Daredevil, Volume 5 by Mark Waid

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The fifth volume of Mark Waid's Daredevil series sees our hero cope with the Superior Spider-man, a souped up Stiltman, and a vengeful villain who wants to make Matt Murdoch and the people he love suffer, but perhaps the most frightening foe of all has to be reckoned with: cancer.

The book begins with a relatively light issue in #27. The Superior Spider-man (really Otto Octavius having captured Peter Parker's body before dying) is asked to bring Daredevil for his own good by his most recent date an Assistant District Attorney but after the two begin to fight, they team up to defeat Stilt Man, a classic silver age Daredevil villain who is now souped up to the max with technology stolen from Otto.

Matt decides to patch up his friendship with best friend Foggy Nelson after the events of previous issues led to dissolution of their partnership. It's that Foggy informs Matt that he may have cancer.

And throughout the rest of the book, the cancer issue looms large, as the depth of one of the Marvel Universe's longest running friendships is on full display. Throughout his run on the series, Waid has always a good handle on this relationship, but here Waid goes even further in showing their loyalty and devotion. This lead to a nice back up story in Issue 27 where Foggy encounters some kids in the cancer ward who are drawing their own comic book using the Marvel characters to battle their greatest enemy. Waid has a rare gift among comic book writers in that he can write stories that touch human emotion, rather than just throwing copious amounts of sex and violence at the readers.

Of course, the book does have action aplenty as Daredevil finds that many seemingly unrelated problems with characters such as Stiltman and Coyote are caused by the same source: a vengeful mastermind who will do anything to take down the Man Without Fear. He even faces a foe who has Daredevil's exact same powers.

This was actually really well done in terms of the action and who the mastermind was behind it. The idea of Daredevil receiving several unrelated attacks and it turning out to be one master villain pulling the strings goes back to at least the 1970s, but they didn't do it quite this well back then.

The art by Chris Samnee really works well here. The art for many of the interpersonal scenes between Murdoch and Nelson were outstanding. Plus when he drew the kids comic he did a great job making it appear to be another style. Waid has had many artists on the book, but Samnee's a keeper.

If I had one criticism of the book, it actually relates more to Waid's overall run on the book. Kirsten McDuffie breaks up with Murdoch in this book. That I didn't object to, but what I do object to is that I didn't even care, neither did Matt. It seems like Waid created McDuffie to have a relationship with Murdoch, and then neither the character, Matt, or the readers really care about the relationship which means that the pages spent on her were truly wasted.

Still, this book is a solid winner with a great story of friendship combined with a true challenge for the Man Without Fear.



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