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I've Seen Bigger Muscles On Worms, Robin

"Next issue -- someone dies! Major shakeups for our hero! And nothing will ever be the same again!"

We've all heard this one. It might be that the writer is going to kill off the main character's girlfriend (and it is always girlfriend) and make the main character into a vengeance-obsessed lunatic for a few issues until our hero is really close to breaking his sacred vow and taking a human life -- or maybe the main character is going to die for half of one issue, and then be resurrected under strange circumstances -- or maybe the main character is going to adjust his costume.

When your favorite Marvel or DC title promises something like this, it typically means that you are going to get a few issues of elevated action, sometimes good, sometimes totally out of character, but eventually your hero will hit the bad guy over the head, knocking him out, (causing no brain trauma) and go back to their normal life.

Real change and genuine shake-ups in franchise continuity are pretty rare. For years, the best example was that of Jean Grey, Phoenix, who died in one of the most well-beloved X-Men stories ever written, and who stayed dead for fiveish years. Then in 1985 Marvel decided it would be fun to reunite the five original X-Men, so they undid all the pathos and tears of millions of fans and revealed that she was never really dead. (Jean Grey died again in 2003, and has actually stayed dead since, but that's mostly because the writers replaced her with the much more interesting Emma Frost.)

This month and next, true believer, we look at two Marvel heroes -- Daredevil and Spider-Man -- who went through very similar shake-ups a few years ago. Daredevil pulled off the shake-up with dizzying style, and then outdid himself and outdid himself again until he cemented its place as the best book at Marvel, while Spidey flailed about confused, and finally whimpered to a retcon that undid all the damage.

Spoiler warning: It's impossible to talk about these two stories without giving away THE ULTIMATE PLOT TWIST OF ALL TWISTINESS. You can still enjoy both stories knowing what will happen, but I have to warn you for the Daredevil story's sake: if you don't want it to be spoiled, go out and read it now.

(The story published as Underboss and Out has also been collected into a big hardcover, generically called Daredevil vol. 2, or it is available as part of the Brian Michael Bendis Daredevil omnibus (not to be confused with his successor Ed Brubaker's omnibus). For your money, the omnibus is probably the best bet, if only because you'll have to know what happens next once you're done.)

One more thing: you might be asking "What the heck? Daredevil is the good story? I don't care about Daredevil; I want to hear about Spider-Man." Ah, we shall explain this -- why the best superhero in comics somehow gets the shaft as compared to one who is a lot less interesting.

A little information about Daredevil, for those of you who didn't see the truly terrible movie with Ben Affleck (whose superpower, by the way, is Anti-Charm). Daredevil is a blind lawyer named Matt Murdock by day. He was struck in the face by a radioactive isotope as a child, which robbed him of his sight but enhanced his other senses. One character delightfully observes in the story, "Do you know what would happen to me if I was hit in the face with a radioactive isotope? I would get cancer and die."

Murdock has a passion for fighting crime, specifically organized crime. His father was a local boxer and a mob stooge who refused to throw a boxing match for the mob and as a result got a pair of cement shoes. For most of his comics career, Daredevil has been locked in a battle of wills with the Kingpin, a big fat mob boss who controls most of the Marvel underworld.

Sin City creator Frank Miller, in his mid-80s run on Daredevil, made the battle even more interesting when Daredevil's ex-girlfriend, a junkie, sold his secret identity to the Kingpin for drug money. The Kingpin nearly destroyed Murdock then, using his connections to wipe out Murdock's law practice and assets until Murdock had to fake his own death. But Murdock made it back, and he and the Kingpin continue their dance on both sides of the law.

It begs the question: why didn't Kingpin blow Murdock's identity to the press? Miller and the later writers of Daredevil never really explained, save that it has something to do with the privacy of their little war, but the reason is somewhat self-evident: after all, the eye on Daredevil would also turn to his assailants, especially if they were the ones who blew the story.

So the plot point remains: Daredevil's greatest enemy knows his identity.

Underboss follows a story in which the Kingpin himself was rendered blind by an over-enthusiastic pal of Daredevil's, thus making him a rather weak alpha lion. In the beginning of Underboss, a small-time hood named Sammy Silke holds forth to the blind Kingpin on the virtue of the "good old days" back before there were any "guys in tights."

In this initial dialogue, the genius of writer Brian Michael Bendis shows through. Bendis at his best writes beautifully natural dialogue -- more than natural. It flows, musically, across the page, painting a picture of the Corleone-esque characters.

"Back before I had hair on my chin, my uncle owned a guy some money at a street rate. You know, a shark. The neighborhood guy everybody went to. My uncle? Ends up he couldn't pay. And you know what happens next -- oldest story ever told -- Pop. Blammo. Face down in his cornflakes. One bullet. Simple. Clean. Right to the head. One bullet and everyone from the Bronx to Orlando -- everyone! -- knows it's a hit."

When the Kingpin asserts that those days are long since gone, Silke says, "Don't I know it!" He turns insulting and mean, detailing the Kingpin's many failures with costumed heroes. "My guess is you wanted to play dress up since you were a little kid, but you were too ****ing fat even then."

And then the Kingpin's hoods pounce on the big guy and carve him up.

It's a beautifully rendered scene, between Bendis's dialogue and Alex Maleev's photorealistic art, dripping with darkness and threat. Each frame of the scene is portrayed like a movie, with the opening long focus on Sammy Silke to the chaotic close shots of hands with knives and the Kingpin's face as he screams.

Bendis and Maleev use tight viewpoint and a keen awareness of light and surrounding to make this a cinematic comic. It's clear from the beginning that this is not your typical funnybook sensibility: this is a dark criminal epic.

After Kingpin's death, Bendis takes the story through a dizzying series of flashbacks, starting when Sammy Silke arrived in New York. Silke is the son of a Chicago mob boss shoring up alliances with the Kingpin, and among his requests when he arrived was to whack a certain blind lawyer whose latest case was messing with one of their affiliates. Kingpin gave a definite no -- "Murdock is not to be touched."

Silke didn't like being told no, so he snuck around the Kingpin's organization to find out why Murdock was taboo, and eventually he got the information from the Kingpin's son himself -- Murdock is Daredevil, and it is generally known in the organization, but no one did anything to Murdock without Kingpin's approval.

Silke saw that the alpha lion had made his big mistake.

Silke can orchestrate the Kingpin's overthrow, but he doesn't count on the power Kingpin's wife has in the organization to take her vengeance. With most of his cronies dead, Silke runs to the FBI with all the information he has, including Murdock's identity, trying to stay out of normal jail circles where Madame Kingpin can reach him.

The FBI laugh at the notion -- Daredevil blind? But when they start poking around, they find a host of coincidences and finally a government brick wall on Murdock's file. The head of the local FBI head puts the kibosh on the story, but one agent, who has a press connection and needs the cash, blows it.

Repeat: he blows our hero's secret identity to the press.

At the beginning of Out, another long focus shot brings us to Murdock the morning the story breaks. He is lying in bed, turning and getting up slowly. The thought captions detail the way his enhanced senses let him know his life is falling apart.

"I hear them on their cells. I hear the motors in their cameras whirring and winding. I smell the coffee. The croissants. The freshly laid deodorant. I even -- yep, I even smell the saline solution in their eyes. I know before I wake up . . . I know my life is over."

So what does Murdock do? Close to the breaking point, in driving rain, he stands on a streetlight over the crowd of reporters under their umbrellas, not looking up. He thinks, over and over, "I am not afraid of you. I am not afraid of you." He takes off his mask and the thought panels drip down the page with the rain. "I'm. Not. Afraid. Of. You.

"Look up here. I am not afraid of you. You will hear me out. You will understand why I am. What this uniform means to me. You will hear me and you will . . ."

And then Murdock hurriedly pulls his mask over his face. "Oh no, what am I doing? What am I doing? Idiot!"

When the time comes to make a statement to the press, Bendis and Maleev give us a full page of waiting while pictures snap, milking the tension. Murdock clears his throat and tells the press how he was blinded, and of the death of his father. "I have had a lot to contend with in my life. I have coped with my handicap. I have put myself through law school. I opened a successful law practice with my partner here, Franklin Nelson. I have fought for each and every client who has come through our door with the passion and integrity that they deserve and I live my life in a fashion that hopefully would make my father proud."

And then when the moment comes: "The headline stated that I was the masked vigilante known as Daredevil. That I was faking my handicap as a cover for my secret costumed life. This information is one hundred percent . . .

"Untrue."

Just before she leaves the country, Madame Kingpin slips Murdock the name of the man who outed him. Through a little bit of clever intimidation (Daredevil standing at your window at four in the morning is pretty effective) Murdock scares the anonymous source out of testifying. However, the bullish head of the paper won't back down in the face of Murdock's libel suit. "You can fight it all you want. It doesn't matter. It's out there now."

And it's true. In one beautifully effective scene, Daredevil saves a woman from danger, the woman thanks him, and just before he turns to leave, a man behind her says, "Hey Daredevil -- what color's my shirt?"

He pauses, doesn't answer, and leaps away.

Bendis has repeatedly said that he will not use any magical cop-outs; no friendly shapeshifter showing up to make things better; no other heroes putting on the costume and posing with Murdock to show that it's all good. No cop-outs.

(Bendis has a point; if Spider-Man put on the costume he would still move like a spider. But Danny Rand, Iron Fist, is another martial-arts based hero about Daredevil's size, who could easily pass for Daredevil, and does in a later story. I don't know why Bendis never addressed this, but the story moves so quickly and intensely that you can forgive him for the sake of pacing.)

There is no Daredevil story as good as Underboss and Out. None. Frank Miller's Born Again, Kevin Smith's Guardian Devil, and David Mack's Parts of a Hole are mere predecessors. And long after Underboss, Bendis left the book to be replaced by Ed Brubaker, who wrote the amazing Devil, Inside and Out -- which was a killer story, but still couldn't top the identity reveal.

We'll go more into this next month, but why would a Daredevil story succeed so well while the inevitable "Spider-Man reveals his identity" story failed? After all, when Stan Lee created Daredevil in the first place, he was trying to replicate his success with Spider-Man, and it was only Miller's crime epics that even kept the man in the killer red tomato suit alive.

Weird as it sounds, it's the lameness of the character that makes his stories good. Daredevil is enough of an unimportant character that his writers can take huge risks, and with only one monthly book and few guest appearances, the writers have most of the control over what happens to Daredevil. When a character like Batman or Wolverine is spread thin across a bunch of comics per month, any truly daring story has to get approved by the editors, who are then counting beans and profit margins before the story is even approved.

You can bet they'll err on the side of safety and keep the formula. It's the same principle that keeps James Bond in bed with hot women and setting off explosions. But with Daredevil, Bendis and Maleev just get to go with it, to try new things, and to push the character to greater and greater depth.

Next month we reveal Spider-Man's identity . . . and why that story was undone less than two years later. Stay with us for a sad tale of tragedy and editors.