The Ed Brubaker Issues
This section covers the issues written by the current Daredevil scribe, Ed Brubaker.
Daredevil v. 2 #82: "The Devil In Cell Block D, Part One"; 33 pages
Writer: Ed Brubaker
Artist: Michael Lark, artist
Now imprisoned waiting trail, Matt Murdock is targeted by all the villains he put in Ryker's Island as Daredevil. Of course, not every villain is going to target Matt directly. Meanwhile, a new Daredevil has hit the streets
When Ed Brubaker and Michael Lark were announced as the creative team that was following Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev, I know I breathed a sigh of relief. Brubaker and Lark were the masterminds behind Scene of the Crime, a Vertigo mystery miniseries that knocked my socks off. Still, I'm sure a lot of fans used to Bendis' crime-oriented, decompressed narrative worried that the downward spiral was going to compress.
What's pretty amazing about “The Devil In Cell Block D” is that Brubaker manages to remain consistent to the Bendis run while easing us into his own style--a style that's faster and breezier than the slow (some would say plodding) pace of the five years laid out before him. A lot happens in this story, even for an extra-length issue: we meet a new Daredevil that seems to want to reach out to Foggy Nelson, who in turn doesn't want to be a part of it; we learn about the dynamics in Ryker's; we learn how poorly Matt is dealing with his incarceration; we're introduced or re-introduced to characters who will play a major part in Brubaker's run, we see both Matt and The Kingpin dealing with attempts on their lives in their own ways, we see a cameo by pretty much forgotten Spider-Man villain The Black Tarantula...
And this consistency-without-mimicking also extends to Lark's impressive art. Lark manages to utilize a similar color palette to Maleev while slowly, carefully adding some tonalities to his palette. The scenes in the prison are stark and cold, full of gray and black...but we get to see a little more vibrancy in the outside scenes. Lark is perhaps one of the most underrated artists out there, and he's definitely the best candidate to follow Maleev; he has a keen sense of choreography that meshed well with Brubaker's storytelling.
There's bound to be some controversy revolving around the final scene, in which Brubaker kills off Foggy Nelson fairly unequivocally (and even if it's not one hundred percent clear this issue, next issue's funeral spells it out in big, kid-friendly letters). I personally don't know how I feel about this, as it takes away a major strut of Matt's personal life and seems to indicate how Brubaker is going to submerge him even deeper into the DD personality. I also really don't know how I feel about the emphasis Brubaker is putting on the idea of Jack Murdock as an abusive father--it seems too easy to throw this in our face to justify the much darker, much more violent DD of this era.
But given this opening, I'm willing to give Brubaker the benefit of the doubt. And judging from his track record, I suspect that where he has Matt now psychologically is nowhere near where he plans to take him.