She never cries.

Daredevil #168

Chosen by me from my shelf for part of my theme week.

Yes they spelt her name wrong on the cover.

Yesterday I teased today would be a look at the first time Daredevil became great, which is very unfair to some of the fun stuff that happened in the 166 issues between this one and the first. Especially some of the great art Gene Colan gifted the book with.

But daredevil often struggled with some lousy villains (Man Bull is not all that many issues before this one) and a sense, especially in the Stan Lee days, that character wise he wasn't really all that different from Peter Parker.

Frank Miller's work on this issue writing and art wise is astonishing. The fight sequences are fluid and interesting, the stakes seem clear and high.

It inserts a flashback in-between panels from the first issue, deepening Murdoch and quickly sketching a fascinating new character in Elektra Natchios (at this point repeatedly called a bounty hunter rather than Assassin).

The kind of hard boiled prose that would become Miller's stock in trade is evident in the captions running through the story but it hasn't corrupted into self parody at this point and attached to a story with likeable characters makes it more bearable than a lot of his Sin City nonsense.

A couple of issues later he would take a rather moribund Spider-man villain and give Daredevil his all time best foil. 

It's a really great run.