Secrets, lies -- and lawyers!

Jan. 5, 2006 | When the final issue of Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev's four-year run on "Daredevil" appears later this month, it'll conclude one of the most engrossing stories that's appeared in mainstream comics this decade, an ornately zig-zagging narrative about moral blindness and double lives, with a hero sinking irreparably into a pit he's dug for himself. (The first three-quarters of their collaboration have been collected in six paperbacks or three hardcovers, all published by Marvel.) Bendis is the most prolific writer in comics right now -- he writes four other monthly series and then some -- but his work with Bulgarian-born artist Maleev has a distinct tone and look, an intimate, understated security-camera perspective on the demimonde of crime, law and the press. They've managed to make "Daredevil" their own -- a doubly impressive feat, considering that almost everyone who's worked on the series for the past 20 years has struggled and failed to get out from under Frank Miller's shadow.

"Daredevil" was launched by Marvel Comics in 1964 as a superhero comic with a Big Shocking Twist -- the hero is blind! and a lawyer! because, all together now, justice is blind! And he dresses up in a spandex devil suit, because he lives in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of New York! The series spent the next 15 years limping along as the poor cousin of "Spider-Man" and "Fantastic Four." When Miller, then an unknown 22-year-old cartoonist, and his artistic collaborator Klaus Janson began their work on the series in 1979, it was marginal at best, a generic superhero title with no particular reason to exist. They quickly reworked it into something far darker -- both visually and metaphorically -- and more interesting than it had been, influenced by film noir, crime fiction and Will Eisner's old "Spirit" comics. Miller's "Daredevil" became hugely popular, especially after he introduced Elektra, the hero's ex-lover, now a ninja assassin. Ninja assassins were pretty big in the '80s.

Both Miller and Janson left "Daredevil" in 1983, and went on to wider celebrity with "The Dark Knight Returns" and (in Miller's case) "Sin City." But from then on, "Daredevil" was the comic book Frank Miller used to do; nearly everyone who attempted a "Daredevil" story after them was either trying to send "a valentine to Frank Miller," as Bendis calls it, or to rebel against his legacy. (Both the wretched "Daredevil" movie and the even worse "Elektra" movie were ineptly crayoned valentines.)

When Bendis and Maleev began their "Daredevil" collaboration in late 2001, they paid their respects; most of the supporting characters from the Miller era appeared in short order, most notably Wilson Fisk, the enormous Hell's Kitchen crime lord known as the Kingpin. Their "Daredevil" looked and moved nothing like Miller's, though. From the beginning of their first issue, Maleev unleashed a drawing style that's sometimes been called "photo-realistic," which it isn't, exactly -- it's wildly, unmistakably stylized, even when he's clearly working from photographs of cityscapes or models. But it's believable, even seductive, in the same way a grainy surveillance tape is seductive. And their opening story line, "Underboss," caroms back and forth in time like a ricocheting bullet: a model in miniature of the way Bendis' four-year plot loops around and through itself, revisiting key moments from different perspectives. (Julian Darius has assembled a terrific set of annotations for "Underboss" and its sequel, "Out," teasing out their scrambled chronology.)

That splintered, documentary approach is appropriate for Bendis and Maleev's overall story, one of whose major themes is information and evidence -- who knows what, and which secrets are actually secret. At the center is a nasty twist on one of the sacred tenets of superhero comics: the secret identity. Beneath his mask, Daredevil is a trial lawyer, Matthew Murdock. If that were ever to get out, his life would be destroyed -- he'd be instantly disbarred, and go to prison for any number of obstruction-of-justice charges -- and the lives of everyone around him would be at risk from his enemies. So nobody knows. Except for a bunch of other superheroes, and various ex-girlfriends, and his partner at his law firm, and a trusted reporter or two, and a rather large number of people who've seen him with his mask off, and a bunch of murderous ninjas, and -- oh, yes -- the Kingpin. And the Kingpin's family knows, too, and so do a handful of friends they've blabbed to, and following a mob power struggle, one morning Matthew Murdock wakes up and his secret is on the front page at every newsstand in Manhattan.

There's no going back. From that moment on, the series' hero is in a morally untenable situation, and everything he does makes things worse. The only thing Murdock can do is to start lying, and make all of his allies lie for him, too. He denies everything. He files lawsuits that he knows are fraudulent. He beats the Kingpin half to death, drags his unconscious body into an underworld bar, and declares himself the new boss of Hell's Kitchen. Then the narrative abruptly jumps forward a year, and things really start going downhill.

The second half of the Bendis-Maleev run fills in the gaps of the missing year bit by bit, and suggests what happens when a hero chooses to rule in hell (or its kitchen) rather than serve in heaven. Murdock has taken on the responsibility of single-handedly saving his community, and he can't even save himself. He's forced to break ties with his allies; he becomes the pawn of greater legal powers than his own; he's de facto a Kingpin himself. Bendis hints briefly that Murdock might have had a nervous breakdown before everything went wrong, then makes it clear that he's just made one terrible error in judgment after another, out of pride and shame. By the final Bendis-Maleev story line, "The Murdock Papers" (which probably won't be collected until this summer, but that's what comics stores are for), Daredevil is trapped and desperate, under attack by both sides of the law he used to defend, and he's made it impossible for anyone around him to do right, either.

Next page: The violence in "Daredevil" is quick, confusing, horrible and resonant