What I Bought 5/27/2013 - Part 9

Four weeks after I started, I reach the end. Of this round of reviews anyway. Hopefully I'll get more comics next week and we can start all over again! Won't that be ever so fun? Hey, where are you going? Come back, we're gonna talk about Daredevil! Everyone loves that book, right?

Daredevil #25, by Mark Waid (writer/storyteller), Chris Samnee (artist/storyteller), Javier Rodriguez (color artist), Joe Caramagna - Oh sure, get cute with the credits. Make it more complicated for me, why don't ya?

Matt hears this Larry's story, suits up, and swings them over to the warehouse Larry escapes from. At which point, Larry falls over dead because they installed a pacemaker in him and it just conked out/stopped his heart. Nothing for Matt to do but go inside. . . and meet Ikari, who is wearing the robe Matt's dad wore when he fought. Twisting the knife. Or ninja scythe thing (Matt calls it a Kusirgama, but David Brothers said it's really a kama, I think, so hell, "ninja scythe thing"). It's a long fight, and Matt's not exactly losing, but he's not winning, either. So he gets sneaky. Hides in a sporting goods' store, sets off the sprinklers, and reaches for a bat. Radar sense will be baffled, and hearing, taste, and smell, will be useless. Ikari will be helpless. Except. . .

'Try the red one.'

Ikari isn't blind, and he beats Matt to a pulp, then lets him limp away, promising death will come at any moment Ikari's master chooses.

I love that line. That whole sequence. Matt's in this odd place where he's exhausted, ready to drop, yell totally confident he's going to win, because he's gone through this elaborate route to make confuse Ikari, based on the fact it's almost too much for him. And then it all goes wrong, because Matt made one critical, false assumption, and so he's screwed himself.

I also like the fact Ikari did use the red bat. It's a nice, kind of nasty touch.

I've read back through the issue a few times, trying to see if there were hints that Ikari wasn't blind in there. Things like Ikari turning his head to follow Matt, when the radar sense wouldn't require it. I didn't see any. Most of the hints were in the writing. Matt's repeated confidence, in spite of the fact nothing goes like he expected. He though Ikari carried his weight badly, he got dropped. he thought he'd have an advantage outside, nope. Thought the staff would help. Nope. Thought the sprinklers would help. Sorry, Matt. If there's an art cue in there (and I'm not saying there is, I imagine the whole point is precisely that Ikari didn't make any slips), I didn't see it. I do like that Matt's first attack ends with him on the ground, looking up at Ikari through his radar sense (Page 8, panel 7), and that's how the fight ends (Page 20, panel 2), too.

Then again, it took me a couple of tries to recognize the moment when Matt noticed Larry had a pacemaker. I thought when Matt said 'They didn't want me to know you were lying, Larry!' he meant they had let Larry escape. Maybe dropped "accidentally" dropped hints that they sure wouldn't want Daredevil to learn about this, and casually mentioned that he was at the hospital. As usual, overthinking it. It's right there, the page before, Matt touching Larry on the chest.

One aspect of the art I did notice and appreciate was the last three panels of page 4. Matt standing on the skylight, looking down at his own reflection (the reflection looking back at us), then the skylight starts to break, the reflection splits down the middle, and in the third panel he falls through the looking glass, descending into darkness*.

Javier Rodriguez helps it along because the colors invert. In the first panel, Matt's costume is red, but his reflections is black, with the "DD" being red (also Samnee drew the skylight so the frame covers the reflection's eyes, nice touch). By the third panel, the costume is red, and the "DD" is back to being black. There's also probably something relevant about the red boot shattering the reversed reflection in the second panel, but I don't know what. "Don't gaze too long into the abyss, not only does it gaze back, but it might break you"?

In summation, this was a very good issue, and I want more. Right now. Or soon, at least.

* Although now I'm seeing him as almost an upside-down crucifix in that last panel (the arms aren't above the shoulders, though), but I might have that on the brain because of all the talk about Man of Steel this week. And because I read two of TenNapel's more religion-heavy graphic novels yesterday (Ratfist struck a chord with me, but not a good one. Closer to, "I may not want to read anything else by TenNapel now". We may discuss this at a later date, if I still feel that way after a second reading.)