Daredevil Visionaries: Frank Miller, Volume 3
Did Frank Miller regret killing Elektra and decide to undo his mistake? Or had he intended to resurrect her all along?
It's not clear to me. But the resurrection of Elektra, which would be repeated ad nauseum with other heroes in other comics in the years to come, looms large over this volume. Its culmination, in issue 190, is arguably the best issue of Miller's initial run, and offers the first glimpse into why Miller is so interested in this character in the first place.
The issue begins and ends with Elektra's two attempts at climbing a mountain; the first time, she fails. The second time, she succeeds. In between, Daredevil and his allies battle for her very soul. Do they succeed? It is to Miller's credit that, even as he refuses to answer the question, when we see Elektra atop the mountain at the end, we feel a sense of closure. Having delved into the heads of the character, Miller now steps back and lets her thoughts remain her own. The mystery itself becomes the story he is telling.
And now, resurrected by demons, Elektra is more interesting to Miller than ever before.
The rest of the volume is of high quality, though perhaps not quite as high as Volume 2. The stories, many of which focus on Daredevil's decaying sanity, lack the human element that Ben Urich provides in Volume 2. Daredevil becomes an enigma, treating his fellow characters poorly with dismaying frequency, and falling down rabbit holes from which Miller does not appear to want to extricate him. These stories are compelling, but with no emotional anchor, we are somewhat alienated.
That is, until Daredevil's downward spiral is purged at the very end.
The final panel of issue 191, Miller's final issue, says almost everything Miller has to say about...well, everything. In God's eye view, we see Daredevil and the incapacitated Bullseye, bleached of color and surrounded by shadow, with Daredevil's confession overhead in caption: "Guess we're stuck with each other, Bullseye." This is a more complicated statement than it first appears. The conventional reading of this statement is that Daredevil and Bullseye, the superhero and the supervillain, are "two sides of the same coin," and need each other more than they need the outside world. Or, expressing the idea Mike Myers' Dr. Evil would parody in the first Austin Powers movie: "We're not so different, you and I."
But they are together, the story makes clear, only because Daredevil has chosen not to kill his enemy. Bullseye lives because of Daredevil's mercy. This makes Daredevil either morally weak or strong, depending on your point of view, but it also makes him definitively different from his adversary. They are so different, Dr. Evil, so there.
Astro City: Confession
The history of superheroes, conventionally told, goes like this: Siegel and Schuster invented them in the 1930s, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby humanized them in the 1960s, and Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons and Frank Miller deconstructed them in the 1980s.
And so, when the 1990s rolled around, superheroes appeared to have reached the end of their history, having been put together, and then taken apart, so capably. But even though superheroes had been deconstructed, people did not stop reading about them. In the years that followed, comics actually saw pretty good sales. The sales were gimmick-driven, but the gimmicks were still sold through superheroes. And eventually, the new ideas that informed Watchmen became part of the way superhero stories were told.
Or one of them did, at least. This was the idea that the superheroes could be compelling even if morally compromised...they could engage in villainous actions and still be heroes, in other words. In the glutted market of the early 1990s, with quality writing spread thin, this often meant nothing more than superheroes forgetting to shave and killing people. And, as time wore on, many superheroes let their beards get very long indeed.
Out of all that came Kurt Busiek and Astro City. Busiek told comics to get a haircut and stand up straight. First, with the painter Alex Ross, he created Marvels, a work that sought to redeem the sense of wonder embodied by the original Marvel stories of the 1960s.
The work hit a nerve with readers and critics alike, perhaps because its protagonist, an everyman photographer named Phil Sheldon, has the same crisis of faith in 1960s innocence that the industry itself seemed to be experiencing at the time.
Busiek, who had worked steadily in comics for years, mostly in obscurity, suddenly became the kind of writer who could sell a title by putting his name in front of it on the cover. And so Homage comics, a division of Jim Lee's Wildstorm Studios, which was itself a division of Image, published Kurt Busiek's Astro City, about a city of superheroes, mostly narrated by the normal people who live in it.
The best story to come out of this effort was "Confession," which ran from issues four through six of the regular series. (The regular series was preceded by a six-issue miniseries.) Though Astro City would peter out toward the end of its run, beset by publishing delays caused by Busiek's poor health, this storyline popped and crackled on the page like few "old school" superhero stories before or since.
"Confession," which I am reviewing in trade paperback form, concerned a morally compromised superhero of the kind Alan Moore might have come up with...sort of. The main superhero of the story is the Confessor, who is a vampire.
Busiek's innovation is to have the Confessor be the moral heart and principle actor of the story, and yet distance him from the reader. Brian Kinney, an idealist and would-be sidekick, is the narrator and the character we get to know best. The Confessor has fallen farther than any mainstream superhero ever has; on the last panel of the third page of issue seven, the Confessor's face takes on a twisted, pained visage beyond anything Reed Richards flashes even in his worst moments. And yet, because of the reader's relationship to Brian Kinney, the story never feels as dark as The Dark Knight Returns or Watchmen, even though it is, in many ways.
And it isn't, in other ways. Busiek never explores if the Confessor has drunk blood. He hints at the sexual aspects of the Confessor's fall from grace, but does not dwell on them. In all likelihood, he is just not that interested in the darkness of men's souls. The Confessor has sinned, and become a vampire. He wears a cross on his chest, even though it burns him, to "focus," in the grand tradition of the kung fu master. But the Confessor does not show us his heart, only his twisted, pained face. For Busiek, the story is the thing.
And such wealth of story we have! In six issues, Busiek introduces a whole city of characters, many of them popping up just long enough to snag our interest. Aliens invade, the government cracks down on vigilantes, a serial killer faces off against a cyborg bounty hunter; none of this is new, but somehow the vast mishmash of it becomes totally exhilarating. When you read it, you feel like Busiek is throwing in every idea he's ever had, just to amuse you, and you can't help feeling grateful.
And we are always outside the action, because we are with Brian Kinney, who seems bland at first, but then reveals depths, not because of who he is but because of what happens to him. To be a superhero's sidekick, and then to find out that your boss is a vampire...this is a unique moral quandary. But it has to be set aside, because of the larger story involved.
Brent Anderson's artwork contributes our distance from the larger. He always stands a few steps back; even the closeups of characters' faces feel photographed from a distance. At the end of issue 5, when the Confessor literally nails the alien invader to the wall, his face is being seared away to the bone by sunlight. But there is no closeup, and we barely see what is happening to him; we only see what he does. This is the essence of Kurt Busiek's Astro City.
Daredevil Visionaries: Frank Miller, Volume 2
Frank Miller's writer/artist work on Daredevil defined the character, drastically influenced the medium, and established Miller as an industry superstar. His run on the comic, therefore, does not come cheap. So I'll be reading it in trade paperback form, published by Marvel as Daredevil Visionaries: Frank Miller, Volumes 2 and 3. (Volume 1 contains stories that Miller drew but did not write. I might read it some day, but it's not a priority.)
I've just finished Volume 2. It's terrific. Miller may have just been starting out, but the themes that make him great are already present: the story is of love doomed by violence. It concerns a hero with contradictory values who walks the edge of sanity, a heroine confronted by the worst of humanity and swallowed whole by it, and, in Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin, a villain who is not so much evil as he is exceedingly thoughtful. It's just that he has all the wrong thoughts.
In fifteen issues, Miller remakes Daredevil. He introduces Elektra, a lost love and deadly adversary. He takes away part of Daredevil's superpowers and gives them back, in the process giving them spiritual resonance no other Daredevil creator has been able to match. He establishes the Kingpin as an enemy so intimately entwined with Daredevil's soul that their relationship becomes something beyond hate. And he begins the decades-long process, carried out in due course by many other creators, of driving Daredevil insane.
Like the best writers of superheroes with long histories, Miller honed in on the things that make Daredevil unique, and used them to explore themes that are universal. He emphasized the fact that Matt Murdock is a lawyer, devoted to process and slow justice, who dresses up like the devil and deals in swift street justice. Daredevil is a "street-level" superhero, so Miller gave him an arch-foe who seems to be an ordinary man.
But the Kingpin is not ordinary, and his systematic dismantling, and equally systematic recreation, of New York City's crime infrastructure, is among the more compelling aspects of the story. The way in which Daredevil thwarts the Kingpin, by finding the wife the Kingpin had thought dead, reveals depths of humanity in the villain while keeping him a villain, something few writers in any medium are able to do. The Kingpin's wife, his Vanessa, is not so much the light that redeems his black heart as she is the safety valve that keeps him from exploding.
To me, the jewel of this volume is #179, which focuses on the supporting character of reporter Ben Urich, perhaps the most decent, human character Miller has ever shown us. Urich has long ago discovered Daredevil's secret identity, a story that could make his career, but he knows it would be wrong to publish the thing and has moved on to fighting the Kingpin with his journalism. In the course of the story, Urich will be marked for death by Elektra, who has become the Kingpin's assassin, and will nearly be scared off the story by the Kingpin's goons. In the end, though, Urich's ambition, which here is indistinguishable from his decency, won't let him stop, and Elektra runs him through.
The reason this story is great is that Miller seems to know instinctively that he needs to inject some more humanity into the story, and he does it. Daredevil has become vastly more interesting, but with his European assassin ex-girlfriend, his shaky sanity, and the obsessions that arise therefrom, he's become somewhat less relatable. Enter Urich, who becomes our way into the story even as he is (seemingly) martyred at the end of Elektra's sai.
It's obvious that the Elektra character fascinated Miller, as he resurrected her and then wrote a solo miniseries for her. Of all the deadly female assassins comics has produced, she is the gold standard, and, as she hardly talks, it is Miller's unique drawing of her that makes her what she is: an assassin so beautiful and deadly that her creators, who deal death for a living, call her Perfect Death.
And so to the art: Miller has altered his linework drastically since he drew these stories. The cover of the trade paperback collection, drawn by Miller years after creating the images inside it, serves as a good primer on just how much his style has changed. The cover is a striking, stark, passionate image of Daredevil and Elektra locked in an embrace that is equal parts lust and menace. It's exactly the kind of thing you'd expect to see in a Sin City comic. Daredevil's hand, clutching the base of Elektra's skull, is exaggeratedly large. Elektra's face is inscrutably beautiful and terrifying, her chin as lanterned as a linebacker's. As if to drive home the point, her fingers, clutching Daredevil's head just as he clutches hers, have torn tracks in his mask. As an image, it is both over-the-top and perfectly demonstrative of the story. Classic Miller, in other words, and wonderful.
You won't see much like it in the book.
Fortunately, the art Miller used to tell these stories is still gorgeous, and technically brilliant. Miller may still have been finding the style he now considers his own when he drew all this, but his search is a wonder to behold.
The dynamic artwork of Elektra's final battle with Bullseye is justifiably famous, but in my opinion Miller truly excels here at stillness. Consider the page before the fight begins: Foggy Nelson freezes Elektra in her tracks by identifying her as "Matt's girl." Miller shows us Elektra's inner conflict with a simple, beautiful picture of her uncertain expression; it is the last clear view of her face we get before Bullseye kills her. Her body language tells the rest of the story; she spares Foggy's life by telling him to "get out of here," but Miller then focuses on her eyes, filled with anger, and then her hunched form; she is furious at herself for letting her feelings dictate her actions, when she has become an assassin to be free of them.
It is in this still posture that Bullseye finds her, so that he may kill her in a brief, epic battle, but again the stillness tells the story. In three short panels, Bullseye holds his gun in three positions; he seems as taken aback as we are by the seething rage that radiates from Elektra. In the last panel of the page, Elektra's angry eye rolls back, glimpsing Bullseye, and we know: she's better than he is, but she's too angry to beat a professional psychopath.
And has Miller's writing changed over the years, the way his art has? No, not really. He found the themes, and the kind of characters, he wanted to write about back then, and he's been doing it ever since. Miller's dialogue of 1982 reads pretty much like his dialogue of 2005.
The quirks one finds in Sin City are also present here already, and not all of them work. Miller is so good at most things that he's never had to develop good conversational dialogue skills for minor characters, and understandably, no editor is going to tell Frank Miller to tone it down with the one-dimensional deformed bad guys. The science fiction underground city of leprous homeless people, a crucial plot point, seems out-of-place in a more spiritual, realistic story like this one. (Although the city's bulbous ruler is a nice thematic counterpoint to the Kingpin.) Miller's knowledge of the legal process and police procedure is a bit shaky. And it must be noted that Urich's recovery from Elektra's attack, which takes place in its entirety between issues 179 and 180, is dealt with too off-handedly to be true to the emotions piqued by seeing Urich struck down.
Still, this is astonishing work. I can only imagine what readers in the early 1980s made of it; clearly, they liked it. Along with the X-Men of Claremont, Cockrum, Byrne, and Smith, and the Teen Titans of Wolfman and Perez, this was the big hit of that era. Having read some of those X-Men and Teen Titans comics, I here opine that this is the one of the three that holds up the best.
Note: Marvel also published some of stories from Volume 2 as a trade paperback called Daredevil: Gang War. It collects Daredevil #169-172 and 180. It's much cheaper, but be warned: the heavily pixelated coloring is inferior and the seven-issue story gap is just as jarring as you might expect.
Why Review Comics?
We at the Blasphemy Blog and other Blasphemy-related projects love to read comic books. We want to encourage more discussion and examination of the art form, which we consider to be the best medium around. Therefore, we're going to start reviewing the classics. We've read a lot of them but we haven't read them all. But we'll be reading more as we go along.
This will be a project of Mr. Blasphemy working by himself. So I'll just be referring to myself in the singular here.
