DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN

I’m thinking DAREDEVIL tonight.

I’ve written before of my life long love of comic books. Growing up at a time before dyslexia was an option, I was struggling to read and write, but I loved stories. School was just no help at all. Comics fused things together for me, a brain that works visually, finding the perfect way in to understanding what was going on.
My love of crime fiction, too, seems to come from the basic and primal prose. Writers who don’t put too many words in a sentence. There’s the great Mats quote, “I hate music, it’s got too many notes”. That about sums up my love/hate relationship with writing.

Batman came first, of course. British reprints of old classic comics. Silver age Batman tales sized up to fit the standard British size. Once family members saw how quickly I took to them, and how quickly this set me racing into being the most ambitious reader in the class, I was given comics quicker than I could read them. I went from someone who couldn’t read or write to someone who was making his own illustrated books and giving them to people.

I was still only about five or six when Frank Miller tore monthly super hero books apart with DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN and BATMAN: YEAR ONE, but they were in my hands. Comics were for kids, so adults never gave any thought to what I was reading. Earth shattering, groundbreaking and dark. Boy, were they dark. The effect on me was so profound that I still have those comics, in the loft at my parents, and I have the collected editions of both stories on my shelf as I type this.
If Batman was first, Daredevil was the real mind trip.

The two heroes of often compared. People say Daredevil is Marvel’s Batman. It’s a bit lazy, really. He’s a moody vigilante who operates in a big city. He likes the dark. They’re both crime-fiction oriented. That’s….about it.
Don’t get me wrong; I love both of them, I’m obsessed with both of them. This write up, especially as I compare the two, will give the impression that I’m degrading Batman. Not so; but to really give Daredevil his due; I’ll have to show how he scores points over the Bat.

They come from different places, and they react with different parts of me. Batman is a classic and righteous hero. As dark as he gets, and as many character flaws as we can point out, he’s a basically incorruptible fiction. THE DARK KNIGT sold that idea brilliantly. The film pointed out that he’s self righteous to a flaw, that he’s angry and insular, that his methods are questionable. But it always comes with the important get out – the man himself is incorruptible.

Also, lets face it, he’s rich. Batman exists because Bruce Wayne’s parents were killed, yes. But Batman is possible because Bruce Wayne is loaded.
Matt Murdock doesn’t have such an advantage. He has every excuse to be a bad guy. A cheat. A bully. He succeeds in spite of who he is, and where he comes from. In the DC universe, Daredevil would be a Batman villain.

His Dad was a corrupt Boxer. His Mother, he was led to believe, died in childbirth. As an adult he learns that she ran away to join the church. He’s blinded in an accident and finds that his senses overcompensate to super-human levels.

He’s a Lawyer who fights crime by night. He’s a Catholic who takes the laws of god and man into his own hands. He’s selfish and selfless, he’s a liar and a cheat, and he’s trying every day of his life to be a hero. Every single selfless act he’s ever done, every single one, has cost him. As a child, he jumped in front of a truck to save an old man, and he lost his sight. That’s the pattern for his life locked in, right there. He is constantly getting knocked down, and constantly finding his way back to his feet for another go.

Recently, Brian Bendis put him through a new level of hell. His identity was outed in the press, ‘Matt Murdock is Daredevil’ screamed the headlines, in a story line that played out over several years. We got some wonderful in-depth character study dressed up as super-hero comic books.

A lawyer who is a vigilante is breaking the law, and will be arrested and disbarred. A catholic who is lying has their own personal demons to deal with. Matt refused to admit he was Daredevil. In front of the world’s media –and more importantly in front of friends who were in on the secret- he lied about his identity. He sued the newspaper for millions of dollars for libel. He continued to attend church. He continued to put on a costume and beat the crap out of criminals. He compromised everything that his profession held dear, and his religion held sacred, in the name of a higher good. All the while, he was the self-righteous guy who felt that it was his decision to make.

But anyway, back to me in the mid eighties. Learning to see the world through comics.

BORN AGAIN is possibly the best achievement of super hero comics. Okay, people will say WATCHMEN, and watchmen is a masterwork. But it also set out to be one. It had things to say about the genre, but had to create whole new characters to do it. There was a degree of separation because it was not taking direct aim at the characters that had inspired it. WATCHMEN has had a long lasting affect on the industry, but there was no long lasting implication for any of the characters, because they didn't exist outside of that one story.

BORN AGAIN, by contrast, was set in the main Marvel universe. It happened in one of its monthly books, with one of its long running characters.It's actions would have log lasting consquences. It's emotional toll would get to play out.

There were no epic conspiracies, no great destruction or grand scale. It was dark and gritty, which were two important cliché watchwords in 80’s comics. But it was more than the cliché. It was grounded and human.

The Kingpin, the man who ran most of New York’s crime empire, found out the true identity of Daredevil. He found out when one of Matt’s friends, an ex lover, sold the secret in order to buy a fix of heroin. Desperate times and desperate measures. When you reach the point that you need something so bad, when your own soul is worth so little, that you will betray the man you love for one more high.

Matt’s life is then taken away a strip at a time. His job. His bank accounts. His house. His friends. His sanity –always a fragile thing to begin with- begins slipping away from him. At his lowest ebb, when he should by any rights be dead, he finds himself collapsed in the arms of a nun, on the steps of a church. In the arms of a woman who seems strangely familiar to him, he begins to heal and find strength; he begins to piece things back together. One of the best elements to any heroic story is the comeback. Not only for Matt, but for Karen, the woman who betrayed him, as they somehow find each other again and begin to rebuild.

The ending takes the character into a new place, which is often so rare in episodic comic books. He doesn’t get his whole life back, the money, the house. So much of what was taken away stays taken. Because that’s real life. But Matt learns who he is, and how much he can take, and seems happier in the final panel than at any other time in his life.

You have to go a long way to find a story this good in any format. It just so happens it was put into my hands as a kids story when I was too young to know what was about to hit me.