Them Bones: Daredevil #10 Review

If you’d told me even five years ago that I would enjoy a Daredevil comic wherein Daredevil battles a giant underground Sarlacc monster and gets into an acrobatic battle with the Mole Man – of all people – I would call you either a deluded scumbag, a shameless huckster or D. G. Chichester… all of which amount to almost the same thing, but I don’t want to digress this early.

My point is that, despite the innate ridiculousness, for an old comic reader raised on Miller, Nocenti and Bendis, of the plot of a Daredevil story like this one, it is in reality a spectacular comic book with great action, stellar art and actual humanity behind both the hero and the villain. This issue is akin to Hamlet’s soliloquy to Yorick’s skull on the nature of death and mourning, only with groin kicking… which actually might get me out to watch some Shakespere. Simply put: this comic is the good shit.

I’m gonna start with a nitpick, mostly because since I spent so much time calling out J. Michael Straczynski on similar issues in my review of this week’s The Twelve I feel I need to be fairly and similarly douchey across the board –  the opening sequence of Daredevil toward a subterranean and hungry giant land slug is a straight lift of both the Sarlacc in Return of The Jedi and the asteroid space slug in The Empire Strike Back. It’s a cool sequence, and the method that Daredevil uses to escape is not only logical and something that I would never have considered, but serves to prove once and for all what a whimpering pussy Boba Fett is… but seeing a giant ring of closing teeth while Daredevil says, “This is no cave” – whoops! I meant, “This isn’t a pit” – is a sure way to make any old fanboy roll his eyes and mutter, “You’re no Han Solo… then again, after the special editions, Han Solo’s no Han Solo anymore.”

However, that’s about my only nitpick this issue. Following that obligatory escaping of last issue’s cliffhanger, we enter into an action-packed battle between Daredevil and Mole Man that goes between being creepy, thought-provoking, and tragically sad… all while two blind guys smack the shit out of each other. Of course, when I put it that way, it sounds like Bumfights if it was scripted by David Mamet and choreographed by Chow Yun Fat, but trust me: it is awesome.

In the course of what amounts to only ten pages, Waid shows us the way grief can affect us and the strange lengths people can go to to alleviate it, and the honest strangeness of the human need to place value on a body when the person who occupied it has gone. For Daredevil, this value has led him underground in pursuit of his father’s stolen body, and for Mole Man, well… let’s just say that I’ll never see him without picturing him doing a painful tuck to the tune of Goodbye Horses ever again. This is heady stuff for a stick fight in a superhero comic, and you will never look at Mole Man – a character who has been almost a living cartoon since his introduction in Fantastic Four #1 – the same way again after he screams about the body he stole, “Don’t touch her! I’m not done!” Ew.

Rivera’s art is rock-solid for this book… starting with that cover. I mean, Jesus; reproducing a Renaissance etching of the torments of hell, down to the obligatory halo around the hero’s head, with that level of detail is above almost any cover artist’s pay grade. And the interior art continue to be solid for the book, with simple lines, clear storytelling, killer use of panel size to control pacing, and use of blacks to increase anxiety; seeing the Sarlacc thing shown mostly in silhouette makes it seem far more formidable than the brightly-lit actual Sarlacc, which looks like Tatooine’s vagina dentata. Put simply, Rivera’s stuff is damn, damn good.

As a guy raised on Miller’s noir take on Daredevil, a story like this should slide right off my back. However, Mark Waid is doing something really remarkable with Daredevil: following his personal mandate to somewhat lighten the character allows him to do wild-assed stuff like go underground to fight Mole Man, while still using the innate darkness and depression innate in the character to explore interesting and honestly dark stories. And he does it without succumbing to the urge to end the story with Matt Murdock at a Duane Reade muttering, “Gimme a bottle of Glenlivet and a pack of single-edged Wilkinson Sword razor blades”… while not turning his back on that side of the character by offering an ambiguous, yet satisfying, ending.

This is a damn good comic book. Check it out.