I am currently about half way through Frank Miller’s early-80’s stint as writer/artist on Daredevil (specifically, Daredevil #168-182, collected in Daredevil Visionaries—Frank Miller Vol. 2. At the time these issues were originally published, I was ten or eleven years old, and primarily a Spider-Man fan, so I wasn’t really reading Daredevil at the time. As a result, I wasn’t really aware of Miller as a superstar writer/artist until his later work on Ronin (1983) and Batman: The Dark Night Returns (1986) for DC a few years later. And of course Miller went on to write/draw Sin City and 300 for Dark Horse Comics in the ‘90s.
Years later, with the title by then in the hands of writer Ed Brubaker and artist Michael Lark, I found myself reading Daredevil on a regular basis. While keeping up with their run on the book, I also went back to a critical point in Daredevil history—the title was cancelled and rebooted under the Marvel Knights imprint in 1998 by writer Kevin Smith and artist Joe Quesada. I went on to catch up with the narrative in trade paperback as it passed through the hands of David Mack, Brian Michael Bendis, Bob Gale, then Bendis once again, until finally arriving back at the point at which (beginning with issue #82) Brubaker and Lark took over.
It’s well known, of course, that most of the best work on the title during this period, both in terms of writing and artwork, can be traced back to Miller’s groundbreaking work on Daredevil in the 1980s (writer/artist teams Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev and Ed Brubaker and Michael Lark provided particularly adept at adapting, interpreting, and expanding Miller’s noirish vision of the character and the world in which he moved). So, naturally, the next step was back to Miller’s Daredevil.
. . . to be continued . . .
