The Sad Strange Case of Kirsten McDuffie

[tcampbell1000]

Kirsten McDuffie is the best character featured in Mark Waid's Daredevil, one of my all-time favorite superhero runs. This set of comics not only brought me joy, but affected how I live my life. It inspired me to deal more honestly with my own feelings and identity, and that's one reason I have a happy marriage today. So, yeah, Kirsten is special to me.

Seven years after that run of comics ended, recent installments of Daredevil threatened to fridge Kirsten. As you might expect, this upset me.



Because part of me wished they would.

In 2011, the position of "Daredevil's girlfriend" seemed to be one of the most hazardous in comics, well ahead of "Arkham Asylum security guard" and just slightly behind "low-level criminal in a Punisher title." There was a long list of those who've loved Matt Murdock and somehow suffered for it. Elektra? Dead, then alive and committed to a life of violence. Karen Page? Dead, after many other forms of suffering. Dakota North? Publicly shamed. Milla Donovan, Typhoid Mary? Both insane (at the time). Heather Glenn, Glorianna O'Breen? Dead and mostly forgotten.



Truthfully, though, it wasn't just the "curse of Daredevil" that hung over these relationships...Matt's secrets and self-sacrifice could be as great a threat to them as any supervillain.

When Mark Waid started writing the series, he introduced a Matt who was trying to lighten the tone of his own life. This new Matt seemed to call for a new romantic partner. But any new love interest would face an uphill climb just getting the reader to invest in her, since the sword of Damocles would hang over her head from the start. She'd have to be extraordinary, resilient, and distinct from anyone else who'd ever filled the role.

Enter Kirsten.

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Kirsten distinguished herself immediately with a sense of humor tied to her incisive intelligence. She took particular delight in skewering the legend of Daredevil and Matt's not-really-secret identity.

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Matt's been called a human lie detector, but Kirsten was nearly as infallible when it came to Matt, consistently seeing through his lies and calling him out.





No quick summary can entirely do her justice...she was a well-rounded character and showed new sides all the time, before and after their relationship began...

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...but "incisive wit" covers a lot of her. (Remember both those words, we'll come back to them.)



As Matt gave up his secret identity, moved to San Francisco, and dealt with (many of) his emotional issues, Kirsten was along for the ride, as Matt's lover, sometime legal partner, and occasional "guy in the chair."

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Unlike some of Matt's other loves, who'd sometimes made him their whole world, she had an emotional life of her own. But she found she could fulfill most of her ambitions at his side, and as for the rest, well, any relationship involves some compromise.



After Mark Waid's time on the title ended, Charles Soule lurched it back to the grittier, grimmer tone that was its usual default, belatedly matching the tone of the popular Netflix series. That move wasn't a huge surprise to those who knew the character's history. But anyone who'd invested into the Matt-Kirsten relationship got one serious case of whiplash.

Matt was back in New York, pursuing some plan to end all urban crime. His identity was once again secret to everyone but Foggy Nelson. Kirsten was a whispered memory.




Soule cleared up the mystery in #15-18 of his run. In a lot of ways, the story did Kirsten right. It showcased her as clearheaded, emotionally balanced, resilient...and still funny.

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What it did not do, however, was give her any agency. The story revolves around Matt's struggle and ultimate failure to adjust to a life without his dual identity...or, if you prefer, a life without secrecy and masochistic self-sacrifice. His concern for Kirsten's safety is an ongoing issue, but this is mostly about him. After an early scene where they discuss his future as a couple should (albeit picking some very odd examples of "people who live a healthy, balanced life")...




...the plot kicks in and gives Matt a chance to indulge all his worst habits. Some mental mumbo jumbo robs the world of the knowledge that Matt Murdock is Daredevil. Rather than clear this up for Kirsten as he does for Foggy, Matt sees it as a chance for a "clean break" from her and the life she represents. He's going back to New York, back to lawyering by day and crimefighting by night, back to the Catholic guilt...back to the brand, essentially.





And...look. Couples break up. Two people sometimes end up with incompatible life goals. And if one person is really done with the relationship, then the other person can't argue them back into it, no matter how sharp a legal mind they have.

But there's something cowardly about Matt not allowing Kirsten to try. You owe it to your partner to at least attempt to hash things out. It feels more like he knew, deep down, that she'd talk him out of indulging his self-destructive side if he gave her the chance, but he kept avoiding that conversation until he found a way to avoid it forever.

And he arguably destroyed her to do so. She's not dead or insane, true...she's just had her most treasured memories altered, almost stolen, because Matt decided she couldn't handle having them. At this writing, this injustice continues...Foggy, Wilson Fisk, and Elektra now know the truth, but Kirsten still doesn't know the thing she introduced herself by knowing. Her incisive edge has been dulled. She's like a Sherlock Holmes who can't detect.

Waid, who admitted that his Daredevil partly addressed his own issues with depression, argued that it's more heroic to try to change your life for the better than to accept that misery is your fate. More typically, Daredevil comics admit that some of Matt's unhappiness is self-inflicted, but sell some of it as tragically necessary, with no clear dividing line between those two zones. There's no room in the tragic version of Daredevil for a long-term relationship that isn't angst-ridden.

Kirsten resurfaced...first as Matt's ex, later as his and Foggy's sometime law partner. But the incisive wit of the Waid days and the Soule treatment has largely left her. She showed up in Man Without Fear to try helping Matt through some physical therapy, then gave up on him almost immediately when he got sulky. You know, as you do with people in physical therapy.

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Once again, Kirsten is not allowed to argue her own case. Apparently all it takes is Matt being nonresponsive for her to give the hell up this time. (The voiceovers are not from her; they come from the ghost of Matt's dead girlfriend Karen Page, which...is a choice.)

I'd like to think the vital character from the Waid days is still in there somewhere, the one who could laugh and seethe as well as work and worry. But it hardly matters if we never really see her. As long as these mental "blinders" prevent her from knowing the "real" Matt or Daredevil, she's little more than a brainwashed patsy when it comes to him. And the plot never has any use for her doing anything that doesn't involve him...or someone she thinks is him, anyway.

How far has she fallen? Her most recent dealings with a Murdock were not with Matt, but with Matt's magical twin brother Mike, posing as Matt. And the woman who'd repeatedly made fun of Matt for posing as his own twin brother...now could not tell she was dealing with an impostor. This, in the Marvel universe, where Skrull impersonators and robot doubles are everywhere. This, despite Mike's wildly different mannerisms, different behavior patterns, and complete incompetence as a lawyer.



He held it together for a full two frames there, after an entire working day goofing off. HE. WAS. NOT. GOOD. AT. THIS. And yet she didn't even figure it out after Mike died.



(can't decide if that "His world was darkness" bit is a somewhat tacky reference to Matt's blindness or Kirsten buying all the way into THE TRAGEDY OF MATT MURDOCK narrative that she once opposed, it could easily be both)

Despite those blinders, her character doesn't have to be this way. It would fix a lot if her scenes showed some selective doses of the old Waid wit and more focus on the things she does know than the things she doesn't. The old fire did flare in one exceptional moment, when Daredevil's cycle of self-sacrifice led him to prison. Finally, she starts cross-examining Matt's real choices like she used to, when she was allowed to.



If this were typical of her recent appearances, she could serve a real role in the series. She could represent a separate, saner path than the one Matt's walking down. She could model how a lawyer can be a hero without wearing a mask, as Foggy sometimes does.

Every issue of the latest run has taken pains to mention that Matt is still in love with Kirsten, as well as with his now-wife, Elektra. And if Kirsten Classic were still around, that could actually be a great love triangle: her down-to-earth snark set against Elektra's "big, operatic" warrior's way. Credit where it's due: Elektra in the newer comics is more passionate and interesting than she's been since the Frank Miller days, and she'd even give the Miller version a run for her money. Sure, her marriage to Matt does seem a bit like a cultish suicide pact, but that seems like the kind of thing that turns him on, these days. So I can see why he's into it.

I can't say why he's into New Kirsten. Most of what he (and I) loved about Kirsten Classic is nowhere to be seen. Except for that beautiful flare-up at the prison, all she does is show up to be doomedly in love with Matt, Mike, or Daredevil, whenever the story's soundtrack needs a few sad piano notes.



It's a horrible decision to wife one woman at the same time you profess your love to another, to whom you're still actively lying. But (eye roll) that's "tragic Matt" for you. Maybe the wrongness of that decision is all the reason he needs.

So, yeah, I'd almost prefer to see Kirsten fridged than this...thing they're doing with her now. The more times she appears as the sad-eyed symbol of Matt's hesitation, the more that version of the character becomes the standard model, while the Kirsten I loved recedes to the background. If she died, it's comics: she'd at least have a chance of coming back fresh. Worked for Elektra!

Ah, well. As long as there's a next issue, there's always hope. I mean, Daredevil's latest appearances in She-Hulk closely matched the Waid days in tone, right down to his non-toxic relationship with a smart, witty fellow lawyer whose humor poked at Marvel cliches.



Maybe that happier energy will splash back into the comic, at least a bit. Maybe in the next arc, Kirsten will somehow shake off the whammy that's been put on her. If she does, I hope she's as furious with Matt as she's got every goddamn right to be--for what he did to her, and what he did to himself. And I hope she expresses that fury with some freakin' jokes.

Comments

[tcampbell1000]

Sorry for briefly disrupting the homepage, guys: got my wires crossed when it came to the cut feature.

[nyadnar17]

This was wonderful. Thanks for posting.

[thanekos]

It's fascinatingly mechanical shared universe character handling - each writer's got someone tied to the protagonist in one run such that they couldn't just kick them offstage in subsequent runs without it being really awkward, but the run she's from and the role she plays is atonal enough to what they want to do with the protagonist that they just keep having her walk on stage to do bits that are effectively slowly pulling her off with a hook.

(It's a step up from " I don't want to use this character, but it would be awkward not to, so I'll just kill her off ", at least.)

[numeronone]

Seeing that page from the Serpent Society arc does remind me how jarring it is to read that arc in the modern day. Like, I get what Waid was going for but it's a little odd to think that the difference betwewn the MU and the real world is that cops, judges and CEOs are bothering to pretend not to be white supremacists.

But there again, superhero comics have always been about escapist fantasies.

[numeronone]

But seriously, thank you for doing this. I was rather trepidatious what would happen when Kirsten showed up in "Superior Iron Man" as...a fairly generic love interest, and I've been surprised they kept her around this long after that. She deserves better. It always seemed that way.

[cainofdreaming]

I didn't know Set was such a secret in 616.

[mazway_75]

Again, have her figure out the Mike/Matt thing would have been better but this just undermined her, made her look dumber, a shame given all the good work Waid put into her. As noted, always rough when a new writer decides no use for a supporting character from the previous run but deserved better than this.