Daredevil Epic Collection - To Dare the Devil
The beginning of Frank Millers run. This volumes collects three or four issues before Miller begins art duties, and continues through the first ten or so of the issues he both wrote and drew. To hear reddit describe this volume, its basically unreadable until Miller takes over. That's bullshit. The first couple of stories feature some amazing art by Frank Robbins and Gene Colan, and guest stars the sensational Black Widow in her best costume.
Yes, there are some duds in this collection. There's a Steve Ditko fill-in issue about Matt getting amnesia, becoming a boxer and refusing to take a dive for a crooked promoter (has this exact plot been done 1000 times or what?). And a what if? issue from Miller himself featuring Matt becoming an Agent of SHIELD.
Miller's run starts off rough. His art is... serviceable. Its definitely a step down from Colan. It gets better, but it never really gets
good. Miller's writing starts out similarly rough. However, it also improves throughout those ten issues. Miller introduces Elektra and the Hand, but more significantly, turns Kingpin into a DD villain. Elektra is kinda boring. When this epic ends, she's still just Miller's OC running around as deus ex machina to save Matt's ass. Meanwhile, Kingpin is a fun puppetmaster villain throughout. Although it is frustrating how often Kingpin has DD at his mercy and is just like, "nah, he's not worth killing." Dude, just fucking kill him. Save yourself the headache.
I know Miller's run eventually becomes a character-defining classic, but it just doesn't feel like its there quite yet.
Score: 8/10
I hope this isn't taken as a thread derailment, but what's the general opinion of TMNT, The Eastman and Laird b&w comics?
Somewhere in the mid 80s (1986/87 I believe) someone in my art class told me about this awesome comic book about these mutant ninja turtles. I thought the concept was silly at best, not to mention, I really didn't give a shit about martial arts comics. He eventually showed me an issue, and my memories of the time are that I could see the appeal for an art fag because the art had an amatuerish "hey, I could do that" look to it, but I still thought the concept was dumb. I guess not too long afterwards I read somewhere (maybe a comics journal issue) that E&L had struck a deal to produce toys and a kiddie cartoon series. I believe it was an issue of the CJ as the writer was lamenting that E&L "sold out". The rest is history.
About 2 weeks ago, I thought I'd like to revisit the old B&W comics to reassess. I found some reprint books on IA and read some. The art still doesn't grab me, and I still can't get into ninjas. Reading about the history of those books, it seems that issue 1 was supposed to be something of a Frank Miller/Daredevil parody. The parody angle goes over my head... maybe because I never read Daredevil, lol. The only character I kind of like would be Casey Jones... the rest of it I just can't wrap my head around. How did this shit get so popular?
To me the behind the scenes stuff is far more interesting than the actual comics, lol.
I've never sat down and actually read the original TMNT stuff. As a kid, I stuck mostly to the Archie adventures series. I would like to read through it sometime, because I hear it gets kinda crazy after the first couple of issues.
