Daredevil, v. 13: The Murdock Papers

Collects: Daredevil #76-81 (2005-6)

Released: March 2006 (Marvel)

Format: 152 pages / color / $14.99 / ISBN: 9780785118107

What is this?: Bendis and Maleev end their run on Daredevil as Matt tries to stay out of prison.

The culprits: Writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Alex Maleev

Writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Alex Maleev began their run on Daredevil with (v. 2) #26, and with a couple of exceptions (Bendis worked with fill-in artists on #38-40, and #50-4 was David Mack writing and drawing an Echo story), they continued on the title together until #81, more than four years together. It is a run of impressive length — if not always impressive quality — for a 21st-century comic from the Big Two.

Daredevil, v. 13: The Murdock Papers ends that run, an end that was too long in coming. But that isn’t The Murdock Paper’s fault.

Bendis finishes on a strong note. The story, in which the Kingpin tries to trade his freedom for evidence that will put Murdock in prison, allows Bendis to pull in the most important Daredevil supporting characters for his final ride. The Black Widow, Elektra, and the new White Tiger try to help Daredevil escape; Foggy foggies his way through the chaos; Phil Urich is the observer and reporter as always; and the Kingpin and Bullseye try to finish Daredevil off in their own ways. Matt’s estranged wife shows up to, uh, watch the chaos unfold. Bendis shows, if nothing else, he knows how to end the story he put into motion, and it ends the only way it could.

The fights are good, with plenty of violence and action. The characters, for the most part, get used well; Elektra’s return is a welcome sight, as is the Black Widow’s and Milla’s. I was glad Matt reconciled with his wife; leaving her as a loose end would have been an egregious error by Bendis. On the other hand, the verbal abuse hurled at Elektra is unwarranted, and the new White Tiger gets short shrift. The story has a growing sense of inevitability as it approaches the end, and a momentary dream sequence, as Matt ponders escaping the courthouse, is a nice surprise that underscores why the story can’t go that way.

The logical underpinnings of the story, though. … In The Murdock Papers, it is clearer than ever that Bendis is a writer, not a lawyer; if he played a lawyer on TV, I’d be tempted to ask for his disbarment. The Kingpin’s big plan is to prove Daredevil / Matt was near the site where the alleged evidence against Matt was stored, but that doesn’t prove obstruction of justice, as he and the Feds allege; any lawyer could argue coincidence or that Daredevil, as a hero, was there to preserve the evidence from the supervillains running around. The Feds giving the Kingpin immunity is stupid, and the legal loophole the Owl and the Feds use to circumvent that agreement is unconvincing. (Surely the Kingpin’s lawyers are better than that?) Singling out Daredevil for punishment is stupid, an obvious witch hunt that would prejudice the government’s case in court given the status of other vigilante superheroes. I’m relatively sure a federal agent can’t be fired as easily as Agent Del Toro was. Phil Urich’s refusal to protect his sources is asinine, to say the least; J. Jonah Jameson, frankly, should fire him for rolling over to the feds over the threat for being “lock[ed] … up for the whole day!!” (A whole day? Horrors!) If I thought Bendis’s Urich was the real Urich, I’d be upset that a good journalist was acting like a reporter for a high-school reporter. Probably a Skrull, though.

Maleev’s art isn’t quite up to his par. It’s still good on the aggregate, but Elektra seems to elude him; Maleev seems to have the idea that her face is a plastic mask, unmovable, and he can’t give her costume the reality that other artists have. (Admittedly, it is a unrealistic costume, but the other weird costumes look normal.) In fact, every time Elektra enters a fight, the action becomes stiff and posed. In the rest of the volume, though, Maleev’s work looks exactly like it always does: excellent.

This story should have been written three volumes earlier; Bendis said, in the afterword, that it ended the way it had to, but he didn’t want to saddle the next writer with a setup he didn’t want, and until he found a successor who wanted that ending, it was difficult for him to finish his Daredevil work. Still, it ends well. Despite its flaws, The Murdock Papers puts a nice capstone on one of the great Daredevil runs.

Rating: (3 of 5)

Spider-Girl Presents Wild Thing: Crash Course

Collects: Wild Thing #0-5 (1999)

Released: November 2007 (Marvel)

Format: 128 pages / color digest / $7.99 / ISBN: 9780785126065

What is this?: The future daughter of Elektra and Wolverine has “adventures.”

The culprits: Writer Larry Hama and penciler Ron Lim

Before you ask or make a joke, there are two things I need to say about Spider-Girl Presents Wild Thing: Crash Course:

1. It does not make your heart sing.
2. Nor does it make everything — or anything — “groovy.”

Crash Course was part of Marvel’s now completely defunct M2 universe, which imagines the Marvel Universe one generation into the future. So there were many second-generation heroes, led by Spider-Girl, Spider-Man’s daughter. The eponymous Wild Thing, nee Rina, is the result of the improbable coupling of Wolverine and Elektra. As a setup, I can get past this, although like most of the M2 universe, like a lot of Spider-Girl’s ideas, it reeks of an abandoned ‘90s plot. So writer Larry Hama had his work cut out for him making the setup work. Unfortunately for Hama, he doesn’t quite succeed. Hama was an excellent choice for the job, having just finished a long, defining run on Wolverine, and Wild Thing offered a chance to do similar stories with new twists — the same except different.

But that’s not what we get here; what we get are Rina’s uninteresting high school experiences, complete with a rich alpha female and a boy she has a crush on but barely notices her. Neither is interesting. I’m unsure what to make of Rina’s home life; both her parents are around, but it’s impossible to tell whether they’re with each other or who lives with Rina. Part of me thinks she lives with her upscale mother, while Logan lives in the woods in a fort made out of empty beer cans with Molson bottles forming the windows. But that’s my imagination; on the other hand, I’ll wager that image is more interesting than anything in Crash Course.

The action sequences aren’t anything to write home about either; it’s bog standard dullness, with none of the excitement either of her parents bring to a battle. The less said of her “psychic claws” (huh?), the better; the claws are only supposed to affect the mind, and although they leave no trace on clothes or the landscape, they have no trouble affecting humans, mindless creatures (but I repeat myself), demons, or robots. It smacks of the ‘90s X-Men cartoon, where Wolverine had to wait to fight robots to cut loose because the audience would be too traumatized if he used his claws on living villains. Rina similarly slashes with no consequences.

That isn’t her greatest problem, though: she’s simply not original. Her costume is too entirely close to her father’s to be an homage. Her villains are borrowed from her parents — Wolverine, mainly — and the only original villains she fights are a kidnapper with an armored suit and roller skates and a robot that seems borrowed from the Silver Age Fantastic Four. I half expected Reed Richards to pop out of the ether on Doom’s Time Platform and ask Wild Thing to stop poaching their villains.

The costume is Ron Lim’s problem. The penciler turns in a workmanlike performance that seems to come alive only when Wolverine was on the page. Given that the X-Men were still big in ’99, perhaps he was auditioning for a Wolverine or X-Men gig. Still, the art tells the story, even if it’s not desperately interesting.

Wild Thing #2-5 each carries a J2 (son of Juggernaut) backup written by Tom DeFalco with Lim on pencils. These are forgettable; the J2 series didn’t interest me, and the backups are smaller while retaining the same lack of interest. If you desperately needed to know what happened to J2 — his reunion with his father, the original Juggernaut, for instance — here it is. For the rest of the populace, there’s only one story that particularly works, with Juggie Jr. dwelling on unrequited love without realizing someone’s interest in him.

I can’t even say Crash Course has missed opportunities. It’s just dull. There may be potential in the character, but I don’t care. This is just one of the steps on Hama’s painful descent from an excellent writer toward Howard Mackie-dom, and Ron Lim being merely professional isn’t going to save it.

Rating: (1.5 of 5)