Continued with my read-through of Daredevil during KF's downtime. Before taking a break from it I left off on #50, wherein DD beats the shit out of Wilson Fisk and declares himself the new Kingpin of Hell's Kitchen. For whatever reason the series decides to take a break from that and so #51 - 55 are written & drawn by David Mack and they follow Echo going on a vision quest. The story is... okay and the art is great but about 75% of the arc's script is exposition. Worse, that exposition is often presented as a weird word vomit on the page, like so:
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Which just becomes annoying to read. Mack would probably be a lot better off with a co-writer to reign him in and help better the pacing and structure of his stories.
Anyway, after Echo's arc wraps up it's back to Bendis with #56. This issue is the start of the The King of Hell's Kitchen arc... which is probably Bendis' worst arc. I have no idea what the fuck happened here. He seriously yadda-yadda-yaddas over Murdock being the new Kingpin and cleaning up Hell's Kitchen via a one year time skip and Urich giving us an issue's worth of exposition on what happened during that year. The bulk of the arc is about the yakuza trying to take over Hell's Kitchen, coming after Murdock due him being the new Kingpin. It's... all a huge waste of potential. I don't know if editorial interference fucked up the story or if Bendis just simply didn't know where to go with it but, yeah, it feels like a waste of an interesting idea.
After that arc is a Black Widow focused one. Natasha runs into some spy & political trouble, so she decides to hideout with Matt for a while. It's a decent arc, although it feels like such a weirdly lowkey follow-up arc to Matt becoming Kingpin of Hell's Kitchen.
Next was the most last arc I've read, Golden Age, which goes from #66 - 70. It's probably one of my favorite Bendis arcs so far. Alexander Bont, the kingpin before Fisk, is released from prison. It weaves together three different time periods: Bont's rise to Kingpin, Daredevil (back when he was in his hideous yellow costume) taking down Bont, and the current day of Bont getting his revenge. The premise is probably stronger than the execution of it but Golden Age was a really engaging and entertaining read. With the end of Golden Age there's only 11 issues left of Bendis' run, after which Ed Brubaker takes over for roughly 40 issues.