Daredevil #343, "Recross" Written by Warren Ellis, breakdowns by Keith Pollard and Arvell M. Jones, finishes by Tom Palmer.
"Recross" is a bit of an odd duck: Ellis swaps out his usual style of narration for Matt Murdock's, but it's a Matt Murdock that's faking his way through his Jack Batlin identity, and a head injury inducing cross examination. So it's a lawyer/superhero, playing phony con man, while providing his own legal commentary. It's also unusual in that it's a one-shot (to the best of my knowledge, I don't think Ellis ever wrote Daredevil again) that seems designed to break the then-current status quo of the book: while it would be at least another year before Matt Murdock would be a lawyer again, this was the first step towards ditching the oh-so-street con man angle and the very 90's armor costume. (Do a little digging, and it seems everyone had armor in the 90's, at least once, even if only for an issue. Even characters that really, really shouldn't, like Hawkeye, Spider-Man, Catwoman, Captain America...)
The story opens with a fat cop in a rage, nightsticking the tar out of some slob. 'Kay. Meanwhile, Matt is getting sick and tired of his fake 'Jack Batlin' identity--the name was originally his homage to his dad, Battlin' Jack Murdock. I think some later stories have changed his boxing (or wrestling, in some stories) monicker to Daredevil to gloss this one over. But, how a former lawyer with a strong moral center and sense of justice thought he would be able to live the rest of his life as a flippant street hustler is beyond me. (Or more accurately, how the creative team had thought that, although the switch was probably always intended as temporary.) Moreover, Matt's starting to think his new armor is just as fake of a Daredevil, and we hear the start of the argument against in Matt's head.
Interestingly, and I wonder how much of this is intentional, Matt's living like a slobby con-man, a lot less neatly and orderly than you would expect from a blind man. But then, his 'Jack' ID isn't supposed to be blind, just a lowlife. Irritated that there's no other clean clothes, Matt puts on his suit--not the armor, but the suit he wore as a lawyer, to go do laundry. He bags out on wearing the armor, going against a proud comic tradition of suits disguising any number of costume bumps or outright deformities. (If you don't believe it, get a good, thick long-sleeved shirt, and a bulletproof vest, and maybe stick a mask in your back pocket; and then put a full suit and tie on over that. If you don't dehydrate and pass out before quitting time, great, but with all that on you probably look like Jared from the Subway ads, and I wouldn't wish that on anyone.)
Page five brings us Matt's first blackout, as he's run afoul of the fat cop. Concussed, he doesn't know where he is or what's happened, but thankfully hasn't been beaten amnesiac. Yet. Even half unconscious, Matt is still able to take down the cop, and notices the cop's condition: "Read the low moisture on his dry eyes, wide open for too long." That's an interesting use of Daredevil's powers, although I would've thought he'd have to touch the eyes to read that. Yuck.
As the cop faceplants into a nap in a dark alley, Matt writes it off as self-defense, takes the cop's nightstick, and continues on to the laundromat. Hey, attempted homicide or not, those clothes weren't gonna clean themselves, now were they? It's also not the first time a bloody nightstick has posed a problem for Matt either, is it? (The Kingpin would try to frame Matt with one used to kill a man in Born Again.)
Page eight, and blackout number two: Matt and his laundry are in a poolhall, where five thugs from cental casting have a young boy bent over a pool table (?!) and are about to kill Matt. Having lost the nightstick, Matt improvises in a very British, and Ellis, fashion: striping, a pool ball in a sock. Ellis makes the effort to explain how Matt would know this trick ("When I was a lawyer, I did a study of British borstals--homes for violent young offenders."), so we're rewarded with a dapper looking Matt beating the living hell out of the thugs; while his inner lawyer explains and begins recross. How much would it suck to have a third-person lawyer voice rattling around the back of your head all day? Especially if all your legal knowledge was from Law and Order reruns. Nothing but 'Objection!' and 'Redirect, your honor,' all day long.
After the beatings, Matt tells the boy victim to call the police, and the boy tells him those were the police. And Matt blacks out, for the third time. He's starting to worry about that, but blacks out again shortly after recovering his laundry and the nightstick. Next, he's leaping from the rooftops in the rain, still in the suit, with the nightstick sticking out of his belt in a very uncomfortable looking fashion, chasing down a burglar. Matt says the burglar is a murderer, and that "there's a cop on the ground with a piton in his head," but it isn't shown. Also, Matt's a fine one to talk, since if he's been attacked by half a dozen mad cops this issue; the burglar may have a case for self-defense.
Although he gives lip service to the idea of the law bringing in our burglar-slash-murderer, but since the law is maintained by flawed humans, it too must be flawed. The law should be fair and strong, but sometimes it can't be trusted not to act crazy or save a young blind boy's dad from being shot after a boxing match. Which means the burglar's fair game. Matt breaks the burglar's thumb, presumably then leaving him for the cops, although we don't see that: he very well could've broken his thumb while he was clinging to the side of the building, and if he fell, then the fall killed him, not Matt.
Taking a gargoyle-waterspout shower, Matt tells himself his head is starting to clear, and that soon "this incredibly irritating 'counselor Jiminy Cricket' voice will clear off too." (This is probably what passes for medical care for Daredevil right then: Night Nurse is not going to take your conman psuedo-ID fake hmo!) The voice still has some life in it, though, and some fair questions for Matt: "Why are you defrauding yourself?...What kind of 'Daredevil' are you in your armor?...Whose law, or even justice, are you serving when you play the con man?"
Unfortunately, while the voice grills Matt, down at street level (which appears to be forty stories down in this panel, with really narrow streets) three prostitutes are shot in a drive-by.
Matt leaps into action, still being grilled by the voice, and without any cables, grappling hooks, or anything else to slow his fall, which now looks like about five stories. He bounces off the roof of a parked car (putting a pretty huge dent in it, and cracking the windshield but good! Property damage in the Mighty Marvel Manner!) as he chases down the shooter, who was singing hymns during the shooting. Luckily, I'm pretty sure Daredevil's sales weren't great at this point, which probably saved Marvel some religious-right flak, and thankfully Ellis steers well clear of Daredevil's usual Catholic hang-ups.
Meanwhile, the voice has the line that kills Daredevil's armor for me: "...a bulletproof costume that makes you look like a fetishist riot cop." Well, the armor only ever looked good when Scott McDaniel drew it, anyway: a common problem with Marvel's costume upgrades to armor was that while it often looked great when the initial artist (who usually designed it), it would look like hell drawn by anyone else. (See also: Thor's armor, ala Walt Simonson.)
The voice finally starts to fade, ending the recross; as Matt punches down the shooter, screaming "It's my life! And I'll do what I like!" Wow, it's like Teenage Daredevil! Next, he screams "I hate you!" and slams the door of his room...I hate to say it, but that might have made more sense. For some reason, I had it in my head that the shooter was a judge or a priest/clergy figure, but it's not stated. Daredevil may sneak in one last blackout then, as on the next page, Matt watches the sun rise from the rooftops. The really big sunrise. Again, I've never been to NYC, so I wouldn't know, but it looks like the sunrise on Mercury. OK, I've never been there either. Shut up.
So, Ellis set up the return of Daredevil's classic costume, drawing a line under over two years (!) of somewhat out-of-character armored shenanigans. You could reasonably argue that this story plants the seeds for getting rid of the Jack Batlin cover. That's all well and good, but why were the cops insane? Absolutely no explanation is given, or even hinted at, in this issue. And I didn't get the next issue, so I'm not sure it was ever explained, other than maybe '(Some) Cops suck!' This was indeed Ellis' only Daredevil issue: was it intended as a fill-in? A try-out? A starting block? A stopgap measure? I'm a big fan of Mr. Ellis, but I have no idea. I like to imagine the younger Warren wrote it on a cocktail napkin, between blackouts.
I did remember that there was an action figure of the armored Daredevil, but I think it was more or less a repainted regular DD. Plus, it came with a monstrous grapling-hook launcher that in scale with the toy, would've required two hands and a tripod to fire. That was also pretty early in the Toy Biz Marvel line, and those figures look primitive compared to recent versions. The armor was 'toyetic' enough that a decent version could be made, but I think Tombstone, Infinity Doppleganger Daredevil, and the Surgeon General are ahead of him there...
3 comments:
I don't have any direct knowledge of the story, but when I was reading your summary my thoughts were that during the blackouts the con-man identity was taking over and deliberately provoking the cops, not that the cops were being bad guys.
I thought only the first cop, was mad. The other five cops either were crooked, or they were criminals and lied to the kid, or the kid was lying and DD didn't pick it up, because of his brain damage.
Ooh, the con man id taking over is not half-bad an idea. But we do see the first fat cop beating someone at the beginning, although we don't see if it was justified or not. Again, I haven't read the issues directly after this.
I do know a little later J.M. DeMatteis (excuse me if I misspell) wraps up Matt's identity crisis with him returning to the standard red costume. I don't recall that issue as being great either, though...
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