daredevil by brian michael bendis volume 1

If the Fantastic Four are analogous to Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, adrift in a world they cannot understand, and Iron Man is Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, buying his way into a world every way his inferior, then Daredevil is Hemingway.

PopMatters once shrewdly suggested – in a review of Ed Brubaker’s subsequent run on the title – that Daredevil was a character perhaps best seen as exploring the themes of Hemmingway, offering the following quote: Even Rosenthal, the newspaper publisher who publicly ‘outs’ Matt Murdock as Daredevil, concedes that “I don’t have anything against you personally”, as if to admit that this is just how the system works. No conscious machinations drive the plot nor really direct it, if anything it’s the collective subconscious which stares down at Murdock and pronounces judgement. It’s just all happening because… that’s the way things happen, I suppose. No supervillain nor bureaucrat is driving this huge weight down on the hero. It is the system which is weighed against Murdock, against Daredevil. The evil and corruption of Hell’s Kitchen doesn’t have a face – not even a bald, chubby one. These two characters won’t endure in the readers’ minds half as long as the plot Bendis unspools here, but that’s intentional. And it’s a broke FBI agent who passes that on to the global media and really tears Matt Murdock’s life to shreds by branding him a costumed vigilante. There’s no indication that he even knows Sam Silke exists, yet it is Silke who sells his identity to the feds, not some age-old adversary and certainly not as part of any grand big plan. It’s no coincidence that the cause of most of Matt Murdock’s pain in this run can be traced back to two people he never really meets. More than that, Bendis is actually willing to devote time to rounding out the universe surrounding Matt Murdock. Beyond that, Bendis isn’t afraid to put away the silly costume for a more considered look at Matt Murdock and the world around him (take, for example, the fact that he only appears in costume once for the entire Trial of the Century arc). He’s a tangential figure in the opening two storylines, Wake Up and Underboss, which is particularly surprising given how the second storyline affects him in such a huge way. What is most remarkable about Bendis’ run is just how little Daredevil there actually is in it. It’s strange how these things work – Bendis was almost a one-off Daredevil writer. But, in a story related in an afterword collected here, Bendi explains that it was actually Alex Maleev who suggested that the two be granted stewardship of the title. He did a fill-in arc, Wake Up, after David Mack finished writing for the recently relaunched book.

Bendis wasn’t meant to be a long-term writer for the book.

Daredevil by brian michael bendis volume 1