I'm finding that, more and more, my favourite Marvel material at the moment features the fearsome horned one. No, not Loki, but the vermillion visually-challenged vigilante, Daredevil.
The fact that Daredevil's run is now up to issue 24 in a time of tragically short runs for Marvel books, is largely down to Charles Soule's writing. Recruiting Soule to the writer's chair was a masterstroke, since he is himself a qualified attorney. This has given us a great Matt Murdock as well as a great Daredevil; in a character often compared to Batman, his appeal comes from giving equal depth to both of his personas.
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| Legal - 2 issues worth of pagetime, and already a better bad guy that anything Ms Marvel has come up with |
In this current storyline we see those personas come perilously close to each other, as Murdock seeks to make legal history by establishing the right of masked heroes to testify in court without revealing their identities. This could easily have resulted in a very dry, staid comic that was about as much fun to read as the court pages of the local newspaper. Soule avoids this by only using as much of the legal profession as is interesting to a lay person, and combining it with conflict and adversity that makes us care about the characters and what they are going through. It makes for excellent human drama which is mixed with good old superhero action that compliments the overall story arc perfectly. This particular issue isn't very action-heavy, but if you have been following since the start, you care enough about the characters by now to spend an issue finding out how they're doing.
But enough about the writing (although I could go on and on, it's great), Alec Morgan's art is tailored to the story very well indeed, with the cinematic framing of some pages making this feel like you are watching a TV show at times rather than reading a comic book.
In this book, we see something Marvel could be doing a lot more of. Daredevil surprises me every issue, because part of me is still expecting the writer to start writing a comic that only a lawyer would find entertaining. The recent Black Panther run shows how badly this could have gone wrong - it tried to be a tense political thriller, but ended up being dull as dishwater and frankly hard work to read. I strongly urge you to add Daredevil to your pull list, it has been awesome for nearly 2 years now, and shows no sign of slowing down.
5 / 5
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