Daredevil?

[elspethdixon]

So, I've heard some good and enthusiastic things about Mark Waid's Daredevil run from my flist, but after reading further, I'm not sure about whether to pick the title up or not.

I was all excited at the idea of being able to back to having my delicious Matt Murdock angst unaccompanied by dead and/or crazy female characters (i.e. what made me quit reading it partway through Brubaker's run), but it sounds like Waid is going back to a completely pre-Frank Miller take on the character, and I'm not sure I'm a fan of Matt getting retconned into having all of his vaguely depressive and vaguely bipolar qualities taken away, if that is indeed what's happening.  Like with Tony, Matt's struggles with mental illness (a lot of the storylines he's had since <i>Man Without Fear</i> can be read that way even if the writers didn't specifically intend it, especially <i>Born Again</i> ) were one of the things I always liked about the character.

He's still got the same personality, right?  Just a somewhat more emotionally stable version of it?  All the stuff he's struggled with hasn't just been erased out and ignored, has it?

I trust Waid a lot more than I do some other comics writers *cough*Fraction*cough* but all the DCnU stuff with characters I like getting half the things I liked about them taken away (those that haven't been erased from existence entirely) has made me paranoid.

(Also, wasn't T'Challa being Daredevil while Matt had a nervous breakdown that involved temporarily going evil and then running away to travel around somewhere or other?  Has he gone back to Wakanda?  And are the issues where he's Daredevil any good?  Or at least not utterly terrible and with no dead women and some Foggy Nelson content, which is probably all it would take to get me to read them?)

Comments

[muccamukk]

As of four issues, we've got Matt on a manic, almost joyous high right now. He's intensely emotionally involved in everything, but he's not taking it personally. Sure he has angst over things like his law practice, but he's firmly in an onward and upward mode. If that high's going to come with a crash, I don't know yet, I slightly suspect not, but I couldn't swear to it. I really like it a lot, and I'm a Matt fan in a big way. I'm reading to see what happens and because the stories are highly enjoyable. It does have a very strong Pre-Miller feel, somewhat akin to Daredevil Yellow.

T'Challa wasn't daredevil, he was just minding Hell's Kitchen while Matt was gone. I've heard the art is really good and the writing kind of isn't. Haven't read it though.

[elspethdixon]

Oh, good. I ought to know that characters are generally pretty safe with Waid, but like I said, all the DC reboots plus bad experiences with other Marvel titles had me nervous.

(Also, I'm probably one of the few fangirls to like Frank Miller Daredevil - I felt like he brought in a lot of what really made the title interesting, from the noir flavor to Matt's psychological issues, even though what he did with Karen Page frankly sucked. Granted, that was before Frank Miller became a horrible parody of himself, and I'd probably hate anything he wrote with the character now).

[muccamukk]

I'm really enjoying the DC reboots, but I'm not reading books that had a lot of continuity in the first place (well, Stormwatch did, of course, but I'm enjoying the reset on that one, and looking forward to the epic h/c romance).

I don't mind Miller on that title (other than Karen), but then almost every other writer after him just kept on, and on, and on. It's been 30 years of unrelenting blood, death and angst. It's too much.

[lilacsigil]

I definitely recommend it - Matt is still Matt, he still has angst, but the angst is clearly "Matt has angst sometimes" not "the world is a terrible place and everyone dies".

I also liked Frank Miller's runs on Daredevil, with the caveat that it's probably some of the best stuff he ever wrote!