Frank Miller and John Romita Jr retell Daredevil’s origin story once again in Daredevil: The Man Without Fear. Jack Murdock, Stick, Foggy Nelson, Elektra, Kingpin - it’s like Miller’s going through a checklist of the usual suspects, so, if you’ve read the Daredevil origin a few times by now like me, there’s not much here that’ll hold your attention. It’s not the worst retelling of the origin though, so there’s that at least for new readers, but it does have some weird/silly aspects to it that is all Miller unfortunately.
I’ll mention SPOILERS for the rest of the review but I wouldn’t recommend this one even if you’re a Miller fan - Brian Bendis and Mark Waid both wrote stellar Daredevil runs that touched on a lot of the origin stuff; check those books out instead of this one.
Matt’s dad’s boxing nickname was Battlin’ Jack Murdock but Miller rewrites it (or at least this is the first time I’ve seen this appear in a Daredevil origin story) so that his nickname is Jack “The Devil” Murdock and he’s dressed up in a cheesy devil costume as if this was WWE and not professional boxing! It’s contrived this way so the kids who bully Matt in school call him “Daredevil” because of his dad, sorta, and that’s how he got his hero name - oof, that’s not good, Frank!
Chip Zdarsky’s overrated recent Daredevil run centres around Matt accidentally killing someone for the first time, which sends him into a spiral. In Miller’s origin, Matt kills at least four guys, only three of them criminals, on purpose, before accidentally killing another person, and, besides making a few obligatory sad faces, carries on with his life unaffected. Not that I thought in Zdarsky’s run Daredevil had never killed anyone before, but at least it’s acknowledged there that it’s not a heroic thing to do, whereas here it’s the opposite - the only death Matt regrets is the innocent bystander. Hmm. Not terribly heroic of the character.
Miller uses a lot of lazy tropes in this book. Foggy gets bullied in law school and Matt helps him out and that’s how they become friends. Ok - let’s stop with this bully bullshit, please. Kids get bullied around 11-12 years old - by high school, 14 years on, that doesn’t happen nearly as often, and by the time people are in university? Ridiculous. And to show how badass Elektra is, generic street punks straight out of Central Casting corner her in an alley off Times Square (the book’s showing its age here, back when Times Square wasn’t the Disney-fied tourist trap it is today).
I don’t dislike John Romita Jr’s art but he doesn’t do much in showing the reader how Matt uses his senses to defeat his opponents. With Chris Samnee’s art in his run with Mark Waid, you got a great idea of how Matt “sees” with radar - Romita doesn’t do anything like that. His Daredevil simply concentrates - really hard - ie. stares blankly, and then fights. It’s not very imaginative visually. I’m not a huge Daredevil fan so I don’t know if this is the first time Matt dons the black ninja outfit that’s appeared numerous times over the years but it looks pretty good here.
If Miller’s writing up to this point has been lazy, he tries even less with that borderline comedic ending. Matt saves Some Girl from Some Bad Guy by thwacking bullets back at the Bad Guy with his stick like they were baseballs and he was holding a bat! It’s SO dumb.
The first third of the book is fine - it’s about as good as any retelling of Daredevil’s origins as you’ll find out there - but things really turn rotten from Foggy’s entrance onwards and the feeble Kingpin story leading to Matt putting on the tights is nonsensical slop. I’m not sure I’d point people towards Jeph Loeb/Tim Sale’s Daredevil: Yellow as an alternative, because it’s about the same as this crap, but rather the Bendis/Waid runs instead for a better understanding of Matt’s origin.
Some origin stories don’t need to take centre stage and can be told more effectively in pieces as part of a larger, better storyline - Daredevil’s origins are one such example. Maybe I’d think differently if this was my first exposure to Daredevil’s origin, but knowing it as well as I do, Daredevil: The Man Without Fear was a very underwhelming read that hasn’t aged well.
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