Daredevil: Born Again by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli

I'm sure I've re-read this story since 1986. You can't prove it from this blog, though. And my copy of  the trade paperback is the original 1987 edition, with minimal credits and supplemental material, from the era when the Big Two were still figuring out the whole reprint-floppies-in-a-permanent-format thing. (I'm not sure how I can have a copy of that edition, since mine would have died in my 2011 flood, but I do and I'm looking at it now.)

This storyline obviously followed Frank Miller's original run on Daredevil by several years: he'd worked, mostly with Klaus Janson inking his pencils and taking over writing midway through the run, on that series from 1979 through 1983, in material that's now collected in three good-sized volumes.

Daredevil: Born Again collects issues 227-233 of the series, a discrete seven-issue storyline written by Miller and drawn by David Mazzucchelli. Like a lot of now-famous mid-80s Big Two stories ("The Anatomy Lesson" is another major example), it's a strong, specific story whose bones have been scattered and re-used by a thousand other hands since then to the point that they've become a cliché.

This is the ur-"villain systematically destroys the hero" story - the next most influential version, I think, is "Kraven's Last Hunt," about Spider-Man, from a few years later. But there are dozens of others by this point: everyone who has had an ongoing series over the last three decades has probably been broken down by now.

They all get better, of course. Daredevil gets better in this one. IP can't be left to wither on the vine.

The specifics here: Karen Page, a former girlfriend of Daredevil, went off to Hollywood to make her fortune a few years earlier. It didn't work out; she quickly got addicted, descended into vaguely-described porn, and found herself somewhere in Mexico with a bad habit and no resources. Well, she had one thing worth selling: the real identity of Daredevil (the New York lawyer Matt Murdock).

She sells that; the letter with her note makes its way to New York and Daredevil's biggest enemy Kingpin; and Kingpin decides to use it to, as villains always say, destroy everything the hero loves or cares about.

Murdock's utilities are shut off, the IRS audits him and freezes his accounts, and a corrupt cop brings evidence that will lead to his disbarment. Murdock already had paranoid tendencies, and he quickly spirals out of control, which overjoys the Kingpin.

But Kingpin also then blows up Murdock's brownstone home, which even a paranoid, spiraling Murdock realizes was done by someone. And, since he's a character in an adventure comic, he knows, correctly, who that was.

Things go on from there - I might sound dismissive, but the story is compelling and told well, with precise, emotionally taut scenes and magnificent character work from both Miller (here still underplaying emotion, unlike later in his career) and Mazzucchelli. There is a lot of violence, since this is a superhero comic, but most of it is shocking and a lot of it is fatal, which was not standard for this era. There's even a comic-relief gangster who talks in malapropisms to keep it all from being unrelievedly grim, and a great supporting-character role for Captain America in the big climax.

Miller constructs a new reality for his main characters out of the broken pieces he reduced them to, which is one of the things that became most cliched about this kind of story. That's not on Miller - it was an ongoing series; he had to leave something for the next writer to work with - but it has become a central aspect of superhero comics since, the big storyline in which everything changes and launches an exciting new direction in the saga of <insert name here>.

I think you can read this with only the vaguest sense of who Daredevil and his supporting characters are. He's a guy in a red costume; he's in New York; his civilian identity is a lawyer. The big fat crimelord hates him. And you get that all from the story itself.

This is still probably the best first Daredevil story for any reader, as well as the best full-stop Daredevil story. I don't think that's faint praise, but it does need to be contextualized: this is a genre exercise, from an era when that genre was opening itself to new influences and story-telling techniques, and one of the early attempts to "write to the arc" that was entirely successful. It is a darn good story about guys who dress up in long underwear, run around rooftops, and beat each other up - but it's still a long-underwear story at its heart.