COMIC REVIEW: FTN reviews DareDevil #29

Writer: Mark Waid

Pencils and colors: Javier Rodriguez

Published by: Marvel Comics

The latest two-issue arc of Daredevil feels like The Second Age of Daredevil and also like a perfect jumping on point. The Bullseye saga has ended and now we are at what feels like the start of a brand new age, this time based around the race-hate group, the Serpent Society.

Issue #29 picks up immediately where Issue 28 left off. Nate Hackett, Matt Murdock’s client and former childhood enemy, is lying on the floor of a courtroom having been shot, by a judge, and it turns out that the only reliable eyewitness to the murder is the one guy in the room who can’t see. The courtroom has been entirely infiltrated by members of the Serpent Society who wanted to kill poor ol’ Nate so he wouldn’t spill the beans on the bomb that they had planted in the courtroom in the hopes of starting a race war.

The action in this issue is almost entirely confined to the courthouse and it gives the issue a Die Hard kind of feel to it. Though the location may be confined, the script certainly isn’t and Waid has a lot of fun with Murdock’s efforts to hide the fact that he can’t actually see. Radar sense doesn’t help him with things like ethnicity or in figuring out a sign on a wall.

After the Serpent Society is defeated and Nate is saved, we find ourselves back in a hospital, as we have quite frequently. But this time, we’re visiting Nate and not Foggy. There’s only so much hospital action you can squeeze in to one comic book.

Although they both have very different ideas of the relationship that they had when they were growing up, Murdock is covering all of Nate’s hospital bills (one of the few things that still shows a difference between living in Ireland and America). When Nate is well enough, he’ll have to tell Matt everything that he knows about the Serpent Society. If they have infiltrated the system, as Matt fears they have, Daredevil will be the man to take them down.

Despite not appearing in the issue, Foggy does get a mention towards the end as Matt laments the fact that a replacement for Foggy in the office still needs to be found, but as Matt enters the office, he’s faced with a mysterious mystery person who seems to have already taken the job. We don’t know who it is, but Matt does allow himself a smile.

For a book that has a rotating cast of artists, the art on Daredevil is remarkably solid. Each artist has their own individual style, but they all manage to work within the constraints of “Daredevil art” that gives the book a consistent style and doesn’t detract from the book the way the art in a certain other Marvel Mark Waid book does.

We haven’t seen the last of the Serpent Society and I hope that Nate sticks around too as his version of Matt’s childhood is equally as biased as Matt’s own is, but it’s damn interesting.

4 out of 5 nerds