If It Bleeds, It Leads: Daredevil: End of Days #1 Review
EDITOR’S NOTE: He is Daredevil, The Man Without Fear! Of Spoilers!
One of the main reasons cited for the runaway success of Mark Waid’s run on Daredevil (Eisner awards for Best Writer, Best Continuing Series and Best Single Issue tend to be indicative that You Done Good) is that Waid depicts Murdock as a more positive character than he has been since Frank Miller revamped him in the 80s. Waid successfully broke from the years-long general formula for a good Daredevil story, which was to throw some terrible hardship at Murdock and watch him go nuts for a while.
That, however is Mark Waid. Daredevil: End of Days is written by Brian Michael Bendis, who wrote Daredevil from 2001 to 2006, and who put Daredevil through trials like revealing his secret identity, accusing him of murder, and having him marry a woman who goes violently insane and requires commitment… and not the good kind where people throw you a party and give you salad spinners, but rather the kind where the jackets tie in the back and the big blue pills don’t give you a boner.
So will Bendis’s take on this supposed final Daredevil story embrace the Waid’s more positive take on the character? Sure! Provided you get a warm fuzzy feeling over seeing the title character murdered in the street in broad daylight on page four! But that’s okay, because this Daredevil comic book isn’t really about Daredevil!
Depressed and confused? Don’t worry; stick with me and we’ll work through this. And it is generally a comic book worth working through.
The story opens, like I said, with Bullseye flat-out murdering Daredevil on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen. And it gets bleaker from there.
The bulk of the issue is told from the point of view of Daily Bugle reporter Ben Urich, who, when Daredevil is killed, is busy staring down the barrel of the Bugle closing up shop like every other dead tree newspaper in America and who is probably a severance and three unemployment checks away from debasing himself to start a rotten, pathetic blog (hi, Ben!). Jolly Jonah convinces Ben to write the story of how Daredevil came to this end as Urich’s swan song for the Bugle, while leads Urich to discover previously unreleased video of the killing revealing that Daredevil said a single enigmatic and unknown word before his death, which spurs him to begin writing the story… a story starting with the last appearance of Daredevil before his final battle with Bullseye… where Daredevil, you know, murders The Kingpin (don’t worry, Mark Waid! Three Eisners means we like seeing Daredevil acting like a hero, too!).
Okay, so let’s start with the obvious ways in which Bendis is playing with fire in this story. First, it is a bold choice to solicit an eight-issue miniseries touted as the final Daredevil story, and kick it off by killing the title character. Second, a protagonist uttering a mysterious word as a MacGuffin to drive an investigation into his death is at least as old as Citizen Kane – in fact, Bendis has Urich make a “Rosebud” joke, the parallels are so obvious. And third, having Daredevil’s story being told by a third party in the form of a newspaper article is so antithetical to the concept of “show, don’t tell” that it runs the real risk of being boring if it’s not handled skillfully.
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