Daredevil in Oz

Daredevil #82, by Ed Brubaker, Michael Lark, and Frank D'Armata

It's been about two years since I finally lost all patience with the Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev run on Daredevil, driven off by the storytelling shortcuts and squandered potential, but I have to admit to a certain curiosity as to how it all turned out.  That, as much as my interest in the work of Brubaker and Lark, led me to pick up the first issue after Bendis and Maleev departed.  The greatest failing (if hardly the most noticeable one) of Bendis's writing was his refusal to confront the consequences of his own plot developments, his insistence on writing standard and sub-par Daredevil stories even as he changed the character's life in what should have been irrevocable ways, exposing his secret identity and setting him up as the successor to his own worst enemy.  I opened this comic half expecting to find it all revoked, to see Daredevil's secret identity restored and his wedding ring gone and his billy clubs flailing in action against the splendiferous Stilt-Man.

Instead I see Matt Murdock sitting in prison, exactly the place where Bendis's plot should have been pointing him all along, so he got at least that much right.  (Mind you, based on what I've read about his final storylines I don't have any regrets about skipping the last two years.  Apparently I missed the federal government siding with the Kingpin so they could shoot Daredevil, for what reason I'm not exactly sure.  And a demon baby.  That's about it.)

Anyway, Brubaker inherits the book with Murdock rotting behind bars, and you know what that means:  another comic book writer trying to replicate the first couple of seasons of Oz.  All the key elements are there as Murdock locks horns with crooked COs and tries to navigate the ethnic fault lines that divide the prison's warring gang factions, although in a nod to the Marvel universe setting, each faction is headed by a different small-time supervillain.  I think John Constantine did this same plot five or six years ago, except then it didn't have Dakota North or the Tarantula.

Of course, anyone reading a forty-year-old superhero franchise is looking for quality of execution, not originality of plot. (But it is a lot more frustrating when the comics that purport to break out of the genre mold always do so in exactly the same ways, sometimes raiding the same source material.)  In that sense the new creative team is a major improvement:  Michael Lark is both more subtle and more graceful than Maleev, although he coats his figures in somewhat more ink than usual and throws in one static, narrowly-focused double page spread as if to reassure the fans of the last run that he'll be maintaining stylistic continuity with his predecessor.  Happily, Ed Brubaker makes no such concessions in his dialogue.

Okay, with that backlog of snark out of the way (sorry--it was just sitting in the bank for two years, building interest) I can say that I enjoyed this comic.  Brubaker's writing is well-suited to the half-superhero, half-crime genre approach that Daredevil tends to gravitate towards.  Most of those kind of comics left Marvel when Bill Jemas did, and not without some reason, but Daredevil has thrived under that model and Brubaker is perhaps the ideal writer to continue it.  He also benefits from the dramatic fallout of Bendis's plot and he seems to be putting it to better use than Bendis usually did, finally trapping Murdock in the consequences of his own ill-advised actions and forcing his friends to pay the price.

Unfortunately, as with Bendis's run, I get the sense that all of the daring plot developments could disappear in a single storyline.  "The Devil in Cell-Block D" could easily be a transitional story-arc designed to move Murdock from the Bendis status quo to whatever Brubaker has planned.  Presumably Brubaker will spring Murdock out of prison before the arc's end--although you never know--but I hope he doesn't take the step of restoring Daredevil's secret identity.  All the pieces are in place, though, right down to the mysterious impersonator who's leaping around Hell's Kitchen dressed like Daredevil just as Murdock is about to stand trial.

That possible retrenchment would be especially regrettable coming hot on the heels of Brubaker's big last-page reveal in the latest issue of Captain America.  The Red Skull's death had provided the sole element of novelty in an otherwise conventional Captain America comic, in much the same fashion that Murdock's exposure did with Bendis's run.  It's not that I expect any of these changes to last forever; sooner or later corporate custodianship or fanboy purism or the desire to conform the comics to the latest Ben Affleck movie will always win out.  But it's disappointing to see the backstage mechanics manifest so early and so transparently on stage, and to see writers clearing away their own best work.

Daredevil, to be fair, may not be heading there.  This storyline could end in acquittal and the old status quo or in something new and unguessable, and while that uncertainty should generate a fair amount of narrative suspense it just leaves me mired in the worrisome possibility that Brubaker, too, will chose the safe route.  So in that sense Brubaker and Lark are Bendis's victims, as well as his beneficiaries.

Comments

[Kevin J. Maroney]

I actually can't tell much difference between Brubaker's writing here and Bendis's--he's definitely echoing Bendis's dialog, and the story (so far as it has been revealed) is very much a continuation of what has gone before--in no way a radical change.

And you can't seriously lay the "fear of the reset button" at Bendis's feet. Even if Bendis didn't shake up the status quo as much as he could conceivably have, he took a single, very un-Marvel story idea (Daredevil actually gets outed) and ran it for nearly five years. Every opportunity Bendis had to hit the reset button was resisted, even as he left the book.

(You certainly didn't miss much in the demon baby story--it seemed to wander in from a different title, maybe Powers. But "The Murdoch Papers" was more clever and better-motivated than your capsule dismissal would indicate.)

[Peter Hensel]

And while on the subject of Brubaker reverting the status quo in a Marvel book, or at least appearing to do so, in the Winter Soldier's conclusion,

spoiler warning

The Red Skull was revealed as not actually dying, but merging with Lukin before his death, encasing them in the same body. While a less affecting change than Bendis' outing of Daredevil due to Red Skull's recent negligence in the Marvel Universe, Red Skull converses forebodingly that he will escape.

But there is much reason for faith in Burbaker because he brought back Bucky and, in all likelihood, will remain a supporting character in Captain America. Along with your resistance to Brubaker's arc appearring like a reset button, I was dissappointed with Brubaker/Lark's first installment. (http://amazingcomics.blogspot.com/2006/02/couple-impressions.html)

Good reviews all around, and your deviation from Morrison is an unexpected surprise ;)

[Marc]

I like to keep you guessing, dear readers.

Kevin--you seriously can't tell much difference between Brubaker's dialogue and Bendis's? Set aside for a moment all the tics of idiom and repetition that quickly passed into self-parody. Brubaker mercifully curtails them, but even more importantly than that he writes dialogue-driven scenes that are built around actual dialogue. I mean that in the dramatic sense, not the naive, imitative realism that always led Bendis astray: in Brubaker's dialogue, information is exchanged, feelings are expressed, stances are revealed, all fairly economically. He doesn't grind his scenes to a halt so his characters can throw speeches at one another, explaining their own wafer-thin characterization or blowing smoke up each other's asses. He gives the former maybe a line and the latter nothing at all. He doesn't write that sprawl over multiple issues. There's no tendency for characters to interrupt their own interminable talk with (and you know I mean this) pointless digressions and empty place-markers that serve no purpose, no purpose other (and there is no other way to say this) than to prolong the agony of their talk until it's

Incessant.

Yeah.

Interminable.

Yeah. And don't even get me started on the one-sided conversations, the monologues that are, you know, dressed up as conversations through the most minimal interruption of secondary voices that

sound just like the primary ones.

That would be it. So I would have to say that Brubaker cannot, by definition, echo Bendis's dialogue, since Bendis left precious little genuine dialogue to echo.

Maybe Brubaker does what Bendis was trying to do, and failed at so spectacularly. I don't know if the Tarantula's "you aint got a lotta options left, dawg" is that much better than Bendis's many attempts to write thugalicious lines, but it only lasts one panel and it isn't preceded by three pages of the Tarantula talking about his favorite kung fu movies or some special he saw on the Discovery Channel.

As to the plot, Bendis's outing of Daredevil's identity is not only not very un-Marvel, it's right in the tradition of Daredevil stories since at least "Born Again." It was the single interesting idea Bendis actually followed through on and I give him full credit for that, but he never pursued its consequences or let it distort the comic's status quo nearly as much as perhaps it should have--to the point I left (and apparently to the end of his run) Daredevil was still jumping around fighting the Kingpin and Bullseye, even after he nominally became the Kingpin.

Where can we ultimately lay the blame for that traditionalism? At Marvel, or more properly at the model of unending, unchanging corporate properties, since we all know Daredevil is reverting back to normal sooner or later. It might take a massive universe-devouring continuity reset (unlikely, since it's Marvel) but eventually he's going to be fighting ninjas again.

The problem with Bendis's run is that he never really stopped fighting ninjas. We know the dramatic changes can't last forever--that they've lasted this long is impressive--but that sort of permanence isn't the point of a continuity-bound run on a long-standing corporate property. The point is what happens while we're along for the ride, and Bendis avoided every possible scenic route, detour, or side road save one.

The real reason I fear the reset button is that Bendis insured there would never be as much to reset as there should have been. Underneath the posturing surface he wrote a deeply timid, even traditionalist Daredevil comic. And to the extent that Brubaker continues Bendis's plots, even when those plots are laudable and worth continuing, the worry will always persist that he'll maintain that timidity as well.

[Kevin J. Maroney]

You have a gift for backing me into defending things I don't feel like defending all that strongly; but here I am, at it again.

I don't, for an instant, dispute that all the flaws you identify in Bendis's work are there in his worst stretches--I think I've agreed with you before on how bad Bendis got in Ben Urich's monotone (er, monologue) at Matt's wife (whose name eludes me).

Even that wasn't as bad as the fairly recent issue of Powers--I think it was #2 of the new series--which I accidentally skipped and didn't realize until I checked my reading list notes; on returning to it, I discovered the entire issue was a series of inconsequential conversations which served only to keep the covers apart.

But Bendis isn't always Bendis at his worst. At its best, his dialog has zip, wit, and substance all together; when it goes wrong, it becomes glibness and superficiality.

I think you're right that Brubaker's dialog is more focused than Bendis's worst, but it's different enough from Brubaker's other superhero writing that it clearly feels like his take on Bendis's style.

I can see your point about the storyline overall being timid. I think he set up unreasonable expectations for himself--no one's fault but his--and then failed to deliver.

But to focus on what he did right: In many ways, he was writing a Daredevil comic that was a sequel to Lee's original run, a comic explicitly obsessed with secrets and dual identities and constructed realities. And I think he deserves credit for putting a substantiality behind the threat of "outing" that really is the difference between his book and the standard Marvel storyline. More, he deserves credit fro never lettin the characters or the reader forget that when Murdock failed to maintain the fiction that he wasn't Daredevil, he was going straight to prison (because of the willfully stupid and incredibly illegal things he'd done immediately before Bendis's run).

On the other hand, he should probably have at least one finger lightly broken for each of the following offenses:

* the aforementioned Urich Monolog;
* the "I'm the Kingpin now" moment, which even he seemed to realize was nonsense once he had to actually grapple with it; and
* having Cage, Strange, and Parker show up and basically explain to the reader how badass cool Matt "Bendis" Murdock now was, at tedious length. Man, I can smell that issue across the room even now.

[Marc]

Yeah, you just listed the three main reasons I dropped the book, along with the other scripting problems. The timidity was more a problem when Bendis did something right and then didn't follow through--even more frustrating as it arose from the book's good points.

And while the various scripting problems are, to my mind, pretty much indefensible, I can see how Murdock becoming the Kingpin could have led to some terrific stories. (It could have come from them too, for that matter, but obviously it did not.) Murdock slowly giving in to the Kingpin's methods--or at least considering them--in the service of improving Hell's Kitchen could have had a sick fascination akin to the third season of The Wire. Instead all the interesting stuff is condensed into Urich's monologue and we get drug-popping ninjas.

(On reflection, I'd say the book went wrong when the Kingpin resurfaced to bring the libel suit to a premature, cop-out conclusion, but the next Bendis storyline killed it dead.)

[Kevin J. Maroney]

Yeah, you just listed the three main reasons I dropped the book, along with the other scripting problems.

Well, you danced up and down on the "Ben explains to Milla things that Milla knows better than he does" in your original post, and also pointed towards the awfulness of the "line up to smootch Matt's butt" scene in comments to that post, though you didn't single out that scene. I pointed out the problem of the Kingpin declaration also in comments. So at least we're consistent across the years.

[Marc]

If it's consistency you're looking for, I have some great material on Transmetropolitan and Sandman...