By Michael Climek

[Half of the Foot2Mouth team lives in NYC. That equals roughly 2 hours of Subway time day traveling to and from work. This time is spent reading. What are we reading you say? Trade Paper Backs or normal Comic Books. Thus in this feature we will try to give you a quick review of any TPB we’ve just finished in our travels. They will also not necessarily be things that just came out, but will be whatever we happened to pick up out of our massive collection this week, we are willing to re-read trades after all. Enjoy.]

A few months ago we were foraging through Midtown Comic’s sales rack and we came up on this gem. Daredevils’ Love’s Labors Lost. It was a mere 6 bucks, so we thought what the hell? That’s a decent enough mark down from 20 bucks, our interested was piqued. Should you be interested in it, you can get it on Amazon for 15.59.

But how does the book hold up? This is a collection of Denny O’neil’s run which comes in-between Frank Miller’s legendary run on the book, and then Miller’s other run on the book with the ‘Born Again’ storyline. It suffers for that to an extent. It’s hard to put mediocrity in the middle of legendary well-known stuff.

The book suffers for a few reasons. Love’s Labors Lost is not a concise complete story, its several issues that happen to fall one after another. Matt deals with several villains, none of exceptional note, and deals with a few women, again none of exceptional note. Matt deals with a suicide by a woman in his life, and very vaguely hangs out with an Irish red-head named Glorianna O’breen. He also hangs out with Black Widow and continues to mourn the death of Elektra. It was interesting to read a trade where Matt deals with all the women around him who end up dead. If the first comics victim Gwen Stacy is ignored, Daredevil seems to be the walking embodiment of women in refrigerator syndrome. The disease given a name by writer Gail Simone, where female characters die solely to serve as a cheap dues ex machina’s for a male lead. This was combined with a recent press release from Marvel which announced that Matt’s current wife, Milla Donovan is going to bite it at the hands of the Gladiator. A reaction to how silly it is that the ‘death of a love interest’ has been used over a half a dozen times with Daredevil can be seen at from Johanna over at Comics Worth Reading. That particular article truly is worth reading if you know anything about Daredevil or have a passing interesting in the plight of women in comics.

I mention all this to point out that the trade is a bit too laden with repetitious cliché’s for the average reader. Comics writing was a different beast in the early 80’s before DKR and Watchmen. The constant plight of females that the protagonist knows is one of these cliches. There is also oddly repetitious dialogue, such as a painful scene where Matt fights the Spider-man villain The Vulture and the winged bastard has to call Daredevil “Boy” every other sentence, presumably to emphasize the fact that The Vulture is an old man. To top things off there is also a ‘hillbillies who live in the swamp’ incident that involves attempting to marry a female prisoner to the dumber of the hillbilly brothers cause he ‘ain’t never been with a woman’. Personally I was surprised to learn that in the Marvel Universe there are hillbilly infested swamps in New Jersey. What will they think of next?

There are still some fun moments, the crazy Russian villain is good for a laugh, and Matt’s trip to Italy is humorous and somewhat suspenseful. But on the whole, we recommend waiting to find this particular trade in a half-off bin. Unless Daredevil is one of your favorite characters of all time, then we support your choice completely. Or you could also try Shakespeare.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 11th, 2007 at 8:24 pm and is filed under Comics, Comics Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.