Daredevil #1

[cyberghostface]

Comments

[windleopard2]

Is Matt turning into a werewolf?

[blues32]

Sometimes I forget how tight Pete and Matt are. They've worked together back in Daredevil wore yellow...for some reason.

Guardian Angel, huh? Doing a bang up job, Goldy. Bang up job. Hey, remember that time Daredevil got lured into a mansion death trap? Really could have used an angel to prevent him from falling for the android child/bomb trick. Keeping him alive isn't good enough. Guardians are meant to keep someone safe.

[nyadnar17]

So Pro tip. If you are approached by an 'angel' and the first thing they say isn't "Fear Not".....uhhhh, well you are in for a bad time.

[shakalooloo]

Angels ALWAYS open with the 'be not afraid', or some variant thereof. For good reason.

[cainofdreaming]

Personally I've always preferred the "Filleth not yon pantaloons with excrement" variant.

[cyberghostface]

He's less about keeping Matt safe from harm and more about causing him further anguish because that in turn makes Matt a better hero in his eyes. He would be more likely to cause Matt to go into the mansion death trap because he knew that Matt would ultimately come out stronger from it.

[justsotired]

*rolls eyes*

I'm starting to think this is some kind of fetish among Millennial writers, especially the men.

[cyberghostface]

He’s a villain, not sure what it has to do with the writer having a fetish.

[justsotired]

You know, I'm going to blame being sick for not offering up a more eloquent elaboration, but it has to do with an entirely justified cynicism toward religion among modern pop-art writers being expressed in the most ham-fisted and hackneyed possible way.

,oO(I know, I want to write a story about Matt Murdock questioning his faith. Oh, what if he has an encounter with an angel, but they're BAD. This is very original and subtle!)

[cyberghostface]

I see what you mean now, sorry. Yeah this does come off as a bit cynical.

If I had to guess though the story will probably reveal that this guy is not an actual angel but someone who is deluded into thinking he is and Matt will eventually come to terms with everything afterwards and then talks with his priest. (Which I guess is kind of what Kevin Smith did.) I don't see Zdarsky going full Ennis at least.

[justsotired]

I've come to accept that I can be a crank. If there's two tropes I want comic book writers to get over it's the conflation of authorial sadism with drama under the twee mantra of "kill your darlings"... and, gdi, I just lost the second one.

Basically I renounce Geoff Johns, and all his empty promises.

These writers, almost all of them men (and yeah, I'm also a man) need to be dragged kicking and screaming to Ursula K. LeGuin and Hannah Arendt.

[windleopard2]

May I ask who those two authors are and what makes you fans of them?

[justsotired]

Hannah Arendt was a holocaust survivor and an Ethicist whose work did heavy analysis into the exercise of violence. She coined the phrase "banality of evil" to describe Adolf Eichmann's psychology:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt

Ursula K. LeGuin was a science fiction and fantasy author who often explored themes of morality, spirituality, liberation, and the ethics of the exercise of power in her work. She's often thought of as a feminist writer (and she is one) but I consider her a humanist first and foremost. My favorite out of her body of work is "A Wizard of Earthsea" but the work I say that this modern batch of comic book writers need to start with is "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_K._Le_Guin

https://learning.hccs.edu/faculty/emily.klotz/engl1302-6/readings/the-ones-who-walk-away-from-omelas-ursula-le-guin/view

My argument is that Geoff Johns and his ilk have mistakenly put forward the violence, cruelty, and brute exercise of power as the compelling parts of superhero fiction as a genre, and it's done incredible harm to the genre over the past two decades. It was never those things that were compelling or interesting.

[deh_tommy]

I share this frustration, but why single out men specifically?

[justsotired]

Maybe I'm putting too fine a point on that, but I feel like critical analysis bears out that the writers who're cranking out the degrading violence are millennial men orbiting around my age (30s to 50s). If you want to point out some women writers who've joined in, I'm open to being educated.

[mastermahan]

But it's Matt Murdock. Saying Matt Murdock needs more tragedy is like saying Wilson Fisk needs to put on weight.

EDIT: The man's still mourning his brother's murder for cripes sake. He didn't even have a brother! Mike Murdock needed to be retconned in for the sake of more tragedy!

[tcampbell1000]

:-D

[blues32]

Is he? It feels like he wasn't too broken up about Mike. Which I'm sure is going to bring back Mike as a villain since he was buried with a norn stone...

[cainofdreaming]

That's not an angel. That's Hunter Zolomon who took a wrong turn somewhere.

[mazway_75]

Forgot about the whole Goldy subplot going on and this is...a turn to it not expecting.

But fun how Matt lets Spidey know and half expected Spidey going "dude, trust me, I know exactly how you feel..."

[mastermahan]

Well, obviously he's not her guardian angel. It's been well-documented that no woman in Matt Murdock's life has a guardian angel.

[windleopard2]

Surely Elektra and Nat count.

[mastermahan]

Nah, Elektra's one of the most famous cases of fridging. It's just that she got better afterwards.

[tcampbell1000]

I should have gotten upset over Kirsten McDuffie maybe dying in a train accident. But I didn't.

That makes me a little sad. Early-2010s Daredevil was my favorite superhero comic of that decade, and Kirsten was a big part of the heart of it:



But the versions of her we've seen lately have had none of the wit, charm, and spirit that made her worth reading about in the first place. She's still a smart lawyer, and she made a couple of points about prison that stuck. But she hasn't done anything that's not plot-driven, hasn't charted her own destiny or altered anyone else's trajectory, hasn't even cracked a single damn joke. Or even a clever twist of phrase.

And I understand why she can't be as goofy or as central as she could sometimes get in the Mark Waid days. But...Chip Zdarsky knows how to write wisecrackers who are also really good at their jobs. That's Spider-Man. Chip Zdarsky knows how to write spirited love interests who have firm character arcs in their own right. That's Elektra. So why feature Kirsten as love interest #2 if you're going to remove everything about her that made Matt and the reader fall for her? I don't get the strategy here.

I get the explanation, sort of. Being dumped out of the blue, having her memories altered, and thinking she watched her ex get murdered would take the spring out of anyone's step for a bit. But (1) it'd still be better to see her fight that and hold onto the wit as a coping mechanism. Choosing to be happy in spite of a tragic history was one of the big themes of the Waid years, so if she's here to represent those, why not...try to do that? And (2) these stories don't seem to remember that she was ever different than she is now. You'd think self-flagellating Matt would be eager to take the blame for killing her joie de vivre, but all he seems to say is "I loved her, I left her, but what if she remembers who I am?" As if she hasn't changed at all.

In the last few years, the closest she's come to exhibiting some trace of her original personality was when she took Mike Murdock to task, thinking he was Matt, and told him to stop joking around so much. So the net effect was to make her even less fun than her usual bland portrayal. At this point, fridging feels like it'd be mercy. You either die Daredevil's girlfriend, or you live long enough to see yourself become a cipher.

[cyberghostface]

***spoilers for #2***




If it helps she’s not dead, she missed the train as well.

[tcampbell1000]

It helps a little, but it sorta feels like she quietly died after the Soule flashback issue and the person we've been seeing since is just her sad stunt double.

I guess as long as she's still in play, there's a chance she might actually do something interesting. But it's been seven years since the last time she did--five if you count that flashback issue--and the thrust of the series currently seems to be "I'm leaaavin' on a jet plane, gonna die to fight the Hand a-gain," and I have to stretch my imagination pretty far to see a role for her there. Even Foggy's been mostly sidelined lately. So I'm not holding my breath.

[blues32]

"Arooo?" Is that a common reaction to requests? I thought it was the noise Richard Nixon made in "Futurama".

[tcampbell1000]

I think it's just an exaggerated grunt of confusion.

[cainofdreaming]

Sounds like you haven't confounded enough dogs.

[starwolf_oakley]

Also done on "Home Improvement" a few times. Wilson says something clever and wise, Tim says "Aroo?"

[tcampbell1000]

Thinking this over a little more, I can see part of the problem more clearly. Kirsten had playfulness, intelligence, and pluck, but what set her apart from her very first scene was an ability to see through Matt's bullshit. She ignored his many denials that he was Daredevil until they started making a game out of it. She refused to be relegated to just a supporting-cast role in his life. She told him he never had to fake a smile around her and called him out when he did.

As long as she's still being made to forget who Daredevil is, that knife-like perception of hers is dulled in every way that matters.

I also, frankly, have no idea what relationship with Matt she remembers having, since so much of their history together is inseparable from his Daredevil identity. So not only is she not doing much that's interesting, I can't even guess at her internal life in a way that fills in those blanks.

We coulda fixed that whole problem in the latest issue (2022 #2)! Matt meant to tell her, which would probably have been for the best! He didn't even have the gotta-push-her-away-to-save-her-life excuse, since he was already leaving New York and figured he would never see her again, so the only reason not to tell her is if he preferred her to retain permanent holes in her memory! But he didn't tell her! For some reason, I guess! AAARGH.

[thenicochan]

I've always low-key shipped Matt with Peter ever since I was a teenager. Seeing this reminded me of that. It's a small ship, but I'm happy to take it out to sea still even now.