Blasphemy Reviews

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.

posted by Mr. Blasphemy @ 11:56 AM