#devil's reign

Foggy Nelson (and Kirsten McDuffie), fighting Mayor Fisk with the law.

giving Emma Frost history with Wilson Fisk during her early Hellfire days was genuinely a god tier idea. Nobody understands Emma like Gerry Duggan understands Emma, this mini was SO fucking good and the ending is marvelous.

I was about to review the 2023 series by Saladin Ahmed, but I realized I didn't have my thoughts down about the 2019 series by Chip Zdarsky. Allow me to lay out some thoughts quickly before I get to the most-recent series.

Matt Murdock is back in action as Daredevil. But he's too eager to get out there, and before he's ready he gets in a fight, uses a bit too much strength, and lays someone out. Someone who dies before they can reach the hospital, and Daredevil has to figure out whether he's being framed, or he actually killed someone.

Chip Zdarsky's run was the first Daredevil run I stuck with from the beginning, reading it month-to-month. It was an astounding series that put a lot of emotional depths on Matt and put him in situations he hadn't really been to before, which is something that applied to just about every member of his cast, new and returning. I didn't know I could get invested in Kingpin's love life, but Typhoid Mary was a wonderful character that I grew to appreciate, even though I'd never read her stuff before.

This carried through Devil's Reign and into the 2022 series, which saw Matt trying to build something new and rehabilitative before it all comes crashing down around him. No spoilers here, but the use of the supernatural is excellent, considering everything else Daredevil plays in for his own series, and I was satisfied and a little confused by the ending. Which leads us to:

Daredevil (2023)

Full spoilers obliquely discussed for the Zdarsky run.

Matt Murdock is back from hell as a priest for a small orphanage, and is trying to put a life together away from the world of law and his old friends. But circumstances conspire to draw him back in, and he'll find the mistakes of yesterday can make the mistakes of today even worse.

I think this run is... fine. I'm more preferential to the supernatural and religious side of Daredevil's character than his disability or his occupation, so to see him have to face off against seven demons that represent the seven deadly sins was quite fun. And watching Matt try to crawl back to his original life while making a wreck of his new one made me sympathize with him, even when he made mistakes that ended up hurting the people around him. And Kingpin, especially, has a really fascinating change of character that makes him all the more dangerous.

But it's also not hard to see this run was just competent. I don't think anything in here hasn't been done better in previous runs, and while I appreciated Saladin representing Catholicism as honestly and earnestly as he can, it felt a little too on-the-nose to blend seamlessly into the rest of the story. And besides Matt and Wilson Fisk, there's not as much depth offered to the other characters; most of them are two-dimensional, good-enough stand-ins to what they could have been.