Emma Peel Sessions 34 – ain’t flingin tears at the dusty ground

Booze Broads and Bullets week – index is here, Thanks David!

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(last one)

Daredevil #190, “Resurrection”, is the last issue of Daredevil that Frank Miller and Klaus Janson would work on together – the final issue of his run, “Roulette”, was inked by Terry Austin. The way Miller and Janson were working together was more of a collaboration, so when Miller took over doing complete drawings rather than just layouts the final issue seemed almost baroque. Miller and Janson are a weird hybrid animal, its hard to tell what Miller was drawing and what he wasn’t, and while it is certainly his layouts, you wouldn’t be remiss in wondering who drew what. “Resurrection” is the perfect finale to the original Daredevil run, with “Roulette” acting as a post-script. While the Daredevil/Kingpin dichotomy has been built up over time, their relationship isn’t central to Miller’s portrayal of the character until Born Again. Instead, the focus of  this issue is Matt Murdock’s relationship to Elektra. And Elektra had been dead for around a year at that point, so dead that Matt dug her body up to make sure she had no heartbeat. Elektra coming back to life was the ultimate card for Miller to pull, after spending a lot of his time explaining Matt Murdock’s history of training with Stick as a young man. Miller’s storyline found a synthesis in Will Eisner’s crime comics and kung fu/samurai movies, and borrowed a tone that was equal parts John Carpenter, Sam Fuller, and Kurosawa. The Miller/Janson issues have the sense of real encroaching death to them as well as a broad sense of humor. Early on Frank Miller, up until Elektra Assassin, used humor in his work the same way that Kurosawa did – to leaven and releas the tense atmosphere that permeated Miller’s Hells Kitchen. Stick was created as a response to Zatoichi, and he looks and talks like Sam Fuller. Miller has even spoke about how he found thematic depth in Daredevil through Zatoichi. There’s a lot of chop socky in these issues – and you can see how the serialized nature of the Blind Swordsman films carries over into the comics – where he only damages Matt Murdock emotionally and spiritually but places the rest of the cast in constant physical jeopardy.

(Did you hear that podcast interview with Christopher Priest a few weeks back? The most interesting thing about it for me were the stories about Priest in the Shooter office as a kid, and he mentioned that Denny O’Neil and Frank Miller would go see kung fu movies every friday back when Miller was a 19 year old kid drawing Spiderman. I could listen to stuff like that all day.I know there would be no market for it, but one of these days someones gotta write a book.)

You can see here in these two pages, Miller looked at martial arts movies for lighting effects the same way Eisner had looked at noir. The tonal shift from daylight to sundown in block colors is expressing the darkening of Elektra’s intentions – part of whats so interesting about the character is how Miller never sought to make her a “good” character. She is evil, and unfixable, and she can’t be taken off the path she was set on with the death of her father. The relationship between Matt and Elektra was always one of physical attraction and uneasy emotional connection. You got the sense that it was an uneven attraction, and Elektra was never as invested as Murdock was. And she was never going to be. Elektra’s character arc was always incomplete when she died, though. Thats why “Resurrection” is so satisfying, because we only got the middle of the story – Elektra was an assassin for hire, who’s only moral quandary was letting Matt Murdock live. We knew a little of her past, mostly her relationship to Matt and that her father was an assassinated diplomat. DD #190 is the story of Elektra’s training by the same sect of martial artists who trained Daredevil. It’s not made explicit in the early stories, but Matt is a failure. He had some of the training but he was never going to cut it, and Stick stopped his training. Elektra wasn’t a failure, she completed the whole program, and her failings were of character. She ends up in the Hand, first she rationalizes it as a mission, but in the end she’s inducted and made a master assassin. In later iterations of the story, in Elektra: Assassin and Man Without Fear – we see that Stick flunked Matt out because he was too impulsive and dangerous, and that he could never learn what he needed to. Elektra made it much further, but was headed towards the darkness and couldn’t be shaken of it.

“Resurrection” shows us that Daredevil is completely out of his depth whenever he has to deal with this world, and throughout the run whenever he faces the hand he’s had to rely on someone else for help – Stick, Stone, Elektra herself. Early on, Daredevil lets the ninjas stealing Elektra’s body get away and starts jokingly introducing the Black Widow, thanking her for saving their asses. Stone snaps at him “Idiot! Amatuer! You prattle like a child – - while we suffer defeat after defeat! I… I am sorry. It was my plan that lost this day for us. I should  not reprimand you… I have fought in this war too long… I am weary.” He talks to him the way you would talk to a child, a teacher chastising a student and stopping himself. Matt can’t help it, he could never understand whats going on. Daredevil is shown being so good at fighting conventional crime that he can screw around while doing it – cavalierly disarming thugs, screwing with Turk just for fun (you know how people bitch about Miller making Daredevil dark and ruining the swashbuckling aspect of the character – those people didn’t actually read these issues). Daredevil is great at being a New York City street level crime fighter, he’s the Bruce Lee of guys in tights. But the problems Miller continually confronted him with in the second half of his run were things he couldn’t deal with. The war between good and evil ninjas takes place on a level he can barely grasp, one where life and death are far more mercurial than he’s used to. “Resurrection is a story of Matt being confronted with a problem he can’t solve by hitting guys.

The final sequence, of Daredevil struggling with the little mental training he’s had to revive Elektra, knowing that in fact he can probably do little but so obsessed with Elektra that he has to try. Daredevil is willing to give his life to bring her back, but he can’t. He fails, once again – a longstanding theme of Miller’s DD work is that Murdock is constantly struggling with everything except being a superhero. Kicking the shit out of drug dealers and guys in mechanical suits – thats the only thing in his life that makes sense. Other things like love, family, friendship, the real larger concept of crime that he has to deal with in both of his lives on a daily basis – he ruins all of them just by being involved. Matt Murdock is a mess, thats why he’ll obsess the way he does over Elektra. Because she was just like him, only without the guilt. In a way, she was exactly what he wanted to be, even though her life inevitably lead to a violent, demeaning death.

The final scene in “Resurrection” is Matt Murdock redeeming Elektra. You can read it the way it is explained – that Matt in his untrained and naive way, has managed to clear Elektra’s soul of the darkness that she couldn’t escape in real life. In doing this he also redeems himself, showing himself worthy of the order he was denied. Stone, finding Elektra clean of her life’s sins, disappears, and Elektra’s body with him. The story could also be read as a metaphor for Matt and Elektra’s relationship in life and in death – once Matt has purged himself of his feelings for Elektra she is redeemed – that how he feels redeems her sins – and once she is untainted, her soul can attain a peace she could not in life. It completes Elektra’s story, but it also provides some catharsis for Matt, even without him understanding what he did – it shows both characters were capable of more than their masters thought, and more than they thought of themselves.

Some of the first comics I’d ever read were from this run – I had a copy of #181 with the cover torn off at age five, I think the Power Man and Iron Fist issue as well, mixed in with some FFs and Batmans. When I was slightly older I plowed through the TMNT trades at the library, the earliest issues of which were just redrawn Miller Daredevil and Wolverine panels. I read Year One at 11. I read Dark Knight Returns and Ronin at 13. I read the trade of Dark Knight Strikes Again after getting it Christmas 2003 from a relative who still thought I read comics, and fell back in love with the artform. I didn’t read #190 until I was 19 (maybe 20), finally reading the complete Miller and Janson run for the first time. Frank Miller has always been part of comics for me, and this specific issue (well the entirety 2nd and 3rd Frank Miller Visionaries trades) was instrumental in me ever wanting to sit down and write a comic book. Frank Miller’s career isn’t simple to sit down and classify, and the criticisms leveled at him DO have their merit. He’s not an artist you can say lost it at a certain point, like people often do, or someone who’s consistently topped himself. It’s not as simple as that, and whether Miller made Batman a fascist or not seems to be ignoring the point, and that Miller’s ideologies (which I don’t believe have ever been one permanent fixed thing and have changed as he’s aged) have never been the reason why he’s worth caring about as a comics creator. It’s always been his ability as a storyteller.

In the epilogue, Elektra makes it to the summit, but her journey was never a physical one.