Circumstantial: Daredevil #31 Review

Editor’s Note: We find the defendant guilty on the charge of Premeditated Spoilers.

It would have been really easy for Mark Waid to have fucked up Daredevil #31.

This was the first comic book I remember seeing that in any way tackles the Trayvon Martin / George Zimmerman murder trial, and that is a subject that is just playing with dynamite. And it is playing with dynamite just because it is so Goddamned easy to pick one side or another, based on a few snippets of facts gleaned from various news accounts one might have half-paid attention to while working or drinking beer or surfing for porn. You write a book that takes the side of the shooter, and you’ve alienated everyone who knows that ACLU isn’t a lolspeak acronym. You take the side of the shootee, and you can experience your first mainstream media crossover attention by being mentioned on Sean Hannity’s show, possibly accompanied by your home address.

And yet if any comic book is the perfect one to reference the case, it’s Daredevil, what with its protagonist being an actual officer of the court. But still: it took a lof of balls for Waid to even consider making that case part of a mainstream comic book story… and he generally nails it. Because he’s smart enough to reference the case without the story being about the case. Instead, it’s about the people who made a snap decision about one side or another, based on a few snippets of facts gleaned from various news accounts one might have half-paid attention to while working or drinking beer or surfing for porn.

And that’s most of us, Bubba.

Following a visit with his partner, Foggy, who is battling brain cancer, Matt Murdock gets word that the verdict in the highly-publicized case of a wealthy white woman who shot an unarmed black teenager, allegedly in self defense. Based on signs of a struggle and a lack of physical evidence, the verdict comes in not guilty, and as the prosecutor is talking to TV cameras afterwards, he apparently gives reporters the names, addresses and photographs of the jurors, with the exhortation to hunt them down like animals. I say “apparently,” because Matt hears an electronic click before the announcement, and can discern that the voice calling for violence is that of an imposter. Most people, however, do not have super hearing, so riots erupt all around the courthouse, spurred by summer heat, humidity, and general rage. Awesome as he is, Daredevil is just one dude with a stick, and unlikely to stop a riot by himself, so he calls Hank Pym, hoping to bring in Thor for backup. Thor is busy, however, getting his ass kicked by Thanos in Infinity, but Pym has another idea to break up the riots, which have reached the courthouse steps as the cops have moved to arrest the DA. Daredevil gets the DA in to where the jurors are holed up, to learn that one of the “revealed” jurors wasn’t actually a juror. As Pym manages to quell the riots, Daredevil goes to the fake juror’s address… and he is not gonna like what he finds there.

So the smart thing that Waid does here is just about take no sides in his Trayvon Martin / George Zimmerman pastiche trial. He presents facts that are much the same as that case, and presents a similar verdict to the real one (for the same reasons that most of the jurors in that case gave), but he basically keeps things neutral, and only uses the case as the catalyst for the rioting. Sure, Waid has Murdock refer to the Zimmerman analog as a “harpy with a long and recorded history of bigotry,” but that’s as close to taking sides as he gets, and it makes a certain amount of sense to establish why the case would elicit such strong emotions in pretty much the entirety of the general public. But we never get any sense as to how Murdock (or Waid through Murdock) feels about the case beyond that a verdict was given based on the actual evidence. It’s smart writing that keeps the story a story, and not some kind of polemic to make some kind of statement about that crime.

Instead, the bad guys here are the general public. Regular joes with an axe to grind, on one side or another, who are immediately swayed to violent histrionics based on bad information on an incomplete news report loaded with personal opinion. Which, frankly, was precisely what everyone thought was gonna happen when the Zimmerman verdict happened, because we were told by, well, talking heads giving incomplete news reports loaded with personal opinion. So what we wind up with is a story that, rather than indicting either person directly involved in the Martin shooting, indicts people who went off half-cocked based on partial stories, loaded with opinions and entreaties to emotion. It’s an interesting way to use the story, and as clever and unique viewpoint as I could have hoped when I realized where Waid was going.

But this comic isn’t just limited to commentary about underinformed reactionaries. Waid delivers an action-packed issue with Daredevil dealing with street violence, coming up with a clever way to end the rioting, and one hell of a cliffhanger that ties this story right back into Daredevil’s longer, greater arc. And Chris Samnee’s art continues to be a good match for the story; his lines are simple and medium, almost cartoony, which keeps the focus on the storytelling and not any heavy stylization. His pacing is rock solid – as the riots swell, Samnee’s panels get smaller and smaller to accelerate the action, and those panels focus on random body parts fists flailing, all of which hammer home the general chaos of the situation. It’s good looking stuff, and a good match for Daredevil.

Waid took a big chance referencing the Zimmerman / Martin case in a superhero comic. It would have been really easy to put Murdock the lawyer in the middle of the case and try to make some kind of statement about what he thought about the facts of the case. But instead, Waid kept Daredevil’s opinion focused only on the lack of evidence and the strengths and weaknesses of the case, and instead focused on regular people, many of whom based their opinions on what talking heads on television told them to think. It’s about as smart a comment on the events surrounding that case as I could have hoped for from a mainstream superhero comic… and it came from commenting on everyone else. It’s good stuff.