What’s remarkable about the comics collected in Daredevil Modern Era Epic Collection: Out is that they feel just as revolutionary and modern as they were released nearly 20 years ago.
Superhero comics were undergoing a major transformation, leaving behind the clumsy, desperate collapse of the 1990s and the decades-established structure of American comic books. Thought balloons were by and large gone from the medium, replaced by ever-shrinking caption boxes. Stories were taking on a more grounded, post-9/11 realism, and creators were abandoning the stipulation that stories wrap over the course of a single issue. Comics felt less cluttered than even four years earlier, and all that space gave room for deeper characters, relationships, and a more comprehensive narrative context.
Marvel Comics
Writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Alex Maleev not only took advantage of this shift in Daredevil, they actively propelled it. Though Bendis has never had a light hand on dialogue, he goes to extreme lengths to give Maleev the space to establish atmosphere and clarity. Daredevil became a flagship title for a publisher that had filed for bankruptcy half a decade earlier. This was a book other books sought to emulate, or at least one that inspired.
The book’s open air allows it to shift scenes and explore events outside of its hero’s experience. It’s a book that wants to establish motives and bring life to even its most minor characters. It does this, perhaps in exclusion to the normal ninja-and-swashbuckler action that the character was most known for, to such an effect that the more quiet and mundane moments of the story are elevated to tense, riveting sequences.
One of the most suspenseful arcs contained in Out takes place nearly behind the scenes, in just a few scenes spread over several issues. We follow Sammy Silke, the bumbling, low-level criminal whose unfortunate actions not only led to the Caesar-allusion attempt on Wilson Fisk’s life in the previous volume but to Matt Murdock’s most pressing concern in this volume: it’s Silke’s loose tongue that leads to Matt’s outing in the press.
We know Silke is doomed – having turned himself in for protection, he’s destined for prison – but when we finally catch up with him in a minor-security facility, he’s told he has a visitor. Expecting his father, he enters a darkened room and is faced with his worst possible nightmare.
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We’re never told the conclusion to this frightful exchange. Moments like this – spare moments far removed from Matt Murdock’s experience and action – proliferate throughout Out, building out a world surrounding our story in such a way that we begin to appreciate disparate but essential moving parts of the plot.
We’re allowed insight into Matt’s side characters and his relationship with them, whether he’s present or not. In one inspired scene, the Daily Bugle reporter Ben Urich (who has, for years, known Daredevil’s true identity) standing up for DD’s secret identity, and though he is lying as he does so, he finds himself backed up by an unlikely ex-co-worker: a low-level freelance photographer named Peter Parker.
Marvel Comics
It’s this wider, compelling context that provides evidence for a living, breathing Marvel Universe. Brief flirtations between Jessica Jones and Luke Cage allude to their inner lives and experiences; a dual ex-girlfriend check-in by Black Widow and Elektra illustrates the continuity of Matt’s constant suffering. New love interest Milla Donovan never achieves much depth in this volume, but she is given her own life, relationships, and altruistic career, making her not just likable but real.
With the world peopled with real people, real relationships, and a larger context, it is rich for deeper tragedy and more frightful threats. The book spends most of its bulk dealing with nobodies and failures – criminals like Silke going to prison for botched schemes, the original White Tiger’s arrest and suicide by policeman, and even Matt’s simple failure in court – so when the real trouble arrives late in the volume, the collective competency of the villains is a truly frightening thing to behold because we know that it’s been percolating behind the scenes, a steam train of malice that’s been barreling to an unexpected climax. It helps that those villains are some of Daredevil’s best: Wilson Fisk arrives and establishes the crushingly cruel presence he’s best known for, and Typhoid Mary takes out a crew of rival gangsters in such a balletic and gruesome display that it is a wonder that she isn’t used more frequently and with as much respect as Bullseye (who, it should be said, also makes an appearance in this volume).
Marvel Comics
Revolutionary 20 years ago and resonant now, Daredevil Modern Era Epic Collection: Out presents a signpost between the classic and the contemporary, the beloved and the lived-in. It would be hard not to argue for a timelessness to these stories, particularly because much of the characterizations here still ring true. The medium shifted, and we look back on that shift from a place very much enriched by that movement.
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