Matt Murdock is Daredevil no more and he’s having a crisis of faith. He doesn’t know where to head with his life now that he believes that he may not be able to help others.
Chip Zdarsky’s run on Daredevil has been nothing short of magnificent so far. There have been very few missteps eight issues into the series and that continues with this issue. So much of this series so far has focused on Matt’s crisis of faith, which definitely has been done before in Daredevil comics. However, Zdarsky executes his story in a way that feels different from everything that’s come before, but also feels like Daredevil.
This issue starts off with a bang. Not from any action sequence, but simply from a conversation between Matt Murdock and Reed Richards. Making dialogue-driven scenes in comics compelling is honestly one of the most difficult things to do. Yet, Zdarsky manages to make it look effortless. This opening scene about Matt’s crisis is compelling to read, especially because it centers around the debate of religion, and sets the tone for the rest of the issue.
The rest of the issue focuses on Matt’s need to help others. For the longest time, this was meant as Daredevil. However, now that he’s given up that mantle, he’s unsure about what to do. He still wants to help others, but he doesn’t know how to do so. Zdarsky does an excellent job of tying this plot point into Matt’s crisis of faith by simply reconciling Matt’s need to be Daredevil with his faith. It’s a relatively simple connection that others have used before, but it’s always been very loud and overt before. Here, Zdarsky chooses a more subtle approach that lends itself more often to introspective revelations.
Not everything in this issue works as well as it could though, namely Matt and Mindy’s, the bookstore’s owner, relationship. Any Daredevil fan who knows anything knows that any relationship Matt is in is bound for disaster. That said, it still matters it the chemistry is there between the two characters. As it so happens, that’s not the case between these two. They’re simply not characters that mesh well with one another.
Lalit Kumar Sharma’s helps a lot with the pacing of this issue, which is why most of the dialogue-heavy scenes work though. Sharma’s line-art is good, but not great, whereas the pacing is top-notch. This issue moves as slowly or as quickly as it needs to, yet never feels abrupt when pace changes. It’s definitely a hard line to toe to pace an issue like this, but Sharma does so wonderfully. Plus, you can tell Sharma’s line art has been getting progressively better over the past several issues.
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