Daredevil by Mark Waid Vol. 1

by Robert Greenberger

Daredevil is perhaps Marvel’s best crime fighter because, throughout his colorful career, he has taken on gangsters and mobsters more than he has fought aliens, monsters, and all-powerful villains. His street-level action coupled, usually, with his banter at first made him appear to readers as a second-rate Spider-Man. Slowly, though, once Gene Colan settled in as artist, he and Stan Lee evolved the book into something unique with a tone all its own. Their run set the stage for several other memorable eras, the best known of course being the two periods when Frank Miller controlled hornhead’s destiny.

Recently, though, Daredevil has gone through some very difficult and hard times thanks first to Ed Brubaker then Andy Diggle. Diggle’s Shadowland run, took things too far off into dark corners and stopped being about the lawyer turned crimefighter and about everything else. As his run ended, it was clearly time for something different.

What we readers got was a 180 degree turn, courtesy of Mark Waid and Marcos Martin, who deservedly got a new #1 to mark a brand new era. “I thought it was crazy talk,” Waid told me recently. “For a decade or better, Daredevil had been about the grimmest, darkest superhero comic out there, and while I’m certainly capable of stretching (see Empire, Irredeemable and Potter’s Field), ‘grim’ and ‘dark’ are not adjectives normally used to describe my superhero work. But the more I thought about it, and the more editors Tom Brevoort and Steve Wacker said they wanted to bring Daredevil a little more back into the Marvel Universe, I rolled the dice and accepted the assignment.”

The book was fun to read again without ignoring what came before. Instead, Waid did his homework and we’re seeing new uses of Matt Murdock’s heightened senses, a pretty tough trick after nearly 50 years of publication. Additionally, he’s been partnered with artists who have immediately put their imprint on the character. “Both Marcos and Paolo Rivera are brilliant storytellers, to the point where I can write an entire page about Matt drinking tea or Daredevil standing on a building and they can make it spellbinding and dynamic,” Waid said. “With both gentlemen, I’ve let go the reins quite a bit as a scripter and encourage them to make the stories theirs, too–it is, after all, a collaborative medium. And they make me look so good.”

Like me, Waid has a fondness for the book’s two best eras, noting, “Ann Nocenti, Bendis, Brubaker, and others I forget off the top of my head have definitely put their stamp on the character, but I was always fondest of Colan’s era and Miller’s era because they weren’t as relentlessly dark.”

Those first six issues are being collected in a hardcover, Daredevil by Mark Waid Volume 1, and if you missed out, now’s a great opportunity to dive back in. If you were to sit down and reread this as a whole, what would you learn?

“About Daredevil? Where his head is at right now and how someone can go through such awful, awful things and still put on a red suit and fight crime at night. About the real world? Also yes. You’ll learn about how syndicates use something called “flags of convenience” to create criminal pirate empires. You’ll learn memory techniques for the blind. And you’ll learn how lawyer Matt Murdock makes a living now that he’s been outed as Daredevil to the public and can’t enter a courtroom without the opposition using that against him to turn the entire trial into a circus.”

While people have a fondness for both the character and the creators, one never knows if the combination will work but the writer tells me the response has been “phenomenal. As you know, I’ve been writing comics since shortly after the invention of the printing press, and I can honestly say that I have never, ever gotten as much universally positive feedback on my work. It’s thrilling.”

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Daredevil By Mark Waid Vol. 1

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