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The Devil and the
Detective
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Daredevil: Out
Brian Michael
Bendis, Alex Maleev
Marvel, 2003
Rating: 4.4
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Alias: Come Home
Brian Michael Bendis,
Michael Gaydos, David Mack
MAX/Marvel, 2003
Rating: 3.4
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Posted:
February 17,
2003
By
Kevin Forest Moreau
Brian Michael Bendis built his name with jittery comics noir/verite
works like Jinx and Torso, and has built on that early success
to become one of the industry's most prolific and admired writers with
titles like
Powers
and Marvel's
Ultimate Spider-Man. But it's on another Marvel property, Daredevil,
that Bendis is turning in no less than the best work of his career.
Daredevil: Out, which follows on the heels of last year's impressive
Underboss, coalesces the writer's strengths -- compelling dialogue,
incisive characterization and a knack for imaginative and evocative crime
fiction -- into a seamless package that outshines his creative output to
date.
Whereas Underboss sparkled with the promise of a crumbling status
quo, Out delivers on that promise in a torrent of plausible and
suspenseful ways. Sammy Silke, the mob "underboss" responsible for the
downfall of the mighty Kingpin, has handed the FBI a hot potato of a tip in
exchange for the hope of immunity from prosecution and protection from his
enemies; he's revealed the costumed hero Daredevil's secret identity, blind
attorney Matt Murdock. In a brilliant opening scene, Bendis lets us watch
Bureau agents grappling with this information during an impromptu late-night
meeting; laying out the events leading up to Silke's confession, debating
the merits of his incredible claim, figuring out what to do next. It's a
thoroughly believable bit of procedural, and it sets the tone for the rest
of this collection.
Once a down-on-his-luck agent sells this juicy tidbit to a local tabloid,
Murdock's life is thrown into complete disarray. The media is camped out on
his doorstep; best friend and law partner Foggy Nelson argues fiercely for
the retirement of Daredevil; Murdock even faces the possibility of being
disbarred and sent to jail. And when he reluctantly agrees to represent
White Tiger, a small-time costume wrongly on trial for murdering a
policeman, the ongoing secret-identity scandal blows up in his face, with
disastrous consequences. Bendis keeps the tension at a high boil throughout,
deftly constructing tense emotional scenes: Murdock's confrontation with the
tabloid's publisher; his late-night meeting with former lover Elektra; a
terse sparring match between irate Daily Bugle & publisher J. Jonah
Jameson and grizzled reporter and Daredevil ally Ben Urich; and the
climactic courtroom showdown with an underhanded prosecutor. And to his
credit, Bendis maintains a high level of thriller-novel suspense without the
plotting missteps and belabored conversational tics -- nervous stammering,
forced non-sequiturs -- so often prevalent in Powers or his earlier
works.
Too bad the same can't be said of Coming Home, which collects issues
#11-15 of the writer's mature-readers private eye title Alias. Where
Out moves with the fluid grace of a self-assured professional
athlete, Coming Home is a frustrating exercise in form (melodrama,
sexual tension, wannabe-Tarantino dialogue and sloppy plotting) over Out's
nimble function. Jessica Jones, the former-superhero-turned-detective
protagonist of Alias, is hired to look into the disappearance of a
young teenage girl from a small town in upstate New York. In the course of
her investigation, she learns that young Rebecca Cross may be, or may have
been, a mutant. She also gets drunk and has sex with the town's cute young
sheriff (rather obviously drawn to resemble the actor Luke Wilson), stumbles
onto Rebecca's whereabouts by sheer dumb luck, and allows herself to feel
superior to the town's straight-laced, small-minded residents (with, it
should be noted, little justification).
Eventually a key suspect is murdered, the girl is found, and everything
comes to a rather abrupt and anticlimactic halt. The mutant angle, as it
turns out, is a shameless red herring, an attempt to plug into the fear and
persecution of mutants prevalent throughout the Marvel Universe without
making any clear statements on the issue. The last installment of the
collection, a blind date with Scott Lang (known to many Marvel readers as
the former Ant-Man), redeems the soggy pacing and heavy-handed tone of the
preceding four issues, but the affected, Tourette's Syndrome dialogue that
bogged down Jinx and hampers Powers keeps the scene from
achieving its emotional payoff.
It doesn't help any that colorist Matt Hollingsworth, who so perfectly
shades Alex Maleev's gritty pencils in Out, swathes Coming Home
in a murky palette that does little to enhance the moody, slightly-rushed
feel of Michael Gaydos's self-consciously artsy linework - although he does
a much better job of helping bring to life our glimpses of Rebecca's collage
journals, painstakingly constructed by David Mack with a feel that echoes
the early Sandman covers of Dave McKean.
Which isn't to say that Alias is necessarily a bad comic; it just
hasn't yet found a way to reconcile its atmosphere and classic
flawed-detective characterization with its storylines. It's just that with
his work on Daredevil, Bendis has proven to be capable of so much
more, of living up to his incessant hype. And given that the two storylines
were written around the same time -- the two collections even intersect at
one point -- it's frustrating to witness the drop in quality. For all that
he still seems to have a way to go to strike gold as consistently as he's
doing with Daredevil, however, Bendis proves with Out that
he's the real deal, a gifted storyteller capable of crafting a stimulating
and thoughtful piece of crime fiction. And with its release timed to
coincide with the abysmal
Daredevil
movie, Out stands poised to introduce that talent to a much wider
audience.


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