The Fractal Hall Journal

Frank Miller’s Daredevil run is a classic work, defining the character so well that creators still follow his lead almost 30 years after his debut on the title. This isn’t a bad thing, at all, because Miller crafted one of the most efficient storytelling engines ever with his take on Matt Murdock. Daredevil as initially conceived had some great hooks; a blind lawyer with every other sense enhanced, with the background of a street fighter and the skill of an acrobat. But the character was unfairly considered a Spider-Man take off, and never made the A-list until Miller. As I mentioned earlier this week, it wouldn’t be that difficult to define the character differently pre- and post-1980.

Core genre: Now this is interesting, because here we see a way to reconcile both eras, in a way. Miller places the character very clearly within “crime”. That’s where his interest was, that’s the direction he wanted to take the character in. It’s probably fair to say he was more interested in the Kingpin and his henchfolks that in Murdock. The earlier Daredevil was more of a swashbuckler and adventurer. And as with Green Arrow, it’s easy to see the overlap between pulp-adventurers and noir-type crime stories. I think Daredevil lies somewhere within that overlap.

A) A blind man with super-senses
B) Radar sense
C) The skills of a street brawler and an acrobat
D) A devil costume
E) Lawyer alter-ego.
F) A contradictory inner-conflict

It’s a fairly long list of factors, all essential. It’s a testament both to his creators and to Miller that Daredevil’s engineering is so simple, obvious and elegant, yet is the foundation of so much conflict and complexity.

I’ll get the psychology out of the way first. This is maybe Miller’s most important addition, a recognition of contradiction in a Catholic who dresses as a devil while engaged in good works. He’s a blind man who’s more aware than any around him, a wealthy man in a white-collar job with working class origins in a dangerous neighbourhood, a lawyer who breaks the law every single night.

From a pulp-adventurer standpoint, it doesn’t matter that Daredevil hasn’t got particularly supervillainy bad guys. A largely faceless set of common crooks, organised criminals and ninjas are in keeping with a protagonist who needs a lot of cannon-fodder to prove his mettle. Personally, I’m not keep on Daredevil’s ninja stuff, but it’s in keeping with his genre. I suppose the reason I question it is that I prefer Daredevil to be more of a brawling street fighter than a Batman-type martial artist, Murdock being the son of his father, a working class boxer. And I think Daredevil would be comfortable with playing dirty if he had to. Again, we see another contrast within the character: a graceful acrobat but a brutal fighter.

Because of his enhanced senses, he’s one of the characters who can locate and contextualise his villains most easily. One perspective the film took that I thought was quite interesting was the way he fought one battle in the courtroom every day, and continued it at night if justice wasn’t done. Of course, he’s not really meant to be a prosecutor, so it doesn’t quite work as a status quo, but it’s an interesting take. It’s better in the comics, I think, because as a defender, it gives him the chance to rehabilitate these villains, to mitigate their circumstances. There’s the good works again, and yet another contradiction: the very same man who hunts and maims them so brutally is responsible for dusting them off the next day. His day job becomes essental as a way of placing his villains, of understanding his villains, in a context beyond the hunt/fight/tie them up for the police pattern of most heroes.

The radar sense is an important element, mostly because it’s really cool. Seriously, it’s one of the all-time great powers. I can see why it’s sometimes played down, in particular when writers want to make him more of a skilled ninja who senses his environment via sound and the movement of air (see Miller and JR Jr’s Man Without Fear miniseries), but I think it serves a good purpose as part of Murdock’s power set and his story themes. It means he sees nothing, and everything.

Addendum: After writing the above, plok mentioned a few things in regard to Daredevil in the comments of another post. There are a few things in there that made me think (and if you’ve been following these delineation posts without taking a look at the comments, you’re missing some excellent points and counter-points from plok, Will and Will). One thing that is obvious is that this post has been almost entirely about post-Miller DD, unavoidable generally because his take has become the dominant one, and specifically because I haven’t read that much of the 70s Daredevil. That’s something I need to remedy, and I suspect will lead to a post in the near future that addresses this.

1) “The very most topmost important thing about DD is that he’s blind.” Absolutely. Not least because it drains colour from Murdock’s viewpoint, setting up yet another contrast. The Marvel U is a colourful world, even in the noir-corner Daredevil inhabits. The use of colour (red in particular, of course) is very important in Miller’s run, and even in the blurry murk of the Bendis/Maleev stories (I really need to start introducing examples to back some of this up. Bear with me, these follow-ups are coming). But colour, and light, are things Murdock hasn’t seen since he was a child.

2) “I maintain the difference between him and Batman is… he enjoys his crimefighting life.” I haven’t touched on this, but I certainly should underline that just because I think Matt Murdock is contradictory and conflicted, it doesn’t mean I think he has to be particularly grim. To play him straight down the line miserable is a mistake, I think, and something that takes subtlety from the character. I think it’s interesting that even though he gets shat on more than almost any other hero, the writers still aren’t able to go all the way and portray him as bloody and merciless. He isn’t, after all, the Punisher.

3) “DD isn’t driven (he caught his Joe Chill in issue #1).” Which ties in to the above. If he’s at all compelled in his adventuring, it’s because he loves to do it. This character loves conflict, thrives on it. He has to, considering what the writers usually inflict on him. Murdock takes pleasure in these contradictions.

Lawyer and criminal, hunter and defender, grinning adventurer and tortured Catholic. Matt Murdock and Daredevil.

Click here for the Delineation Archive.

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I’ve avoided the psychology of superheroes up until now, for a couple of reasons. The biggest one is that different writers will have vastly different views regarding a character’s motivations, and it’s pretty unlikely that, with the exception of particularly radical interpretations, an editor will question differing psychological approaches. Which is fine, really, as every writer brings their own perspective to their work. I’ve concentrated instead on the elements that can, or should, be consistant across the board. We may argue about whether Batman is a Republican, Democrat, or utterly uninterested in politics, and back it up with an analysis of his personality, but whether or not he drives around in a black car with a fin on it somewhere isn’t really up for grabs.

In doing so, I have skipped over a few things, one of which occurred to me while reading Will Shetterly’s comments on the Batman delineation. His assertion that Batman is a “mystery” character gave me pause for thought.

Let’s me put it like this: Batman and Daredevil are not the same character. We can list the similarities between them (and there are many), and just as easily list the disparities (one has superpowers and a working-class origin, the other hasn’t, etc.) Sooner or later, we fixate on the psychological reasons why they’re different, and I think we’ve got to a point in comics writing where psychological reasons have become the single most important factor that writers think about. It’s only a small step to reason that Batman and Daredevil react to different situations because Batman’s outlook is shaped by an affluent upbringing and the loss of his parents at an early age, while Daredevil’s motivations are controlled by an inner conflict between different drives (how very Catholic; indeed, how very Frank Miller) set up by the contradictory things he learned from his father.

The psychology aside, we ask, are Batman and Daredevil that different? No, is the answer we’re given. Miller worked on Daredevil, therefore he’s the perfect writer for Batman. Brubaker broke through on Batman, let’s get him on Daredevil. Why oh why can’t Bendis get his hands on Gotham?

I think what causes the confusion is that there are two different types of “crime” story in play here. I don’t want to get too tied up in semantics, and forgive me if I’m using the incorrect terminology, but I’m essentially referring to “mystery” and “hard-boiled” fiction. The former tends towards an external intellectual challenge for the protagonist, while the latter is concerned with a character’s inner conflict as well as any conflict with other characters.

Miller’s stroke of genius was in realising that as a Catholic dressed as the Devil, as a man who’s father indirectly taught him to fight, while simultaneously teaching him that fighting was the one thing he should never do, Matt Murdock’s inner life would be a fucking battlefield. It made him the perfect character for Miller to use to explore hard-boiled pulp fiction in the Marvel U. It also created the situation where I could write a delineation for pre-Miller Daredevil and post-Miller Daredevil seperately. It’s a situation that may well be repeated over at DC, as I suspect “Green Lantern” and “Geoff Johns’ Green Lantern” are two separate entities.

The problem is, Batman isn’t conflicted, at least, not where his various identities are concerned. In fact, in order to conceive of a situation where Batman was conflicted about his identity, Miller had to go to two different extremes; the very beginning of his career, and the very end. The problem lies in the middle bit.

You see, all too often we’re led to believe that there’s a conflict between Bruce Wayne and Batman, a tension between what either identity desires. This just isn’t true. Playboy Wayne and Batman are just two different masks, two different sets of tools, that are utilised by a third personality; rather, the only personality. This Bruce Wayne doesn’t necessarily want to live in Batman’s world, but he doesn’t necessarily want to live in the playboy’s world either. He wants nothing more that to finally be able to hang up these different disguises. But that’s not going to happen until he can be sure that his city is safe, and that no child will ever have to go through what he had to. This is Bruce Wayne as the obsessive master strategist, but also an altruist who spends his fortune almost recklessly, not on wine and women but on his mission. This is the man who raised his sons to be heroes. That’s not Daredevil. That’s not anything like Daredevil.

I think Frank Miller did a lot of good work at both companies, but while his take on Daredevil created a lot of potential for the character, it badly limited Batman by encouraging other writers to wander down the wrong path. They chose “hard-boiled” over “mystery”. What it comes down to, beyond the psychology of it all, is that the two characters interact with their respective villains in completely different ways, and if we accept that superhero stories are, when you get right down to it, based around these interactions then it follows that they must be two different kinds of stories. Batman is a mystery story. He finds his villains through detective work. Daredevil is a pulp adventurer, so he hits people in Josie’s Bar until they tell him where the Kingpin is. Think of any story where the Dark Knight does the same thing. Can you honestly tell me it wouldn’t have been a better Batman tale if he’d solved a puzzle or found a clue rather than duffing up a goon? Yes, Batman should duff up goons, but that should be how he deals with them, not how he puts them in context.

I haven’t done a good job of explaining what I mean when I say that. I need to do some posts where I back up some of these assertions. That’s something I’ll address shortly. In the meantime, thanks to all the new folks who’ve turned up recently, and to all the regulars who keep on coming round. It’s very much appreciated.

I think it’s time to switch companies, and have a closer look at Marvel’s take.

Click here for the Delineation Archive.

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Joe Kelly’s departure from the X-Men marks the point where I’d given up on Marvel titles. Let’s not even think about what the fuck was going on over in Spider-Man.

The bankruptcy was the best thing that happened to the company.

For a while during the early 00s, it seemed that Marvel were willing to do anything, no matter how nuts, to their characters. Daredevil was better than it had been since Miller, Priest’s Black Panther was (and still is, to this day) the most intelligent political thriller ever to be written in a superhero title; maybe one of the most sophisticated runs of any comic ever. Bendis’ Ultimate Spider-Man was just brilliant, and with Ultimate X-Men first and the Ultimates later Mark Millar was about to define what became Marvel’s house writing style for the decade.

I was a massive fan of Babylon 5, so you can imagine how much I was looking forward to the Great Maker’s Amazing Spider-Man. But hands down the craziest, and best, decision was to get Grant Morrison on New X-Men.

I’m not a Chris Claremont fan. So it’s incredibly easy for me to say that Morrison’s X-Men is head and shoulders above every other attempt to write with those characters. It seemed that he was willing to do anything with the title, an exercise in sheer imagination and possibility. Never mind Millar on Fantastic Four: Kirby’s legacy was carried forward in this title.

I’m not sure whether, from a creative standpoint, Marvel learned the right lessons from their successes. Jemas-era Marvel shows the incredible possibilities of writers left to do whatever they want. Instead, it seems that interesting elements of the Ultimates, New X-Men and Straczynski and Bendis’s work have been cherry-picked and then applied to years of interminable “events”. I can’t fault the marketing/business side of things; the sales figures say it all, and who’d have thought that the Avengers would become a brand to dominate even the mighty X, and without a film to back it up?

Like I say, I like new and fresh perspectives. It’s even important that the “industry” is more switched-on in business terms (Christ, I remember when the X-Men movie was a huge, global success, yet the comics of the time not only ignored it, but went out of their way to be hostile to any possible new readership that may have happened along). I’m not sure that the correct way to exploit this is to just overlay a style that was interesting five years ago on every fucking title that’s released.

Because what we have now, once again, is editorial-driven comics. Civil War/Secret Invasion dominates everything, and stifles the creativit of the individual titles that are meant to support it. To my mind they just aren’t enjoyable to read, or at the very least nowhere near as enjoyable as Morrison’s X-Men or JLA, or even Bendis’ first hundred Ultimate Spider-Man issues.

If I’ve got any conclusion to arrive at, it’s this: DC and Marvel have both chosen to stick to editorially mandated paths, the only difference (and the heart of why one company is doing better than the other) is that DC chose their path ten years ago rather than five, which makes it appear less “fresh”. But it’s only relative, because God knows Marvel’s approach started to look stale before World War Hulk.

Damn, I’ve gotten all pessimistic again. But one thing cheers me no-end. There’s never been a better time to be a Transformers fan.

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I don’t like writing negative reviews of things. You know, apart from the I Am Legend one. Oh, that was a fucking pleasure. I feel a little bad about going after comics based heavily on the 70s satellite-era yesterday: my point isn’t that they’re not necessarily good comics, it’s just that there’s a significant element to them that not only leaves me cold, but is almost deliberately ambivalent to me as a reader, in that it isn’t really for me.

So I don’t mean to be critical when I say that there are some writers that I don’t find as engaging as others. There are a lot who I think are objectively pretty poor, and that’s usually confirmed by the views of others. But what I find interesting are the writers championed by people I respect whom I don’t necessarily feel the same way about.

Forgive my less than incisive critical insight, by most of the time I couldn’t really tell you why I like some of the writers I do. The example I always use is Tom Clancy: a hackish doorstop-crafting right winger whose work I really dig for no good reason at all. It doesn’t even make sense to me.

In comic book terms, there are a number of writers who I really rate. Grant Morrison, of course. Mark Waid, John Rogers, Geoff Johns’ Green Lantern, Matt Fraction, the Phonogram guys. And there are just as many who I don’t really get: Sean McKeever, Tony Bedard, most of the Marvel Adventures writers. Here’s a couple of controvertial ones: Dan Slott and Gail Simone. Both are excellent writers that just don’t really click with me, even though I like some of their work well enough. And I have no idea why, other than the fact that somethings don’t click, and that’s just that. And I’m really not having a go. I mean, I didn’t get a hang of Shakespeare until last year, and that’s not bad company to be in, fiction-wise.

It’s not to say that there aren’t greyish areas. I think some of Mark Millar’s work is really good- Swamp Thing and Red Son in particular- and some of it I’m not keen on. As much as I love Bendis’ Ultimate Spider-man, I was a bit luke-warm on his Daredevil, and by virtue of familiarity some of his dialogue ticks have started to get a little annoying. I’d assumed Ed Brubaker was just another mediocre Bat-hack, but you don’t need me to tell you that Criminal is amazing, and his Daredevil may well be the best since Frank Miller’s.

I mention John Rogers above, and it’s his and Keith Giffen’s Blue Beetle that’s prompted the post in a way. I’ve said before that I’m never picking up a title just to keep the run consistent, and I’m certainly not getting any fillers ever again. And unfortunately, as much as I want to support the book, I don’t think I’ve ever read a filler comic I’ve ever liked, and I’m not liable to pick up Will Pfeifer’s issues.

That said, and in complete contradiction to the above, I’m absolutely picking up the Spanish-language one-off because it sounds like a fantastic and intriguing experiment. Maybe fill-ins would have a better rep if they all tried to do something a bit different.

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Let’s cross the beams and talk about a different genre that shares a few things with SF.

Crime fiction has sometimes been dismissed in much the same way spaceships and unicorns have been. But unlike the latter examples a certain amount of rehabilitation has taken place. Writers like Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler have been reassessed as proper literature (to a certain extent), and in the cinema crime drama is practically the definition of worthy film-making. Crime fiction is considered a true literary pursuit (The Name of the Rose, for example).

But back in the day pulp fiction was nothing but lurid, base entertainment, often sharing creators with SF, fantasy, horror and, of course, comics. Even now the crime section in bookshops is kept separate just incase the real fiction catches something. In fact, the reason I started reading crime stuff was that I was responsible for the section as well as SF when I worked in the bookshop. And there are plenty of crime authors that have no ambitions beyond formula. Despite this, why did crime get the promotion to acceptability?

The most obvious answers are believability and a real world setting. Realism may not always be to the forefront, but plot holes are easier to explain when your characters aren’t fighting orcs or driving giant robots. And God knows a good spread of excellent directors were drawn to the genre in a way they weren’t to science fiction.

As with the bookshop example, there’s still a kind of association between crime and SF; just look at how much of the latter works use film noir or detective fiction tropes. It’s particularly noticable in comics today. Frank Miller was perhaps the first to really hammer home his use of Daredevil as a way of writing crime stories. He’s been followed by the likes of Brian Bendis and Ed Brubaker, two mainstream superhero writers who’s interests lie more towards crime fiction than anything else.

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