Daredevil #508
Jul 16th, 2010 | By Lee Rodriguez | Category: Marvel, Reviews
Written by Andy Diggle and Antony Johnson
Art by Roberto De La Torre
Shadowland #1.5 here opens just after the events of Shadowland #1, with Matt Murdock’s nearest and dearest reacting to the soon-to-be-leaked footage of Daredevil murdering Bullseye in the only logical way… They essentially poop themselves. Foggy and Dakota head into the nearly deserted Hall’s Kitchen hoping to gain an audience with Lord Daredevil, only to get shot down figuratively by the White Tiger and then shot down literally by some black-clad ninjas. Izo calls in Elektra for reasons that will surely become clear and Daredevil reacts with ambivalence towards his first foray into murder before having a mental breakdown in a battle with something else inside him. THAT’S the moment I needed for this to be okay.
Shadowland #1 was a fine comic, as is this one, but I felt and still feel like we missed something. The leap from where we left Matt Murdock in Daredevil #507 to where we first see him in Shadowland #1 is enormous. He goes from chastising the Hand for clinging to their old ways of murder to stabbing Bullseye in the gut? It didn’t work for me. The scene of Daredevil fighting himself definitely helps to shed some light on the situation, but it still feels disjointed. The main Daredevil title has had one of the best flows from one creative team to the next of any comic I’ve read in the past decade. It’s been ten years of truly fluid storytelling. The biggest hiccup to date is this one; midway through one writer’s run. It’s a violent swerve.
I’ve no problem accepting that Daredevil could get to this point. I just don’t think we saw it get here quite well enough. I have faith that all will be revealed in the coming months, but as it stands, the core title and the Shadowland mini-series are both suffering as a result of this “fill in the gap” storytelling Diggle and co. are aiming for. De La Torre’s art is as great as ever and serves this story incredibly well. I give Daredevil #508 3.5 out of 5 red word balloons. This story/event should be amazing given the excellent groundwork laid before it. This isn’t the greatest start, but let’s hope it reaches the level of greatness it deserves.
See, after this issue, I disagree entirely. The first issue, things seemed to have jumped ahead a bit. The second issue of the story begins to explain what the current status quo is, and to me, that makes it clear that we’re going to continually get new pieces of the puzzle. I fully expect, in an issue or two, for us to see a scene of Matt Murdock waking up IN Shadowland DURING its construction and not know WHAT the hell is going on. Someone or something has a hold on him, and I suspect we may not find out what until the very end of Shadowland, at which point, we’ll be faced with the story of how anyone deals with it.
Question… what if it’s the Shadow King? It would make the name immediately appropriate, and really would make sense from a plot standpoint. Shadow King targets someone not usually in league with psychics at all and seizes control of them, then slowly builds himself an empire, all the while doing so in plausible-to-that-character ways so that no one expects anything until it’s too late.
It’d be an odd new direction, but it could be interesting…
4 out of 5 luft word balloons