Sunday Splash Page #122

"Do You Know Who Your Children Are Racing?", in Daredevil #248, by Ann Nocenti (writer), Rick Leonardi (penciler), Al Williamson (inker), Petra Scotese (colorist), Joe Rosen (letterer)

So we hit the first major run of Daredevil for me. Ann Nocenti wrote the book for about 50 issues (#236-291, with a few fill-ins here and there). The part that gets talked about most is the ~30 issue stretch in the middle with John Romita Jr. as penciler, and we'll get to that next week. But I did want to touch on the first year this week, because of how it winds things around to where they are and where they go for that later part.

It picks up where Born Again left the character: Matt is disbarred, but living in Hell's Kitchen with Karen Page. Matt's working as a cook for a local diner, and since most of the people he encounters have no idea who Matt Murdock is, he's dispensed with playing the blind man. So as far as helping people goes, there's only Daredevil and what he can do, and none of what Matt Murdock, lawyer extraordinaire brought to the table. There's also Karen feeling torn between her love and admiration for Matt and the good he does in costume, with her discomfort at how often he's doing good by beating the shit out of people. Matt struggles with trying to talk people down, or convince them to do good, but this is superhero comics so that tends to fall through. And sometimes people don't want to be helped, or push back at Daredevil's notion he has the right to interfere in their lives at all.

Most of the stories during this stretch are one or two parters, mostly dealing with one-off threats or minor villains. A young man raised with a massive phobia of disease and toxins by an overprotective mother, who decides to try and poison everyone in his apartment building because they're so unclean. A union leader who grows so frustrated with the greed and disinterested cruelty of the wealthy, he starts killing them (which also turns into a whole argument about where the line is between reporting violent news and glorifying it for sales, as a Daily Bugle reporter tries to use this to make his name.) Bushwacker, a hitman with an arm he change into firearms, running around killing gifted people who are suspected to be mutants. Daredevil's trying to save him (mostly from Wolverine who is out to end the guy) for Bushwacker's fiance, but also stop him from killing anyone else. As with all compromises, nobody goes home happy from that one.

The book shifts through a series of artists, the title's shift in look going along with Murdock trying to find his footing, his path forward. Louis Williams draws four issues (the two with Rotgut, the man freaked out about disease, and two with a voodoo drug-running operation), and nobody else handles more than two, mostly just one. You have what I'd call more traditional superhero style artists, in the Gil Kane/Neal Adams mold like Chuck Patton and Keith Pollack, as well as fairly early Todd MacFarlane for an issue. Sal Buscema draws the second issue Nocenti writes, a Mutant Massacre tie-in, while Rick Leonardi handles the last two issues before Romita Jr.

But the first issue Nocenti writes is drawn by Barry Windsor-Smith, and involves a version of the Black Widow that's nearly unrecognizable after the last two decades of her being this entirely professional, always cool under fire, greatest secret agent ever type. When Nocenti loops back around to follow-up on that story, with Natasha struggling with the psychological toll of killing someone who had been made into a weapon, Keith Giffen steps on art chores.