FSC: DAREDEVIL #181

Going into 1982, there was no comic book series that was of greater interest to me and my small collection of comic book reading friends as DAREDEVIL. The title had been gaining momentum ever since newcomer artist Frank Miller had been brought on to pencil it a year or two earlier. Miller’s storytelling chops were self-evident, and became stronger and more graphic over time, elevating some otherwise pedestrian stories into something more meaningful. Editor Denny O’Neil evidently had a lot of faith in Miller’s potential, as he soon let him write the series as well, and it became virtually an entirely different series. Gone were the faux Spider-Man villains and the playful banter. Now, Daredevil had more in common with DC’s Batman, a dark figure of justice whose world was a lot more grounded and realistic (for all that it also included a lot of ninjas and stuff.) Dialogue and copy were stripped down, permitting the artwork to carry a greater percentage of the narrative.

Miller made DAREDEVIL a top series, one that other creators began to emulate to one degree or another. He turned the Kingpin from just another goonish adversary of Spider-Man’s into a dangerous and unbeatable force, and crafted Bullseye into a character to take seriously despite his origins as just another gimmick super-villain. Miller channeled a lot of his love for the work of Will Eisner into his approach, and nowhere was that more apparent than in his creation of Elektra, the woman from Daredevil’s past who had broken bad and who was now an assassin for hire. She started out as a riff on Eisner’s Spirit character Sand Saref before growing in her own direction. Over the course of several months, Miller had kept the stew of these characters and others bubbling, but the main event happened in this special double-sized issue. It was upsized for no particular reason; it wasn’t a centennial issue nor an obvious anniversary. But it signified that something important was about to happen, and just as with X-MEN #137 a year or two previous, it would prove to be climactic.

The other person whose work needs to be acknowledged on this run of DAREDEVIL and who is too often overlooked is Klaus Janson. Klaus had been inking the series before Miller came onto it, providing prior pencilers as diverse as Gene Colan and Carmine Infantino with a sense of grit and texture. He and Miller fit together like a hand in a glove, and so as Miller began to focus more of his time and attention on building the story and the overall page layouts and composition, Klaus wound up doing more and more of the finished artwork. To achieve greater control over the finished pages, Klaus also took up the coloring of the title, which allowed him to get across wonderfully evocative effects operating from a single viewpoint. While Miller is the one who most often gets the plaudits for the artwork, a good deal of the credit by this point should more rightly go to Janson.

The story in this issue is relatively well known and very well-remembered even after all of these years. And while it’s the culmination to a number of long-running plotlines, like most of the issues surrounding it, it plays as a self-contained single issue story. It focuses on Bullseye, once the Kingpin’s top assassin, now incarcerated after his defeat by Daredevil–who, to add insult to injury, also saved Bullseye’s life before bringing him in. This entire issue is narrated from Bullseye’s point of view, often providing an unreliable narrator’s perspective in the manner in which what Bullseye is thinking and saying clashes with the visuals that we are seeing. It’s an effect that comes across due to the fact that the same person is controlling both the words and the visuals. Having heard that the Kingpin has a new assassin and that he’s been left to rot in prison, Bullseye stages a breakout, determined to take back his number one spot.

Elektra has been hired to bump off Foggy Nelson, Matt Murdock’s law partner, and so Bullseye figures he’ll beat her to the punch and take her out at the same time. Elektra gets to Foggy first, but when he recognizes her from his and Matt’s time in college, she can’t go through with the hit. Just as well, because then Bullseye is there, and what follows is a virtually silent multi-page action sequence in which the two killers attempt to put one another in the ground. Bullseye, though, gets the upper hand, and in the above shot runs Elektra through with her own Sai, a fatal blow. She’s able to stay alive long enough to stagger to Matt Murdock’s brownstone and die in her arms. Despite the blurb on the front cover, this was an entirely unexpected development–Elektra had only recently been introduced and she was suddenly a phenomenally popular character, so the audacity to kill her off in this manner felt similar to X-MEN #137’s death of Jean Grey in terms of having an immediate impact.

In any event, this convinces Bullseye that Matt Murdock must be Daredevil, a theory he tests with a thrown blade that Murdock effortlessly blocks with his cane. Attempting to get back into the Kingpin’s good graces, he brings this information to the Kingpin, who dismisses it as preposterous (otherwise, we could have had “Born Again” years earlier.) But he tells Bullseye that he’ll consider rehiring him if he eliminates Daredevil. This again leads to a multi-page virtually silent showdown, one that begins with DD tricking Bullseye with a dummy figure and a tape recorder to convince him that he isn’t Matt Murdock at all. Shades of the 1950s Superman! The fight is especially brutal for a 1982 comic book produced under the strictures of the Comics Code, and therefore all the more intense as a result.

In the end, we end up with a quasi-reprise of the sequence in the earlier story in which Daredevil saved the stricken Bullseye from an oncoming train. This time, he’s keeping the killer from a fatal flaw. But this time, Daredevil chooses to let go and permit his enemy to plummet to his death, the sort of harsh, hard-boiled choice that super heroes simply didn’t make in 1982 as a matter of course. Given Bullseye’s murder of Elektra, though, this felt entirely earned, and I can’t recall any readers of the time complaining about Daredevil’s actions here (though no doubt there were some.)

As it turns out (and possibly to shave the harshest edge off of Daredevil’s actions) Bullseye survives the fall, though his spine is shattered and he’s hopelessly paralyzed as a result. And the story ends with him silently stewing in his own hate and vowing that he’ll find a way to rise back up from this misfortune and come after Daredevil again. It’s an impactful moment in an issue that was full of them. Among readers of the time, I don’t know that there was any other comic book that we talked about and dissected more than this one issue–certainly my new friend Steve Cicala and I went over it back and forth like a Rosetta stone of comic book storytelling.

As it happens, this issue includes that year’s Statement of Ownership, which will give us a glimpse into just how well DAREDEVIL had been performing the prior 12-18 months or so. This would have been slightly before Miller took over the writing, though well into his time as the artist on the series. It shows that the book was selling 127,625 copies against a print run of 285,143, giving it an efficiency rating of just under 45%. This would have been an increase from the past, and had caused the book to go monthly after languishing as a bimonthly for a while. And this number would only get better as Miller’s time went on.