collecting all five issues of this mini-series
Writer: Frank Miller
Artists: John Romita Jr. (p), Al Williamson (i)
Publisher: Marvel
With Miller’s final work on the character to date, he chose to go back to the start, to Daredevil’s origin story, and re-tell the birth of this superhero as he saw it – no costumes included. Originally developed as a Daredevil movie script treatment (and surprisingly more cinematic than the eventual 2003 product), this tweaked origin story signalled the maturing of a talent who had fully come to terms with his medium and was exploiting it to tell exactly the stories he wanted to: and a perverse sort of logic renders his return to the early years of Daredevil a great pleasure. Whilst the extended origin concept behind the miniseries risked it being boring for the uninitiated – you’ll get a whole lot more out of this if you have a knowledge of what kind of man Matt Murdock will later become – it gave Miller the opportunity to get some kicks out of revisiting key characters from the mythos (Elektra, Stick) and integrating them more fully into DD’s backstory.
Again opting to collaborate with an artist rather than illustrate the story himself, Miller this time found himself working with the revered longtime Spider-Man artist John Romita Jr. most recently seen illustrating the pages of Amazing Spider-Man and his creator-owned series Gray Area. It’s fun to see Romita Jr finding a more advanced style here, with his detailed cityscapes setting the scene perfectly for Matt’s boyhood origins. You can practically smell the city streets of Hell’s Kitchen through his atmospheric renderings, and the book is so obviously visually dense and satisfying right off the bat - before any action even kicks in – that you’d almost be happy if nothing even happened to Matt. But happen it does, and Romita’s art faithfully recreates the radioactive origin along with the hospital and family scenes that accompany Matt’s accident. From there, the bright Marvel-style origin descends into darker Miller-brand territories, with the accidental killing of a prostitute serving as a constant reminder to Matt – and the reader – of how high the stakes are. Romita’s recurrent motif of her falling to her death gives a feeling in a single image that would take many words to convey, and it’s this kind of perfect integration of artist and writer that makes the book a pleasure to read. Any non-converts to Romita will definitely be impressed by his work here, and it will ensure that you’ll want to pick up his upcoming work with Mark Millar on Wolverine’s solo title.
The eventual original plot here is a fairly straightforward crime-noir tale which is more reminiscent of the Dark Knight Returns than any of Miller’s other Daredevil work. Whilst surprisingly unconnected with much of Daredevil’s history or continuity, the story at least gives Miller’s excellent writing the chance to reprise and polish all the character tics previously explored in his Daredevil work, with the descriptive passages detailing Matt’s sensory perception being particularly impressive, setting a template which would be followed by many modern writers on the book ever since. However, some of his character work seems to be an unnecessary re-writing of history: the linking of Matt and Elektra’s mystical origins by Stick comes off as too convoluted, and much of the crazy-woman-Elektra work only serves to undermine the beautiful simplicity of their relationship that Miller crafted in the first issue of Daredevil that he ever wrote. Such tweaking will affect longtime followers more than casual fans, but even readers who aren’t too concerned with continuity may find it difficult to reconcile some of Miller’s changes with the characters they already know and love.
It’s a shame to say that The Man Without Fear is weaker than his previous Daredevil works, but there’s an occasional feeling that Miller’s relentless pursuit of his latter-day mission statement to get superheroes out of their costumes and make their books about strong characters, not solely attractive graphics has robbed the book some colourful appeal. Whilst in keeping with the gritty origin story he wanted to tell, it would have been nice to actually see some of Daredevil in action by the end of the book, and although Romita’s final splash goes some way to appease costume-hungry fans, this book reads more like one of Miller’s “straight” crime thrillers than it does a superhero book. Without wanting to take away from what is still a hugely enjoyable book, it’s fair to say that Born Again is a more fitting testament to Miller’s work on Daredevil – but for a more solid realisation of where Miller always wanted to take the character, you can look no further that The Man Without Fear.
(If you’re wanting to find out more about Daredevil, I can highly recommend http://www.manwithoutfear.com, Kuljit Mithra’s superb fansite on the character, which has helped me out massively putting these reviews together. Cheers to Kuljit – an absolute authority on the subject - and all on the messageboards!)
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