Blindly Following A Old Trope… In A Good Way: Daredevil #25 Review

Editor’s Note: Amateur. You carry your spoilers like a blind man. Leaves you vulnerable in seven ways.

Mark Waid’s run on Daredevil has been pretty universally solid, with a few missteps along the way – whether we needed another “drive Matt Murdock insane” story like we got a few months ago is an open question, and that whole “throw Foggy out a high window… as a faint to have some schmo with a scalpel kill him in front of witnesses” plan probably could have used an extra day or two on the drawing board. But in general, those moments are outnumbered by good, and sometimes great, moments and stories.

But then there are times when Waid just fucking outdoes himself. I’m not sure how into this whole greater Unknown Mastermind With A Master Plan To Break Matt Murdock greater storyline I am – again, it’s something that’s been done by at least three Daredevil writers I can think of off the top of my head – but the particular story of Daredevil #25, with this particular antagonist, has a progression and an arc and a final twist reveal that is simply magnificent.

Don’t get me wrong, the antagonist himself is only okay – every writer of superhero comics ever has at least toyed with the idea of a villain who is the evil version of the hero (Bizarro / Owl-Man / Kaine / Sinestro / Faith anyone?) – but that final twist reveal? Man, that’s enough to forgive going to that villain well.

Matt Murdock has been found by a kid who claims to have been experimented on by whatever party has been tormenting Daredevil. The kid claims that he was blinded in an attempt to give him radar senses like Daredevil, and that he can take Murdock right to the bastard. The kid’s heartbeat doesn’t skip when he tells the story, so Murdock changes to Daredevil and brings the kid to the warehouse before revealing that he knows the kid was fitted with a pacemaker to keep his heartbeat steady while lying – a pacemaker that is then shut off remotely, killing the kid. Daredevil enters the warehouse to discover Ikari – someone newly given Daredevil’s radar sense, wearing a costume like Daredevil’s original crossed with a ninja suit – who, despite being new to the world of radar senses, seems able to fight Daredevil to a standstill. And then Daredevil learns that, despite all his training in how to flourish with the use of his radar sense to compensate for his blindness, the deck has been stacked against him the entire time.

In a lot of ways, this isn’t all that new a story. Having a superhero battle a newer, more evil and twisted version of himself and losing to him in the short term is not exactly the freshest story in the book. Purely by coincidence, I happen to be watching the Blu-Ray of The Dark Knight Rises as I’m writing this, and pretty much the same story’s unspooling in front of me in 55-inch plasma and DTS surround sound as we speak. Hell, if I’m remembering right, they even did the same thing on The Greatest American Hero, for Christ’s sake. So the guts behind this story aren’t anything particularly new.

What is new is the structure behind it, and everything leading up to the reveal. We spend the battle inside Daredevil’s head, and he’s saying all the right things: Ikari is an amateur, he doesn’t know how to really see with his radar senses, he hasn’t been trained to be effective with them, etc, etc. And looking at the battle as it unfolds, it generally seems like Daredevil has things in hand – it’s a pretty even match, but each step of the way, Daredevil seems to have a solution. It’s only over the course of pages that you start to realize that every time Daredevil seems to have a way to regroup and gain some ground, Ikari has a way to counter it and keep coming. What Waid has done here is take a pretty standard superhero battle and slowly reveal to the reader that things are not under control. That maybe Ikari is toying with Daredevil, that maybe he has an edge that Murdock isn’t aware of. And that slow dawning causes a similarly slow rise in tension and unease throughout the issue that gives the reader a much more satisfying and exciting experience than your standard hero-fights-doppelganger battle.

And that reveal… Jesus. Waid set the groundwork to obfuscate that reveal masterfully, over the course of a couple of issues. The mutated dogs and madmen on the rampage in Daredevil #24, Larry the dupe kid who lures Daredevil to the warehouse – hell, Daredevil himself – all point to a particular set of circumstances and chemicals and physical effects required to give someone radar senses. So Waid has spent a lot of page real estate to take us down a certain path where we instinctively believe that Daredevil and Ikari are evenly matched in power and special abilities. So when Waid reveals that Ikari does, in fact, have an edge – and an edge that is instinctively obvious, yet masterfully hidden thanks to Waid’s misdirecton – it is a whallop to the reader. I literally muttered, “Holy shit,” out loud when I got to it, and it made me immediately want to see the next issue to see how this all played out. It’s good, good stuff.

Chris Samnee’s art helps sell the surprise ending as well as the writing. He works in a simple line, almost cartoony but more just simple, without a bunch of extraneous detail, which gives the reader a simple yet clear visual to follow, while simultaneously de-emphasizing the importance of visuals in the world of a blind man. In addition, Samnee brings forward big, bold sound effect visuals, particularly early in the issue, to show the importance of sounds over visuals to Daredevil. The overall effect points to sound over vision, which helps hide the big reveal at the end very effectively. Samnee also choreographs the battle sequence extremely well, moving from standard acrobatic superhero sequences to a couple of guys just beating on each other like desperate boxers as the fight goes on. It is art that is one hell of a match for the story.

The idea of an evil version of a superhero isn’t anything new, and frankly, in the long term, I’m not sure that Daredevil really needed one – in the greater scheme of things, I think Bullseye, a visually-based killer, is more than enough to act as Daredevil’s polar opposite – but in this particular story, leading to this particular reveal, it more than works. Waid and Samnee give us a simple fight that looks like it will go one way, ultimately taking us in a completely different direction, and it is a damn fun journey to go on. Give this one a shot.