Forgotten Masterpiece: THE DAREDEVILS #8

Because he was such a popular and influential comic book creator, most everything that Alan Moore wrote for mainstream publishers has been reprinted and in virtually continuous print since he first started writing in the very late 1970s. But occasionally, there’s a little bit of something that’s been overlooked–partly because it appeared in an oddball place, partly because it didn’t really have a comfortable home among other like-minded material to reprint and collect. One such story saw print in the 8th issue of THE DAREDEVILS, the monthly Marvel UK series that was reprinting Frank Miller’s American DAREDEVIL stories and also serializing Captain Britain. THE DAREDEVILS only lasted for 11 issues so it’s scantly remembered in the States after all of these years.

In this issue, Moore and artist Mike Collins produced a savage and on-point satire of the then-current DAREDEVIL series the magazine was reprinting. It’s worth mentioning that this story was produced in the midst of Miller’s run, and so while it takes many of its cues from Miller’s solo issues, it also skewers the earlier Roger McKenzie stories that were then filling pages elsewhere in the issue.

It’s all dopey stuff, with Moore channeling the spirit of the early Harvey Kurtzman MAD stories that he loved so much. And Collins along with inker Mark Farmer does a bang-up job in replicating the style of Miller and his inker/finisher Klaus Janson.