Always love splash pages that are creative about credits.
Frank Miller is now in full effect. These issues reintroduce The Kingpin, who is coming out of retirement to find and rescue his wife. Compare the panel above to the one below, from Spider-Man.
Frank puts Kingpin in a Speedo and it makes the dude MORE badass!
And look at his almost foppish appearances earlier:
And now Miller, with Klaus Janson’s inks to add to the darker nature of this version of Kingpin.
This is the story that makes Kingpin into a force of nature, whose love for Vanessa knows no bounds.
It’s also the first time we learn his real name is Wilson Fisk.
Without these issues, he’d probably still be a bit player in Spider-Man. These are also the issues where the Daredevil/Murdock/Kingpin triangle starts to form.
We also see that his wife, Vanessa, has memory loss and is wandering the sewers. That will be important later.
Kingpin goes after a company owned by the father of Matt’s girlfriend, Heather, and in turn Matt will eventually use the situation to bully Heather into marrying him. After she agrees, he’ll dump her and she’ll kill herself.
Also, he nearly kills Bullseye, Kingpin’s chief assassin.
Yeah, in these issues DD is morally ambiguous.
So let’s review. Miller has been around for a little over a year, but he’s only been the official writer of the book for about five months. In that time, he’s created Elektra, completely changed Kingpin, and established indelible side characters (or added depth to existing ones) like Turk, Josie of Josie’s Bar, Foggy Nelson, and Becky, their wheelchair-bound paralegal.
Remember when corporate comics felt risky and dangerous? This is when that was.
Oh. And one more thing: Turk throws himself through a window.
This is a chapter in Elektra story that is one of the best Frank Miller stories of all time and the second best Daredevil story of all time (full list here).