Season Three picks up with the second half of Daredevil By Brian Michael Bendis And Alex Maleev Utimate Collection Volume Two (3 episodes) Matt Murdock is a scary-ass Kingpin. Luke Cage, Doctor Strange, Reed Richards, Iron Fist, and Spider-Man try to tell him to cut it out, but DD is having none of it. Even his wife (oh yea, he totally got married off-panel) isn't happy about Kingpin Murdock.

Daredevil By Brian Michael Bendis And Alex Maleev Utimate Collection Volume Three (5 episodes) thinks the person to get Murdock out of his funk might be The Black Widow. Maybe? Possibly? But, uhoh, Bullseye is back. Now who's going to be killed? We also get to see who was The Kingpin before Wilson Fisk, and how his life was also ruined by Matt Murdock. We then get an interlude story where a bunch of people whose lives were adversely affected by Daredevil meet in a support group to talk about how Kingpin Murdock has ruined their lives. And we cap-off the Bendis-Maleev run with something that's going to send Murdock to prison. Like, for real.

Daredevil By Ed Brubaker And Michael Lark Ultimate Collection Volume One (5 episodes, also known as Daredevil: Inside & Out) shows what happens when the FBI sends Matt Murdock to prison. And then sends The Kingpin to that same prison. And then sends Bullseye to that same prison. It sounds so interesting that The Punisher turns himself in, just to see how Murdock will survive in prison without revealing that he's actually Daredevil (which everyone totally knows he is). This is a super-fun followup and worthy successor to the Bendis run, which is often considered the best run of comics of the 21st century, so far.

Daredevil By Ed Brubaker And Michael Lark Ultimate Collection Volume Two (4 episodes) won all sorts of awards as Matt Murdock, freshly out of jail has to navigate in the post-Civil War (where heroes battled heroes over the u.s. demanding that all heroes reveal their secret identities and register with the government) Hell's Kitchen. And an old villain returns and completely fucks up Murdock's life in a completely different way than every other villain has fucked up his life. Poor Matt. You think the sheer volume of dead exes he has is sad? What happens to his wife is devastating.


Never has a package been wrapped up so nicely as Daredevil By Ed Brubaker And Michael Lark Ultimate Collection Volume Three (3 episodes) which could totally be the end of the series. Every storyarc from the Miller era onward is put to sleep without resorting to Shakespearean bloodbaths. 



InterSeason Special is, once again, not super-fun. It COULD be its own season but I wouldn't inflict that on you. It's a two-parter: Daredevil: The Devil's Hand by Andy Diggle, Anthony Johnston, Billy Tan, Robert De La Torre and Marco Chechetto ponders what would happen if Matt Murdock/Daredevil were the leader of the ninja clan The Hand, the people who hounded him during the Miller run, and who seem to resurrect Elektra on a fairly regular basis. It's an interesting premise but it, and it's follow-up Shadowland were such a failure, following the Quesada/Smith/Bendis/Brubaker runs, that Marvel asked Diggle to give a flimsy excuse to get as far away from this storyline as possible. It doesn't help that Johnston scripted Diggle's plot, as Johnston's major weakness is his inability to write convincing dialog.

​Season 3 is 20 episodes and an Interseason Special.

Weebly doesn't have a strikethrough feature for text in posts (but it does for their comment sections ... weird), so please imagine the gray text that follows is strikethrough, as it describes a season I set out to create, but, given the mission statement of the "(title of comic) in (number) Seasons", which involved it being The Best of a series, I couldn't, in good faith include any Daredevil comic between Miller's run and Bendis's. None. There's a decent issue here and there, and there are some promising starts to run but they usually veer off into magic or armored suits. And the 21st century writers basically just wrote improved versions of those stories anyway, so .. onward.

Season 2 is almost unchartably awesome. This is when Quesada got rid of the armored-idiocy and had Kevin Smith of Clerks & Mallrats fame write the best short run of DD (the best long run is coming up super soon). 

Serial 1: Daredevil Guardian Devil (2 episodes) is the only sort of magic based DD story I've enjoyed. It's Matt Murdock taking care of a baby who may be either the new messiah or the antichrist. Black Widow, Karen Page, and DD's mom all help take care of the little tyke? angel? demon? Dr. Strange and (the very briefly involved) Mephisto aren't super helpful, and when Bullseye shows up things get very, very bad for everyone.

Before the super-awesomeness continues, Paul Jenkins wrote a storyarc called Episode 3: Daredevil/Spider-Man Marvel Knights that, because of when he was writing it, didn't get a ton of attention but is an important glimpse into the relationship between Peter Parker and Matt Murdock, and that is going to be an important relationship for the future.

But now, the superawesomeness. Serial 2: Daredevil Parts Of A Hole (2 episodes) introduces our blind protagonist to the deaf assassin, Echo. While her character's story is cool enough (her father was Kingpin's right hand man until he was killed by...someone) what makes this story so fantastic is Quesada's layouts and art. The broken Quesada panels and the uncredited David Mack art (he's the writer, and if he didn't do the art on some of these pages, then Quesada absolutely nailed Mack's art style) are as vibrant and entrancing as Seinkewicz's art was creepy and unsettling. It must have been daunting to have to follow this storyline, but the next art team was more than up to the task.

Serial 3: Daredevil By Brian Michael Bendis And Alex Maleev Ultimate Collection Volume One (5 episodes) (with David Mack doing the art for the award-winning first storyarc) is non-stop Holy Shit. The first arc has Daily Bugle reporter Ben Urich wanting to write an article on a little boy whose father was third-rate DD villain, Leapfrog. The boy is obsessed with DD and keeps drawing and telling the same stories about him. How is the kid tied into Matt Murdock's life? Then, the disgraced son of a crimelord has decided that The Kingpin's reign needs to end and he absolutely destroys Murrdock's life in the process, leaving the media and the FBI to wonder can Matt Murdock really be Daredevil? Maleev's art in this volume is not as inventive as the Quesada/Mack issues but it is the perfect accompaniment to Bendis's gritty DD aura.

Taking a brief break from Murdock's horrible life, we follow Brian Michael Bendis to Serial 4: Alias Ultimate Collection Volume One (2 episodes), where we meet disgraced former Avenger and not so popular private investigator, Jessica Jones as she tries to find her place in the Marvel Universe. That this was the first Marvel book to have the word "fuck" appear in it, it's mostly known for Bendis's killer dialog, which became tiresome in his Avengers run but was genre-defining here. Now what does this have to do with Daredevil?

Matt Murdock hires Jessica Jones as a bodyguard in Serial 5: Daredevil By Brian Michael Bendis And Alex Maleev Utimate Collection Volume Two (3 episodes) He needs her because EVERYBODY thinks Matt Murdock is Daredevil and his life is going to shiiiiiiiiiiit. I would actually stop Season 3 in the middle of this volume (issue 50) when Murdock proclaims himself The New Kingpin.



The Inter-Season Special: Daredevil Father is flashback time. As you might imagine from the title focuses on Murdock's relationship with Battlin' Jack. It was written and pencilled by then Marvel Editor-In-Chief, and man who rescued the DD line from the terrible 90s, Joe Quesada. Curse him all you want for things he did to your other favorite comic heroes, the man did great by DD. And this book is a tribute to his own father.


Season 2 is 15 episodes, all killer, no-filler. Plus an inter-season special.

I'll get to the final two seasons of Batman before the end of time (I wrote a Season Eight note that was eaten by Facebook a couple of months ago, and just looking at that pile of books again makes me weep), but in the blindwhile:

With no computer last week, I was able to set aside time for some serious graphic novel reading. I read nearly all of the Daredevil that's been collected in trade format, and decided to make a continuity of my favorite titles for you to enjoy.

Much like the first season of the Batman continuity, a lot of the first season of Daredevil is written by Frank Miller and the team of Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale. Neither Miller nor Loeb are currently my favorite writers (The Frank Miller of the twenty-first century is misogynist, racist, zealot whose work shouldn't even be picked up with borrowed tongs. Seriously, if you pick up a book by Frank Miller with a copyright date that begins with "2", put it down, find an adult, and put a pot on the stove so you can boil your eyes pure again. Post 2007, Jeph Loeb's writing became erratic when his teenage son died, which is much more human and much less problematic than Miller's downfall but still pretty disappointing.) but their early work on two of my favorite comic book characters can't be ignored.

There's a variety of entry points to the Daredevil (hereafter referred to as DD) continuity, including Miller's own origin series "The Man Without Fear" (art by John Romita Jr., another promising talent who has been largely disappointing in the last decade). While Miller's 1980s work on DD is filled with three dimensional characters and interesting plotting, "The Man Without Fear" was written in the mid-nineties and, while not as misogynistic and filled with zealotry as his twenty-first century work, it's still problematic. The man created Elektra Natchios and gave her a cool origin story in his 80s DD run, but in this version of her origin, she's a groin-kicking, oversexed "bad-ass" much like every woman in Sin City. So skip the book entirely and start season one on a happy note.

Serial 1: Daredevil Yellow (2 episodes) by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale is a fun, swashbuckling DD adventure that you won't be seeing again for a looooooooong time. Watch how the son of Battlin' Jack Murdock becomes the blind savior of Hell's Kitchen. You get to meet his close friend Foggy Nelson, and his interesting assistant Karen Page (who is awesome without being a groin-kicking, oversexed bad-ass). You also get to see him face two villains who will become important way down the line. And it's fun to imagine that they were in jail for over an entire season, compared to the revolving door villain problem over in Batman. And, as always, Tim Sale's art is gorgeous.

But now we delve into the Frank Miller run, a weirdly fun 80s continuity. Serial 2: Daredevil Visionaries Frank Miller & Klaus Janson Volume 1 (5 episodes) throws you into a storyline by Roger Mckenzie (and later Dave Michelinie) with pencils by Miller and inks by Janson. DD is an established superhero who works with Russian superspy, The Black Widow by night, but works at the lawfirm of Murdock and Nelson (good old Foggy) during the day. Karen Page is no longer the plucky assistant (don't you hate when they recast roles after an awesome pilot?) and Matt is now involved with a woman named Heather. The villains in this initial run are kooky and fun in a borderline silver-age way, including the hilariously inept criminal Turk (who I'll just hope received the nickname because the man is a turkey and not as a reference to his ethnic origin). It's not too long however before Bullseye shows up, and any time Bullseye is in a DD story, you can be sure somebody important is going to die. There are also cameos from The Hulk, Doctor Octopus, and Spider-Man, and we get to see The Gladiator in action. Although pretty much every issue in this could be a stand-alone story, the world building in the DD series is so much more impressive than the Batman continuity, it's kind of amazing. 

In fact, the stories roll right into Serial 3: Daredevil Visionaries Frank Miller & Klaus Janson Volume 2 (5 episodes) which is one of the most genre-defining superhero stories of its time. Now writing as well as penciling the series, Frank Miller gives us The Elektra saga. Turk, The Kingpin, Bullseye, The Gladiator, and The Hand are twisted around the lives of Matt Murdock and his DD persona. I don't have a heart, so I can't speak to it being wrenching, but it's certainly more emotionally satisfying than most 1980s superhero stories. And there are a lot of densely packed panels of dialog and internal monologue. If you don't know what happens in The Elektra saga, I won't spoil it for you, but daaaaaaaaaamn.

Serial 4: Daredevil Visionaries Frank Miller & Klaus Janson Volume 3 (4 episodes) concludes Season One (so easy to put this season together) by keeping all the same characters from volume two in play and throwing The Punisher into the mix, and bringing The Black Widow back. While Volume 2 is a great example of a character-driven soap-operaesque serial, Volume 3 turns the DD & Bullseye story into a morality play that far outshines the "Why doesn't Batman just kill the Joker?" storylines in the DC universe. I mean the DD / Bullseye relationship is all kinds of fucked up, and it gets almost too-real. The end of the original Frank Miller run has a pretty devastating ending that would have easily worked as the end of the series.

Episode 17: Daredevil Love's Labors Lost, by Dennis O'Neil and Frank Miller, gives us our final story with Heather, and the first real uncluttered glimpse of Foggy & Murdock's complicated friendship. Frank Miller does co-plot the end of the collection, and the highlight is the art by David Mazzucchelli, who worked with Frank Miller on Batman: Year One.

In fact, Mazzucchelli stays on the book for the return of Frank Miller as the writer for Serial 5: Daredevil Born Again (2 episodes), where Karen Page returns and just completely fucks up what's left of Matt Murdock's life. The usual supporting cast: Kingpin, Gladiator, and Foggy all appear, but we also get some time with Captain America, and a villain called Nuke. Plus, maybe, possibly, we meet Matt Murdock's mom.

Now we step slightly away from Matt Murdock's tumultuous life to see Frank Miller and Bill Sienkewicz team up for the first time (this book started to come out a year before "Love And War" but it's a better fit, chronologically, here) in Episode 20: Elektra Assassin. This origin story for Elektra is weeeeeeeeird and wonderful and should probably not be read on hallucinogens.  But it should definitely be read.

If you watch Doctor Who, you know that between seasons (or sometimes between halves of the season) they do a Christmas special which is part of continuity but is usually a break from the overall storyline. In the spirit of that the Midseason Special is a potentially hard to track down graphic novel by Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz called Daredevil Love And War is a creepy story of obsession involving characters you'll never see again, but it's also the love story of The Kingpin and his wife, Vanessa (who was a minor character in Miller/Janson omniboo). While the story is classic good Frank Miller, it's the Sienkewicz art that makes this a creepy must-read.

Season 1 is 20 episodes and a mid-season special.