Daredevil Message Board

[Kuljit Mithra]

DAREDEVIL ANNUAL #1 by Zdarsky, Garcia, Underwood, Mooneyham, Rosenberg, Cowles comes out today!

Here's the cover by Chip Zdarsky:



Here's the preview and solicit:

http://www.manwithoutfear.com/daredevil-news-article/2020-08-22-DAREDEVIL-Annual-1-Preview

Please use this thread to discuss the issue. Lots of changes to the DD origin here!
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Kuljit Mithra
www.manwithoutfear.com

[Kuljit Mithra]

So... what did everyone think of the story?

SPOILERS!

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I knew this would be about Mike Murdock but didn't know how much things were going to change. It's an interesting twist on the origin, and we also have Butch too (and maybe even that unnamed baby).

If you check back to issue #13, you can see how far back Zdarsky has been planning this... have a read again and see what you may have missed the first time.
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Kuljit Mithra
www.manwithoutfear.com

[DesignDevil]

It's been a while since I've chimed in on here. I decided a while back not to spend so much time online, but this issue made me look around at different people's reactions, and I decided to chime in somewhere.

I've loved, LOVED, Zdarsky's run. Over the last year I've been telling everyone I could to read it. Now I kinda want to go find those people and say "Eh, just stop after issue 21 and assume Matt goes back to jail." It would be easier than trying to explain this stupidity.

This was hot garbage. He took a stupid and contrived idea that Soule introduced (and should have undone in the same story to prevent exactly this) that could have been ignored or undone easily, but instead chose to tattoo it permanently all over Daredevil's history.

Lot's of people are loving this, and more power to them. I can't understand how any long time Daredevil fan could like this.

I don't care what magical reality warping macguffen did what, you can't just sprinkle in a twin brother into key moments in Matt's history and say it all worked out the same. Imagine DC did this with Batman. Bruce Wayne had a twin who was raised along side him before and after his parents death and was part of his life, but everything happened the same. It's nonsense. The original One More Day was nonsense for pretty much the same reasoning, but this is actually a much larger scale change to the character.

Maybe this will be undone before Zdarksy leaves. I doubt it.
We can now look forward to all the tired tropes down the road of the "evil twin". How long before some lesser writer has Mike rape some woman by pretending to Matt? Or captures Matt and takes over his life?

This stupid silver age golem needs to go back to the nothingness from which he came. Oh and Fisk has another kid. Lame. Morbid curiosity and stellar artwork are what's keeping me on the book.

Forgive my bluntness. Just my opinion and everyone knows what opinions are like...

[Daredevil24]

This was trash. The internet already proved they will eat anything up during the Waid era so I'm not surprised this trash is being praised. I thought they'd find a proper way to reintroduce Karen Page due to her popularity in the Netflix world but he the author instead did the dumbest thing next to Matt Murdock being left off the hook in court after lying and allowed to move to San Francisco.

[fubarthepanda]

Yeah, this is a tough one to swallow. "Mike Murdock" from the Soule run uses the Norn Stone mcguffin (from Thor/Siege) to literally write himself as a real twin brother into Matt Murdock's history... As a one-off imaginary story that's undone by story's end, this would have been OK, but letting it stand as a part of continuity is problematic on a number of levels.

To make matters murkier, Zdarsky stops the new origin at Battlin' Jack's death, so have no idea how this impacts the original Mike Murdock run from the Silver Age and everthing since (perhaps we'll get that story in next year's Annual). But the ret-cons don't stop there, with Zdarsky writing The Owl into Battlin' Jack's final fight, and tossing in a long lost Wilson Fisk son to boot.

The art is also all over the place. Only one penciler and inker are credited, but the art style is inconsistent across the issue. Not sure if this was intentional, but it almost looks like they were trying to ape different DD artists at different times, but my head hurt too much from the story to give it any more thought.

But, with any luck, this is just Zdarsky trolling long-time DD readers and this'll all get wiped away in a future story. Fingers crossed...

[macjr33]

Similar to some others I haven't been on the board for awhile given everything that has been going on; however, given this issue I was curious to what others reactions were.

I have similar feelings to others, I didn't really like the issue much. It just seems like an odd thing to double down on. I am with Daredevil24, in that if you were going to do a "One More Day" type of story it should have been to reintroduce Karen not just because of the popularity of the Netflix series, but because killing her was a mistake in the first place due to lazy writing and shock value.

With that said, I have been loving Zdarsky's run (plus Checchetto amazing art) thus far so I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and see how things play out. He seems to genuinely get Matt and he is a smart writer so he has to have a plan for all of this. And I guess to his credit he has fans talking about it evident by some of us coming back here to discuss so he did something right in creating a buzz. I guess time will tell to see if he can stick the landing.

[Dimetre]

Of all the stories Charles Soule told during his run on Daredevil, my least favourite by far was the story of how the Reader created Mike Murdock out of thin air by reading over Matt's legal briefs about Wilson Fisk. It didn't make any sense for a multitude of reasons, and I thought it was close to criminal that Soule didn't undo the creation of Mike before he left the book.

I have been ecstatic with Chip Zdarsky's run on Daredevil, and I had no idea what to expect from this annual. By and large annuals for Daredevil consist of throwaway stories that leave barely any impact on the series at large, but I always read them anyway and then quickly forget about them. When I opened this one and saw Mike, I took a deep breath and gave Zdarsky a chance to impress me.

While I would much rather Mike Murdock exist as merely a third identity Matt would don from time to time, I think I'm slightly more accepting of this issue than others who posted here. If you look at the scene between Mike and Black Cat, Zdarsky does a much more convincing job eliciting reader empathy for Mike than Soule ever did. That one panel showing Felicia's look of concern did wonders.

I read through the scenes of Mike's life with interest, treating it like an issue of What If?. I hope I can still treat it that way. But I am worried what this means for the future of the series. Matt now clearly is accepting of his shared history with Mike, so the norn stones clearly did their job. I guess Zdarsky has earned the right to be left alone and take this where he wants, but I hope Mike gets undone at some point.

I'm very confused about Butch. Around the middle of this issue Mike calls Butch's mother "Ms. P," but on the final page it's suggested he's Wilson Fisk's son. I suppose Butch's mother may have been going by her maiden name, or perhaps Butch is the result of a one night stand, and Fisk never had a presence in Butch's life. But what I find truly confusing is how giving Mike a history causes Fisk and Ms. P to get together and bring about Butch. This is just weird, and I think it's the weakest and shakiest aspect of this issue.

While I would rather this Mike Murdock story not have been touched, for what this issue is I don't think it's badly done. I like how it's structured, and as I typed above, I felt empathy for Mike for the first time. That ending with Butch was rough though.

I'm giving this a three.

[DesignDevil]

So does anyone see a way of interpreting this as just being in Mike's head? As in the stone just filled in the blanks for him with a fiction to make his mind whole? But Matt and everyone else is unaffected? That would work. Mike being real is still dumb to begin with, but at least that wouldn't crap on Matt.

If next month has Matt sitting in jail remembering his dad giving him advice and Mike is there next to him in a flashback, I'm probably throwing the book in the garbage. I'm trying to reconcile this, but if going forward Matt now has memories of a twin brother throughout his 35+ year life? Yeah, I think I might be done, because this is just stupid.

If that's the case, then next months Daredevil isn't the one we've been reading, it's "New 52" Daredevil with a completely different history. I honestly can't believe the overwhelmingly positive response this is getting everywhere.

[fubarthepanda]

I suspect the positive responses are from casual readers who don't have a lot of affinity for the character or as much in-depth knowledge of his history. Most of them have probably never read the Mike Murdock stories from the Silver Age... That said, when DC ret-conned Hush or The Court of Owls into Batman's history, I remember similar points of contention.

Overall, though, when the consensus hopes a plot turn is "undone" as soon as possible, then it probably wasn't a great idea to begin with...

[macjr33]

[Mike Murdock]

I'm a bit late commenting here. I really did enjoy this issue. I think it's because I'm a sucker for all the different takes on Matt's origin and this drew from all of them to essentially make a what if story.

The story is obviously more than just in Mike's head, but I didn't get the impression Matt's memory was changed. Even if it was, it doesn't alter the past comics we've read.
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Matt Murdock's cooler twin brother

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