Comic Review #19: Daredevil: Father #1-6 (2006)

 

I think Daredevil is a really great character and the vast majority of his stories are fun as hell to read. I'm even talking about the Silver Age and Bronze Age Daredevil stories that people always seem to not talk about and if they do they bad mouth them. A lot of them were incredibly fun I though. There's a good chance that if you pick up a Daredevil comic you'll have fun with it. For the people who don't know Daredevil was created by Stan Lee and Bill Everett in 1964. He was blinded while saving an blind old man from being hit with a truck. He lost his eye sight but he gained a radar sense and heightened the other four senses. With these powers he became a super hero. A very unique take on the superhero honestly, and he's one of two superheroes that I can think of that are lawyers, the other being She-Hulk. Maybe that's why his stories are usually at least fun to read there's a lot of ways to take the story.

Anyway, you'd be thinking to yourself, Oh hey, a positive comic review, well no. This story falls under what I call "LOOK THIS IS GRIM AND GRITTY AND SERIOUS DAD COMIC BOOKS AREN'T JUST FOR KIDS DAD LOOK IM SERIOUS". I'm not bad mouthing dark stories. Chris Claremont's X-Men were usually fantastic for 17 years and they had some dark ass stories within them. I'm just talking about stories that feel like they were written by edgy teenagers and not adult men. Daredevil: Father is a story about a woman coming to Daredevil for legal services. Some industry in New Jersey (hi Damien) gave her cancer and now she wants to sue them. There's also a serial killer going around and killing people and plucking their eyes out. And a new group of heroes that I honestly felt would have probably worked better in a different story. Just me though. Oh I'm going to ruin the story for you now so if you still want to read it run away fast! 

You know the blind old man who Daredevil saved. The plot device, you know not even a character, just a damn plot device that no one really cared about. Yes, that guy. Well it turns out that Joe Quesada loved him and made him a part of this story 42 years later! Yes! You wanna know why he's in here and why it feels like a IM EDGY AND COOL AND GRIM AND AWESOME AND THEY JUST RIPPED OUT A GUYS HEART FOR NO REASON AND THATS JUST COOL. The old blind guy is the father of the woman with cancer. And he molested her. Oh and she was the serial killer because she wanted to kill Matt Murdock for saving him. Yep. That's a character point we all needed to hear about. We all needed to know the man that helped give the hero his powers is a fucking child molester. Wonderful. Not depressing in the least.

FINAL VERDICT: Despite some nice art (some of it looks wonky) this is just a story that's not really worth telling. You can tell a much better story about how Daredevil's father Battlin' Jack Murdock had an impact on him, other people in the Marvel Comics world have. This one is just lame. Buy it for the art if you gotta but not for any kind of story.