DAREDEVIL #172

"GANG WAR!"
Writer/Penciler: Frank Miller | Inker : Klaus Janson
Colorist: Glynis Wein | Letterer: Joe Rosen
Editor: Denny O’Neil | Editor-in-Chief: Jim Shooter

The Plot: Daredevil awakens in a water main and escapes into a community of underground vagrants. He returns to Josie’s to question Turk. Meanwhile, from his underground lair, the Kingpin supervises a gang war against his treacherous ex-lieutenants. Bullseye sets out to track the Kingpin down and learns the location of his stronghold. Meanwhile, Daredevil raids that very place and recovers what he believes to be the Kingpin’s files, but which turn out to be newspapers.

Bullseye and some men attack the Kingpin’s lair but find it booby-trapped. Later, as Bullseye berates his employers for their incompetence, the Kingpin arrives and hires him away from them. He forces his former men to sign confessions holding them responsible for the gang war, then he turns his attention to Lynch, his right-hand man who he has deduced killed his wife, Vanessa. The Kingpin kills Lynch in a fit of vengeance.

Later, Daredevil learns from a neighborhood hooker that there's a gangland meeting going down. He heads for the Kingpin’s office tower and shuts down its generator, which lures Bullseye into the basement for a fight. Daredevil bests Bullseye but is surrounded by the Kingpin and his men. Kingpin offers DD the files on the men who signed his confessions, as well as Bullseye, to get him to leave. Daredevil does so, departing with an implied promise that their feud is not yet over.

Elsewhere, beneath the city streets, the Kingpin’s wife, Vanessa, awakens and wanders off, amnesiac and hungry.

Sub-Plots & Continuity Notes: Daredevil saves Josie’s plate glass window from destruction as she notes it's been replaced three times this week. A moment later, Turk provides DD with a recap of the past two issues, including a good amount of info our hero already has.

Daredevil recalls saving Bullseye’s life, and now blames the assassin’s subsequent murders on himself.

My Thoughts: Man, this one is dense. Miller probably could've split it into two issues and it still would not have felt the least bit decompressed. We have the Kingpin’s revenge, his return to power, and Daredevil’s rematch with Bullseye — all events which could easily support their own individual issues — crammed together into one story, yet somehow it’s all executed perfectly without feeling overstuffed or poorly paced at all.

We also get some nice little moments such as our hero mistaking a bunch of newspapers for Kingpin's secret files due to his blindness, leading to an embarrassing run-in with Detective Manolis, and we see that in addition to being a murdering psychopath, Bullseye is also a very shrewd businessman.

All that said, I'm unsure about a scripting choice Miller makes here. Multiple times throughout the issue, he has some sort of hard-boiled narrator talking about New York City in a series of captions presented in what appears to be a computer-generated font (which would've been quite advanced for comics back in 1981). But at no point do we learn who this narrator is, nor is there any reason given for the unusual typestyle.

Nonetheless, this has to be one of Miller’s best DAREDEVIL installments so far. I believe I've read that Miller’s secret intention when he took over writing the series was to do crime comics which happened to feature a superhero, and with this three-parter, he's accomplished that goal in spades. The Kingpin is a perfect villain for Miller’s interpretation of Daredevil, and as of this issue, their long-running feud has officially begun.