Daredevil In five Seasons, 3: inside & Out

Season 3: Inside & Out
(showrunners: Brian Michael Bendis & Ed Brubaker)

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.