Welcome, dear readers, to another week of comics and commentary at Comics! The Blog! We kick things off, as always, by handing out awards for the Best of the Week – beginning with two Award postings, followed closely by the past week’s Best.
Yes, it was extremely recently that I was telling you to buy the latest Mark Waid Daredevil joint. And literally just a few days before that, I was telling you to buy the last issue of the previous run on Daredevil (also done by him and Chris Samnee). It feels like I am always talking about how good the Waid/Samnee/etc work with Matt Murdock has been, and I keep thinking someday people will get vocally tired of it and I will agree because I am, in this hypothetical situation, starting to get tired of talking about how good Daredevil is. But I never get tired of it. Every issue, something wows me. In the All New Marvel NOW! Daredevil #1, there is a sequence approximately halfway through where I actually had to put down the comic, laugh and swear out loud at the book because Waid, Samnee, Javier Rodriguez and Joe Caramagna actually shocked me with the brilliance of it. A sequence where the framing, panicked narration and even the way the lettering trails off is just screaming how important it is that Daredevil rescue this little girl… and then he winks. Fuck you, you guys. That’s too good. Stop ruining it for the rest of us.
People roll their eyes at relaunches and renumbering. Sometimes, they claim that this plays fast and loose with the history of the book. Daredevil #1 stomps all over that idea by selling how new everything is while still reminding the reader that it hasn’t forgotten where it came from. The end of the previous volume made it perfectly clear why Matt needs a fresh start in San Francisco: he torched his career and reputation to take down a white supremacist group and to refuse to let them use his ill best friend Foggy for extortion. He embraced the totality of who he was – and its consequences – and headed out to a familiar face where he could start anew and, you know, afford to eat.
What’s amazing though, is that even this new location is steeped in Daredevil’s history. He spent a short amount of time there back in the pre-Miller days, and that pairing of new locations with attention to detail and continuity in a way that doesn’t require a trip to Wikipedia to make sense of. Heck, you could probably jump into this book without having ever read a single panel about Daredevil before; Waid and Samnee elegantly explain the hero’s past in a visually astounding duo of full page splashes near the beginning that explain who Matt is, where he’s from and why he’s here, all in a layout that gives enough visual room for big images of Matt and New York while visually representing Daredevil’s superpowers. It looks deceptively easy until you actually realize how intense the art is, and how smartly balanced Rodriguez‘s colours are, and how Caramagna‘s word balloons never get in the way. It’s a comic whose craft is so impeccable that it never obtrudes, but is always there to notice and marvel at.
The narrative itself is all about those little details, like how Matt’s powers make him uniquely able to realize what the real threat is and how to neutralize it. It also makes him acutely aware of how out of place he is, and how, despite his history, everything in San Fran is new and he needs to relearn how to live there. He even feels more disabled there than he ever did in New York. It’s these little details – as well as a great last-page reveal – that inject a sense of urgency into a series that has always managed to find what it needs when the time comes.