Lee Weeks comes on board as series artist and…Wow. He’s somewhere in between the heavy inks and shadows of Frank Miller/Klaus Janson, and the more line-based drawings of John Romita, Jr. Weeks will provide consistency during the transition between Ann Nocenti’s and DG Chichester’s runs, and they are two very different writers.
Kingpin’s latest schemes have failed to bring Daredevil down, but his trip to hell has left him a little…Touched. Kingpin is still frustrated by the whole thing, but look here how he hits Bullseye with a newspaper–training him like a dog.
And so in this, Nocenti’s last story, Daredevil and Bullseye switch costumes.
Daredevil is still pretty nuts, and Bullseye has always been crazy. So it makes for an interesting dynamic.
During the first part of the arc, fake Bullseye ruins DD’s reputation by doing awful things in the red underwear. Which leads to this:
I find this to be the single WORST moment in Nocenti’s run. It turns Kingpin into little more than The Joker and Daredevil into Batman. But Kingpin is really more Machiavellian than trickster–he shouldn’t NEED Daredevil to fight him (the way Joker needs Batman), he should hate Daredevil and smile only when DD is crushed. Conversely, Murdock is driven by justice–not revenge. He’s the fist of the law, not the Dark Knight of vengeance.
But the story ends like this, so all is forgiven:
Daredevil #181 has to be one of the most iconic comic books in history–the “DD drops Bullseye” sequence has been tributed, copied, plagiarized over and over again. And it always works.
I really am enjoying Nocenti’s run. Sad it’s about to end.
Here’s the sequence, in case you forgot…
The splash page to #290 is pretty funny. Nice headlines.
