DAREDEVIL #197-200 (1983)

This is a great arc! Daredevil travels to Japan to find Bullseye.

Thanks to Lord Dark Wind, Bullseye gets surgically enhanced with an adamantium spine

And somehow he doesn’t need a healing factor for his body to accept the implant (unlike Wolverine), and now Bullseye apparently has a psychic link with Daredevil. 

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I don’t think this aspect of their relationship was ever explored later.

While in Japan he has sex with Lady Deathstrike.

Actually, the woman who becomes Lady Deathstrike much later–for now, she’s the victim of Lord Dark Wind’s gangs.

Daredevil has his final showdown with Dark Wind, but it’s Yuriko who kills him.

Thus, Yuriko shows signs of being the powerful assassin she was born to be, and would later become.

William Johnson’s art is very different from Miller/Janson–it’s clean, and the figures are very muscular (but lean–not like the 1990s version of muscular).  This arc announces a clear departure from the Frank Miller days, and begins to rebuild the DD universe by bringing Bullseye back.

DD then pursues Bullseye back to the U.S. where there is some retconning (minor) of DD’s origin, showing his dad once fought as Red Devil.

Daredevil uses the memory of his father to find mercy after a kick-ass battle against Bullseye.

Overall, a very, very good story that nobody remembers because Frank Miller gets all the Daredevil love. It’s one of Denny O’Neil’s best comics that he wrote for Marvel (top 10 here). It’s also one of Daredevil’s best adventures, according to this list.

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