Nocenti/Romita Daredevil

Daredevil 258

This was a fill in issue.

Regret buying? Yes

Would buy again? No

Would read again? No

Rating: Stupid

Daredevil 255-257, 259

Leading up to the really good stuff.

Regret buying? No

Would buy again? Yes

Would read again? Yes

Rating: Pretty good

Daredevil 260

Phew.  260 is as remains intense as my memories of it.  Typhoid Mary completes her crushing of Matt Murdock.  From a narrative point of view, I’m disappointed that she didn’t complete her mission as directed by the Kingpin - She didn’t break his heart by revealing that Mary, the woman he cheated on Karen with, was also Typhoid.  Catfishing Daredevil would have made for a unique entry in the book of Ways Matt Murdock’s Life Has Been Put Through The Ringer.  

As it is, Way #72 is up there on its own merits.  On paper, it doesn’t sound like much: Hire Daredevil’s recent rogues gallery to beat the crap out of him.  Then drop him off a bridge.  Unimaginative, no subtlety.  But the execution is amazing.  

Things that make it work:

It starts with Daredevil prancing out of his apartment.  He’s legit prancing:

Right before he gets blindsided by Bullet, starting his terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

Daredevil gets wrecked in the middle of an Independence Day parade.  The indifference of the crowd as he stumbles among them in an increasingly-beat up state feels like Nocenti’s final word on the state of the world.

The thrashing Matt undergoes is brutal.  John Romita Jr does not compromise in showing the punishment that he’s taking.  The reader feels every hit, and Matt’s pain, exhaustion, and loss of mental faculties screams out from every page.

That ending.  I remember reading this issue off the spinner rack as a kid, at a time where the only comic I read was Transformers.  This was like a slap in the face; I had no idea who Daredevil was, but I knew that I just saw him die, left to rot in the weeds beneath an anonymous bridge.  I did not know this creepy woman, but I saw her kiss him before she killed him, and that perversion struck me as the deepest betrayal.  But she cried as he fell, and I felt her pain as well.

Heady stuff for a ten year old, and maybe that’s coloring this read through, but it remains just as powerful thirty years later.

Regret buying? No

Would buy again? Yes

Would read again? Yes

Rating: Major feels.  (Hard to objective rank this as Really good, so new category.)