Daredevil Reborn 1

I start this not knowing why a rebirth is necessary, though I am aware that DD’s own title is presently named Black Panther, The Man Without Fear (not Another Man Without Fear, sadly), so things have clearly changed.

The first impression is of Walt Simonsonish art, except without the expressiveness or dramatic impact – mostly it’s just the inking style, to be honest. It’s all functional enough, telling the story efficiently, but I can’t come up with anything genuinely positive to say about it.

The story is astoundingly dull and uninformative. Another artist might have come up with a way of suggesting Matt Murdock’s emotions when a group of thugs attack him, which might have offered some clues as to why he is walking around somewhere in the South. Though actually Diggle should give us something – there is a horribly written text page at the back, which should have been at the front, telling us a little bit about recent events. It halfway tells you why Matt is on walkabout, and lets you guess at some reasons why he didn’t fight back against the thugs, but really Diggle should have realised that a fresh mini-series might get some new readers on board, and should have given us a bit more rather than relying on some painfully lurid prose by the editor at the back. I defy anyone to derive a significant sense of who Murdock is, what his problems are, what he imagines the point of his wanderings might be, from anything in the actual story.

Anyway, the story: Matt wanders into a small town, is set upon for no reason, is warned to get out of town by a sinister Southern sheriff who seems too bad to be true, and, using his incredible super-senses, suspects something dirty is going on. It all reads rather like an old Kung Fu or Hulk TV episode, which is dreary enough. Then we get the really dumb bit, where the bad guys hold two completely contradictory ideas in their head at once, for plot purposes: 1) They have identified him as Matt Murdock, who was revealed to the world as Daredevil => this superhero is obviously snooping around and is dangerous, so needs killing; 2) Two bad guys make a ridiculously lame attempt at this, and one says “Can’t have gotten far, blind man in the dark. I Don’t think he’s gonna give us any trouble.” The first conclusion is leapt at with no evidence, as Matt shows every sign of leaving, and was simply passing through when set upon, the only thing that kept him there that long – but obviously the plot needs the bad guys to take action rather than simply let him leave. The second part is cheap idiocy for the sake of some obvious irony, as it is predictably counterpointed with Matt leaping agilely at the bad guys from behind.

I’m really sick of the dumbness of most of the comics I’ve been sampling so as to have things to review here. I don’t get how any writer has so little self-respect as to peddle such nonsense, especially when it is extremely easy to come up with plenty of other less silly reasons for Matt to hang around and get into confrontations with the enemy, to rev up the plot. This reads like an immensely lazy and thin script on every level, but I confess that I suspect I may be being a little harsh on Diggle because I’m getting so exasperated with the quality of most Marvel and DC comics in particular. Maybe they were really no less stupid in my youth, but their comics generally had far less pretensions to class and literary quality then, so I suppose that made the feeble contrivances and sloppy writing less infuriating.