When Daredevil #16 dropped back in 2001, it was a rather spectacular shock.
The book, relaunched under the Marvel Knights banner three years earlier, had already delivered its share of shocks: filmmaker Kevin Smith had joined Joe Quesada for the opening story, in which Daredevil nearly throws a baby off the roof of a building (he was under the hallucinogenic suggestion that the baby was the antichrist, obviously). Directly following, Kabuki creator David Mack introduced Echo over seven succinct and captivating issues.
Marvel Comics
The implication, for both Daredevil and for the larger Marvel Knights lineup, was one of distinctive creative vision, one that explicitly abandoned the sorts of disposable mediocrity that had plagued Marvel Comics in the mid-’90s.
Issue #16, by Brian Michael Bendis, Joe Quesada, and David Mack, directly illustrated this divide of eras. It begins with an old-school conflict illustrated by Quesada and written in a stilted, cliché-ridden dialogue that smacked of that old disposability. Daredevil is mid-punch-up with The Fury, a bland new villain/anti-hero, interchangeable with any other villain-of-the-week. The only hint that something is amiss is that The Fury’s costume is in constant flux, gaining and then losing the adornments of other characters: a cape in one panel, Captain America head wings in another.
Marvel Comics
By the third page, Quesada’s action pencil become infected with David Mack abstraction: dynamic effects and watercolor smoke replace the realistic backdrop of Hell’s Kitchen. It’s here that Daily Bugle reporter Ben Urich – and abstraction – becomes the primary focus of the book. We learn that The Fury is the creation of a young boy who has been struck near-catatonic by trauma. The real world is less contained by the hard inks of the boys imagination. It is less comic book than life.
It’s a bold move for Bendis: for his first four issues of the main title, Daredevil drops all aspects of superhero theatrics, of easy-to-read action. It drops Daredevil nearly altogether. Indeed, the book makes a point to throw all of the established Matt Murdock/Kingpin drama (leftover from Mack’s run as writer) aside. Ben cannot focus on covering the systematic legal dismantling of the Kingpin’s empire because that story seems less important than the mysterious and tragic human-interest story of this lost boy.
Marvel Comics
The boy, it turns out, is the son of missing D-list supervillain Leap-Frog; he has witnessed something that has sent him into his imagination. He cannot stop narrating his interior comic book stories, stories in which Daredevil plays a key but unknown role.
The story is about abuse and loss, about the human in a very inhumane Marvel Universe. It is illustrated in surreal, hard-to-follow artwork, as if Ben’s inability to uncover the truth has cast him into an unreal doubt over his journalistic ethics.
There could be no doubt that the new Daredevil was a book with loftier goals than the original series, one that yearned to elevate not just the character but the medium itself. Though Bendis, Quesada, and Mack are replaced, for six long, somewhat tedious issues written by Bob Gale (of Back to the Future fame) and penciled alternatively by Phil Winslade and Dave Ross, and though those issues fail to engage in the high-art ambitions of the previous team, the book still tries to focus on something more concrete than average superheroics: Daredevil gets sued.
Bendis returns—with eventual regular collaborator Alex Maleev—in issue #26, with a troubling story centered around the Caesar-like betrayal of Kingpin; the team would continue for a staggering 56 issues. Those five years are arguably the most influential run of Daredevil since Frank Miller and Ann Nocenti’s time on the book in the 1980s, a never-ending highlight reel of Daredevil at his most dark, compelling, and noir.
Marvel Comics
Marvel Knights delivered a jolt of creative energy to a struggling Marvel Universe; after issue #16, Daredevil became the crown jewel of that imprint. For a time, Daredevil was the must-read title from the company, far outpacing the X-Men or the Avengers.
And it started with a traumatized boy, a chain-smoking reporter. It started without Daredevil.
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