The Doomino Effect for Sep 24, 2008
I’ve been going on for months about how I’m ready to ditch Daredevil. The book has become decreasingly interesting to me, following an inverse relationship with my sense that Brubaker has been dragging out the formula of “A Daredevil villain wants to get at Matt Murdock by way of his personal life, which is continuing to unravel, and that is manifesting itself through an increasingly violent and unstable Daredevil.” I’m glad that events that took place in the first arc of Daredevil Vol 2 are still resonant, but that resonance was becoming a drone.
I was only picking up two other books last week, so I decided to take a chance on Daredevil #111, part 1 of the Lady Bullseye arc. Not only did Daredevil have everything I said in the opening paragraph going against it, but the lead villain is a female knock-off of Daredevil’s arch-nemesis, which seems more appropriate for a dwindling and desperate 1990s reinvention attempt (I’m thinking Lady Octopus). But Bullseye is a good guy now, so if you want someone to kill people by throwing things quickly, what are you gonna do?
So in this particular issue, we don’t see much from Lady Bullseye, but what we do see counts: 1) her “origin” stems from admiration for the original Bullseye as he tore through her Yakuza captors; 2) she’s pretty ruthless and digs the carnage; and 3) she’s on a mission for the Hand that actually doesn’t include targeting Daredevil. So right off the bat, we don’t have a villain going after Matt Murdock. Hooray!
Yet Murdock’s personal life continues to get complicated as he has sex with Dakota North. In a classic “torture myself with guilt over things I’ve done to screw up my life even more” Daredevil moment (and don’t get me wrong — I love these moments and I think they’re crucial to the Matt Murdock character), Matt slips out of bed with the hot naked ex-model, pulls up some pants and thinks “Oh … dear God in Heaven … what have you done, Matt? You just cheated on your wife … Your wife, who’s in a mental institution because of you…”
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