Daredevil In Five Seasons, 2: Guardian Devil

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.
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Almost every popular TV show/comic/serial book/cartoon has a weak season. This is going to be that weak season. I considered not including this, and making it a Daredevil In Four Seasons, but instead, let's call this a Writer's Strike Season. They get in a few interesting episodes, they seem to have a greater goal in mind, but they don't quite reach the tone/conclusion they were hoping for due the deadline of the impending strike.

Seasons Three through Five are amazing, and this will still be better than a bunch of comics that came out around the same time.

When I originally compiled this, Ann Nocenti's run wasn't collected, but now I believe her entire run, and those that immediately followed it have been made into Daredevil Epic Collections. So, here goes, something new.
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Despite what some hardcore Daredevil fans have told me, the Serial 1: Daredevil Epic Collection Vol 13 A Touch Of Typhoid (5 episodes) isn't one of the best Daredevil stories of all time. It's a solid late 80s comics with a very cool idea for a villain: Typhoid Mary, a villain with unclear levels of telekinesis, pyrokinesis, and the ability to control people through hypnotic suggestion. She's also "schizophrenic" in a way that we now understand doesn't really exist. She might have some flavor of Multiple Personality Disorder, but no psychiatrist was consulted for the realism of this character. It was the 80s. Sometimes you write about mental illnesses that you only know through television. She is an interesting spin on a femme fatale, as she is hired by The Kingpin to destroy both Matt Murdock and Daredevil (whom he knows are the same person) without killing him. But she plays all sorts of different angles within the story. There's also recurring children who are there mostly to harshly judge Matt Murdock. The story starts really well but gets bogged down in the uninspiring Inferno crossover of the late 80s, and never really recovers for me. I'm also not a huge John Romita JR fan, though I prefer his 20th century work to his 21st century work. But while this was only about a three star book for me, there's a lot of interesting story packed in, and I think it's the highlight of Nocenti's run.

(The rest of Nocenti's run is NOT part of my Season Two because: I read Nocenti's follow-up to A Touch Of Typhoid, Daredevil: The Lone Stranger, and it was not to my liking. It has a lot of fantasy/magic that the just doesn't make sense to me in the DD world established by Miller and Loeb.  And any time Mephisto appears in the Marvel Universe, it's almost guaranteed to be terrible. I actually couldn't finish this volume, even when just skimming it. BUT while it may just be not to my liking, I am pretty sure there's a common consensus among DD fans that Daredevil: Fall From Grace is an almost astoundingly awful collection of comics.  It came out recently as part of Marvel's EPIC COLLECTIONS, and I remembered seeing the cover art for the Fall From Grace storyline looked pretty cool. Well, the aphorism about books and covers exists for a reason. This is pure unfiltered 90s crap. There's an almost Vertigo {the DC line, not the phobia or the U2 song} color palette, there's some questionable storytelling but most of all there's the unforgivably cheesy Daredevil armor-centric uniform.  Also, at one point, DD asks Captain America "You want to dance with me, soldier-boy" in a scene that looks like it was written by someone who'd not only never read a DD comic, but had never heard of the character before. DO NOT SPEND MONEY on this collection, but pick it up in a library or book store, flip through it, and bask in the knowledge that it can't hurt you anymore.)
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Season 2: Guardian Devil
(showrunners: Brian Michael Bendis & Joe Quesada)

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.


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 on Miller's run 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 Murdock'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.


Serial 4: Alias Ultimate Collection Volume One (2 episodes) 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? Well, at the end of the volume, Jessica and Luke Cage are hired to be his bodyguards. Mark Gaydos is the artist on this, and he he sets up a template for how to draw conversations that include constant interruption or long silences that many artists will use as inspiration. Bendis is truly excellent at choosing artists that work well with particular stories.

Serial 5: Daredevil By Brian Michael Bendis And Alex Maleev Utimate Collection Volume Two (3 episodes) Man, Matt Murdock needs Luke Cage and Jessica Jones as bodyguards because EVERYBODY thinks Matt Murdock is Daredevil. He also meets a new romantic interest so let's hope we don't see Bullseye again anytime soon.


Serial 6: Alias Ultimate Collection Volume Two (2 episodes). Matt Murdock's reliable bodyguard gets her origin story. We also see her plopped into the Spider-Man portion of the Marvel Universe when J Jonah Jameson's life intersects with hers in a couple of different ways, which also ends up involving Ben Urich, setting up Jessica Jones's more mainstream title.


Episode 17: Elektra Introspection. What's Matt's formerly dead assassin ex-girlfriend up to this season? Oh, you know, her work has dried up and it turns out some of her victims' surviving relations have decided to either kill her or cure her from blood lust. 

 
Episode 18: The Pulse Thin Air. Former private eye, Jessica Jones is now a superhero reporter for The Daily Bugle? Oh, and she's pregnant and adjusting to life in a stable relationship. But as soon as she's hired as a reporter she needs to track down the identity of someone who murdered one of her new colleagues, so I guess life isn't too different.

Episode 19: The Pulse Secret War. Someone has attacked Luke Cage and Jessica Jones in their home, and he is super hurt. While he's in the hospital, Captain America and Nick Fury show up and Jessica has no idea what's going on. While trying to help her solve the mystery, Ben Urich gets a call from a former source saying that it's time to bury Nick Fury. What could possibly be going on?

Episode 20: Secret War. The answer to the last episode's mystery pulls in Wolverine, Spider-Man, Daredevil, Quake (yes, from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.), the Fantastic Four and more. What the hell did Nick Fury do?


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 20 episodes, all killer, no-filler. Plus an inter-season special.