Daredevil #606 - Back on the right track Dougie boy!

[icon_uk]

Yay, 607 is out, so I can post another couple of pages from #606, since it features one of my favourites, so thank you bi-monthly publication schedule!



This is what Doug "Cypher" Ramsey looked like at the end of the recent "Hunt for Wolverine: Weapon Lost" mini-series.



And possibly a good barber?

So then, in Daredevil #606, Daredevil meets the other new members of his crew who will be assisting him in his new mission. Reader we've seen already, but also...






The whole “Trying to translate the entire internet caused a breakdown" backstory thing is still,,, not really convincing for me, but a Doug who gets caught up in racy Hungarian romance novels whilst being a detective (after a shave, a haircut and probably some therapy), wearing his funky All-New X-Factor goggles and an X-Men variant T-shirt* based on one popularised by one of the “Queer Eye” guys? Yeah, I can work with that.

* Based off a book I confess I've never even heard of but sounds like a REAL hoot... or not

Comments

[beyondthefringe]

Well, he's alive, didn't lose his powers, and seems relatively okay so...
I'll be cautiously optimistic for the moment.

[icon_uk]

Yeah, baby steps, but I'll take them

[captainbellman]

...I like that he's wearing a variant on that "A Little Life" t-shirt Antony wears on "Queer Eye" now and again.

[icon_uk]

Never having read it, does the comparison to the O5 work?

[shadowpsykie]

that shirt has been used in fandoms for a very long time (they use it for sense8 I know, and a few others...)

[icon_uk]

"A Little Life" only came out in 2016, please don't make me feel any older than I already am! ;)

[shadowpsykie]

oh no I am saying I think the meme was around before the book. my dad died of cancer in 2015 and that was around the time sense8 came out, and I am pretty sure people used the same memetic image/mantra back then.

[commodus]

This looks really good, the art style really fits Daredevil and the grittier urban setting which is so important to the character.
But what is he planning with this team of his?

[icon_uk]

He's putting together a team to investigate how legal Kingpin's election to the post of Mayor was, so he can be taken down with no chance of a comeback

McGee is a former veteran police Detective NuHuman with many connections, and a variety of vision powers (Aside from some sort of optic blasts he can completely memorise anything he looks at and recall it perfectly, zooming in and around the image he's memorised long after the fact),

Reader has his bizarre "Whatever I read comes to life" power which has a vairety of uses as seen here (but he can also do things like see through other people's eyes, or teleport, or stop time etc). Bit of a deus ex machina, but also a bit ofa wld card, see the other recent Daredevil post.

And Doug, of course, is a natural codebreaker and data analyst.

As investgative teams go, it's a solid setup, especially if they also use Misty Knight, but I don't know if she's a rgular even though she was in the Weapon Lost mini like McGee and Doug were

[shadowpsykie]

wait... McGee the reporter from the incredible hulk is a New Human?

[icon_uk]

Sadly, awesome though that would be, this is Frank McGee, not Jack, though a mention of a link might be fun!

[zylly]

You might even say his team is the X-Tra Sensories.

...I'll see myself out.

[chalicother]

Wait a minute. Soule wrote this and the Mini...? Is this the first time a write has realized an idea was bad and just got rid of it in one issue?

[icon_uk]

The covers for the mini show Doug looking his usual self, so I think the internal pages look of him being burned-out and haggard was a late addition to the mini, and never intended for the series.

The thing is I can see why Soule went this way, and still think it was a bad, or at least unimaginative, way of doing it. (I'm speculating wildly here of course, so I might be speaking out of a completely different orifice than the one I intended)

The mini was setting up Doug having a problem with internet addiction (nearly starving himself to death, that hair hasn't seen shampoo or conditioner in weeks etc and this is a guy who's been drawn by Alan Davis, so perfect, fluffy, swoopy hair was pretty much his norm), and now they can use him as a back-to-basics book and paper researcher, which he'd excel at, without his usual god-mode-Oracle-Plus levels of absolute computer mastery.

Nearly ten years after his return, Doug suddenly getting hooked on the web like that (To the extene of stealing mobile phones off dead bodies so he can get his internet fix) seems pretty out there, and they could have gone down a different, perhaps more interesting, route to get there.

One of the things that's come up since Doug's return is that his powers have expanded, from "just" translating languages, to genius level pattern recognition, semiotics and (and this is a weird one) a fundamenal understanding of the universe... oh, and baking (No, I didn't follow that one either), and Zeb Williams (and others) seemed to suggest that Doug now had a degree of sensory processing disorder, he was receiving and processing so MUCH information that his interactions with people were more stilted than they had been.

A series like Daredevil, where the senses are so important a plot point, might have been the perfect place to explore a supporting character who senses too much and has to learn how to damp it down, and voluntarily moving away from the relentless information overload of the internet would be a logical place to start.

That might yet be how it goes, and I'll be keeping an eye on the title because of that (And because it's m'boy Doug of course) so we'll see.

Sorry, I think there was an answer to your question in there, but it sort of got out of hand..

[thanekos]

" Doug, let me teach you some sensory management techniques I've learned. "
" Did you learn them from ninjas? "
" A ninja, yes. "
" .. statistically speaking, I had to get into that stuff eventually. Sure. "

[icon_uk]

Regrettably, the last time he tried something like that, it didn't end well... qu'elle surprise for Doug.

[zylly]

Reading all that, it does feel like both a sharp reversal and/or cleaning up his own mess, but also a bit of a "let's clamp this down so it doesn't get super out of control" with regards to Doug.

Especially since the X-Men just got a new member who talks to machines over in Red, it also looks a bit like a "let's clean up redundancies."