DAREDEVIL #159

"MARKED FOR MURDER!"
Writer: Roger McKenzie | Penciler: Frank Miller | Inker: Klaus Janson
Letterer: Jim Novak| Colorist: Glynis Wein
Editors: Mary Jo Duffy & Allen Milgrom | Editor-in-Chief: Jim Shooter

The Plot: A mystery man named Pondexter hires aging gangster Eric Slaughter to assassinate Daredevil. Slaughter’s men rough up Matt Murdock and Foggy Nelson for a line on DD, which leads Matt to change into his alter ego and seek the assassins out. He fights off their best attempts to kill him while Pondexter secretly videotapes the entire altercation.

Later, in his home, Pondexter reveals that he's actually Daredevil’s enemy, Bullseye, and makes plans to study the tape of Daredevil’s fighting style and then go after Black Widow to use against the Scarlet Swashbuckler.

Sub-Plots & Continuity Notes: This issue features the debut appearance of Eric Slaughter, who will go on to be a minor recurring character throughout Frank Miller’s DAREDEVIL run.

We also get the first appearance of Judge Coffin, who will pop up once or twice over the next few years as well, though here he seems to harbor some sort of dark secret (he believes criminals are guilty and must be punished "one way or another") which I don't believe ever pans out into anything.

Also notable are appearances from Turk Barrett and Ben Urich, both characters whose creation predates Miller (Turk debuted in 1970’s DD #69 while Urich appeared just a few months prior to this installment, in #153), but both of whom will become major players in the upcoming Miller run.

Urich suspects a connection between Matt Murdock and Daredevil, which narration informs us will shortly become “…the most astounding story of his career…”

The events of the previous issue happened “last night,” according to dialogue.

The issue ends with a one-page featurette on Daredevil’s famous billy club. (Why does my spell-checker not like the word “featurette”? It is a word, isn't it??)

My Thoughts: These aren't the most compressed issues, I've gotta say. We're in the era of the seventeen-page story at the moment, and this issue features a nine-page fight scene with Slaghter’s men, while the previous installment’s battle with Death-Stalker came in at ten out of seventeen pages. Mind you, I don't object to wall-to-wall action by any means, but such drawn-out skirmishes should theoretically be in service of a dense plot and a bunch of sub-plots. So far we have very little in the way of the latter, but at least the former is represented in Bullseye’s secret campaign against Daredevil.

But Miller draws the heck out of all of it, at least. His characters have great body language and the fight scene is a ton of fun to look at, with a bunch of big panels allowing the action to breathe. The Omnibus collection is specifically called DAREDEVIL BY FRANK MILLER AND KLAUS JANSON, and I know that by the end of his run, Miller is basically doing breakdowns for Janson to finish, but at this point I think there's still a lot of Miller in the art and it looks great.

Lastly, at one point a reporter refers to Matt Murdock as “…one of the nation’s best known and most respected public defenders” while at this point Foggy had served as New York City’s district attorney for a term. So why do they run a little rinky dink free legal clinic? I seem to recall an era, perhaps post-Miller, where Murdock & Nelson operate out of a palatial office suite on an upper level of a skyscraper. That's always been my favorite status quo for these guys. I've never been big on Matt Murdock living among the “common man”. That works great for Peter Parker, Steve Rogers, etc., but for whatever reason I don't like it for Murdock.