Unlimited for a month or two. Somebody tell me this is a bad idea, please...
heliopausa: (Default)

[personal profile] heliopausa 2015-07-15 06:18 am (UTC)(link)
I'm so outside all of this (I've never seen Daredevil at all, nor heard of him until recently) that I can't possibly tell you it's a bad idea! But I loved the quick picture of you in days of yore sorting and aggregating and intelligently fitting together the fragments of comic-story which landed up at the smokeshop. Literary archaeology. :)
domarzione: (Default)

[personal profile] domarzione 2015-07-15 01:23 pm (UTC)(link)
I wanted to like the Waid far more than I did because Waid is Waid and he is such a comics nerd. But I didn't really like it much at all. I still love the Bendis and Brubaker stuff best; Bendis did a lot with Foggy especially, turning him less into a comic relief, and I really liked the interactions his Matt had with the other local heroes -- Luke, Peter, Danny, Jessica, etc.

If you have patience, wait around for a discount/free trial of Marvel Unlimited or google around for a code; I got one once and mainlined like a fiend. Then, when it's time to leave, they acted like a cable company and kept offering discounts to stay. I didn't, but I presume they still do stuff like that.
domarzione: (Default)

[personal profile] domarzione 2015-07-17 01:02 pm (UTC)(link)
DD under Bendis and then Brubaker was heavily serialized; you couldn't pick it up out of the blue and be at speed.

For when you get your subscription:

That volume of DD starts with Kevin Smith's run, which was heavily hyped because he was a cool guy back then, but it's not very good. Not actively awful, but hardly worth the Visionaries treatment they gave it. Bendis shows up, there's a David Mack arc, then Bendis again, then the Gale arc that nobody talks about and was never collected in trade (very skippable), then Bendis takes over for real, with one more cameo by Mack that's better than his first because he's doing the art.

Actually, here: http://www.comicbookdb.com/title.php?ID=447