Daredevil by Frank Miller & Klaus Janson, Vol. 3
Credits are always a tricky thing for assembly-line comics. Projects tend to have a particular, clear breakdown of responsibilities – this guy writes, that other guy draws, a third guy inks – but those comics tended to be monthly, and monthly deadlines lead to messiness. (Ask the guy who spent sixteen years in a business that had a minimum of seventeen “months” a year.)
And creators want to work with each other – sometimes the same crew for a while, sometimes a one-off with that idol of theirs or the new guy doing interesting stuff.
When it comes to gather all of that messiness into a book, sometimes the publishers err on the side of simplicity. The first time the “Frank Miller Daredevil” was collected, it was under roughly that title, even though Klaus Janson drew the vast majority of those stories. For the second go-round, Marvel decided they needed to add Janson to the title, which makes a lot of sense.
But it meant that there was a first book with stories mostly written by or with other people, one of them inked by Frank Springer, and most of them drawn by Miller and inked by Janson. And then a second book that really was all Miller/Janson, the core of the run.
And this third, concluding volume gets messy again, with Daredevil by Frank Miller & Klaus Janson, Vol.3 collecting not just the climax of their run together – Daredevil issues 186-191 – but several odder and quirkier things, several of which Janson had nothing to do with. So it’s yes Frank Miller, as before, and some embarrassed shuffling of feet about how much Janson there is.
There are three quirkier things, so I’ll take them first, in the order they appear in the book and in increasing order of importance and strength.
Miller and Janson did an issue of What If…? in 1981, with co-writer Mike W. Barr, asking the comical question “What if Matt Murdock became an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.?” It would be a very standard late-’70s, early-’80s Marvel comic, much like the stories in the first Miller/Janson volume, is what. Talky, obvious, full of cramped panels and way too much narration from that boring bald giant on the moon. This is included, I assume, for completionists.
Miller returned to Daredevil for a one-off issue, #219, in mid-’85 (about a year before the Born Again sequence with David Mazzucchelli), apparently in large part to work with John Buscema. The credits are a bit vague – the splash page credits everything to Miller (with an asterisk), Buscema, and inker Gerry Talaoc – but I assume Miller wrote this story and did layouts that Buscema finished. This is a hardboiled “crooked town” story in twenty-ish pages, with Matt Murdock (out of costume) wandering into this Jersey hellhole and incidentally (and almost accidentally) cleaning it up on his way back out. This story has many of the weaknesses of both Marvel comics of the era and Miller in particular, but it’s a solid piece that works on its own level.
And the last eighty pages or so of this book incorporate the 1986 graphic novel Daredevil: Love & War, written by Miller and drawn by Bill Sienkiewicz, in what ended up being a try-out for their Elektra: Assassin project almost immediately afterward. This is very much a one-off, but it’s glorious and energetic, with Sienkiewicz at the height of his ’80s inventiveness and Miller’s multiple-narrators captions working quite well. Daredevil himself doesn’t actually do a lot in this story, actually – he is necessary to the plot, I’ll admit, but he also sets off for a whole lot of derring-do that fizzles entertainingly.
I’ve left the meat of the book for last: issues 186-191 is the big ninja storyline, the single most important vector for their takeover of American culture (particularly comics culture) later in the ’80s. But we can’t blame Miller and Janson for that. The stories are muscular and taut, with Miller dialing down his wordiness and telling this story visually a lot more than was standard for Marvel at the time. It includes all the greatest hits of the Miller Daredevil: Matt’s mentor Stick and the small band of good-guy ninjas he leads, his dead-but-gets-better global-assassin ex-girlfriend Elektra, the super-evil ninjas of The Hand and their world-domination plots, the Kingpin, and a cameo by currently-paralyzed assassin Bullseye.
Those issues, though, in the best Marvel Manner, actually starts with some hugger-mugger about Matt’s current girlfriend, Heather Glenn, and the family company she supposedly runs that has gotten involved with…gasp! horror!…some kind of munitions work. As usual with Big Two comics of this era, both the legal and the business details are ludicrous and unbelievable to anyone who is not twelve, and all of the characters talk about it in mind-numbing detail that only proves how little any of the creative team involved understood law or business. But, eventually, the Heather subplot ends and we get to the ninjas, who are thankfully much quieter.
My takeaway from this, and the whole mass of Miller/Janson Daredevil stories, is that everything is part of its time and place. The best of this material is as good as any adventure stories in comics form anyone has made over the past century. But a lot of it is dull, cliched and obvious, rolling out wallpaper-like standard plots, themes, and concepts that are third-hand at best and threadbare if you look too closely. The three Daredevil books have nearly a thousand pages of comics: three to four hundred of that is pretty darn good. The rest you need to slog through to get to the high points.
Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.
