Daredevil Message Board

[james castle]

Holy crap, thank god for this website.

I picked up the End of Days HC last week. I'd been avoiding spoilers but I had a sense that everyone really loved the mini. I was vaguely aware of some of the big sites gushing about it.

I read the thing in two sittings. Long story short: it's unbelievably terrible. After finishing the laughably bad final issue I went to look up some reviews because who doesn't love a good negative review? To my surprise a bunch of reviews were raving. 5 out of 5s. "Masterpiece".

Finally, I came here to vent and, thank heavens, everyone here knows was garbage. I guess some of the big sites just couldn't get past the hype.

In any event, so, so, so let down. I think this goes in the pile with Daredevil: Father and Battlin' Jack Murdock; "big deal" Daredevil minis that were, in the end, trash.

I agree with what everyone has said above. For me, though, the real kicker was the kids. So Matt had a daughter with Natasha, twins with Mary, a boy with Elektra and another with Echo (check out her desk). Five kids? And when the hell did he have these kids? Timmy was about 9 in Wake Up and he's, what, 20 in End of Days? Maybe 25? So we're 16 years later? But Mapone looks a lot older than 16. And she could only be 16 if she was born during Wake Up, which we know she wasn't. So, she's.....10?

Even crazier, all the boys appear much, much younger than Mapone. So Matt had a girl with Natasha and THEN went and had a kid/kids with every other love interest except Milla?

What was the motivation for giving him 5 kids in the first place? It's insane.

Terrible, terrible series.
_________________
JC

So why can't you see the funny side?
Why aren't you laughing?

[qtmxd]

I read the HC a couple of weeks ago, still musing a bit. While I certainly agree it wasn't great, I definitely don't share the vehemence of just about everyone who's commented so far. Maybe some of it is just contrast... having suffered through the Rivera/Samnee era, which I hate, the artwork was a feast for me. Sienkiewicz is always excellent, and it's nice to see how good Mack can bewhen he actually finishes a picture himself instead of scribbling a few lines and collaging something with school paste. And when he's not doing Cap and Wolverine cliches and big explosions for Avengers, Bendis can still do some excellent writing. All the female interviews were well done. Milla especially (though I could have done without the sight...why do all fictional blind girls find out at age 25 that there's an "operation" to restore their sight?). An excellent an neglected creation of Bendis, she thought she had a fairy tale romance with Matt/DD, and is now understandably bitter. The first kid was hers, btw, though given her state of mind, I wouldn't want to be that kid. I also thought it was reasonable for Matt to have a couple of kids, but agree that the number of them, all of them clones, was kind of ridiculous. I thought this was his revenge for being a second-tier character... in 20 years, he gets to re-populate the Marvel Universe.
I think a lot of the problem of the story was the "surprise ending" structure, kind of a guarantee for disappointment. No revelation can justify plodding through 8 issues. And in Matt's story, I want to see Matt, not all Ben Urich. I wonder how a straightforward chronological story would have worked ... Matt with Natasha, training Mapone, till the end. The first issue was probably the worst... Bullseye killing DD is unacceptable, and the hero getting fed up and finally killing the villain is a cliche by now. If there was anything in either death more than that, it was too subtle for me to catch, as was why the mere mention of Mapone would drive Bullseye to suicide. Another reason to tell the story straight and develop these ideas,, without all this mystery substituting for writing. Another smaller disappointment was that I thought Bendis had promised some surprise characters, and there weren't any, just too much Punisher routine. I guess I should be glad it wasn't Spider-Man taking over again. Overall, agreed, not great, but enough there that I was glad to have read it and taken in the art.

[Sparko]

I will end up re-reading this, and potentially buying the trade paperback when it's out, as I'm interested in having all if not most of the Daredevil books out. Essentially though, this was a letdown for me.
What about "Mapone" made Bullseye lose it so bad, enough to at least kill himself, or write the name all over the wall before he killed himself? What relationship did Bullseye have with Mapone? Had they ever been face to face? Did Mapone ever best Bullseye in a fight?
I can buy that Bullseye managed to get the best of Matt here, and in true villainous form, he took full advantage of besting him in a fight and killed him. Good guys can lose too, right? Matt may have been more reserved (outside of Shadowland), because of his good guy nature, but Bullseye had always been a killer. And Daredevil isn't the Punisher after all so he never took out Bullseye when he had the chance (outside of Shadowland).
But what about Mapone made Bullseye lose it enough to kill himself? Was it that really that he no longer felt complete without his arch nemesis? Did he write the name because he somehow knew Urich was on this hunt and he wanted to do a last act for redemption? The Joker has been written once or more where he needs Batman. It's a sick symbiosis. It's Tom and Jerry on acid and too many anti-depressants. Maybe that’s why Bullseye wacked himself out.
Could the story have been better if Mapone was introduced much earlier and only at the end did she introduce herself as Stick?
I liked that Urich was the story teller and the story revolved around his investigation. I actually liked “Wake Up� and while I could have seen it as a Urich mini, it still felt appropriate enough to be in Daredevil’s book. I’m a big fan of the art in the book. The dark grittiness is a story teller in itself. I kind of liked seeing Matt’s kids all over. It was unexpected to say the least. I even liked that his daughter Mapone ended up being the one who would teach Timmy to be Daredevil. I liked how she took that Stick persona.
Overall, I’m only giving this 2.25 stars out of 5. I liked the concept, and I loved the art, but the execution of the concept just kills it for me. I’m left utterly disappointed after my first reading. Maybe I expected too much from this, but it was warranted. I loved Bendis’ run on the actual book, and to this day, it’s some of my favorite story telling.

[james castle]

[qtmxd]

I read that page, and still don't understand it. You're trying to explain it, but I suspect it's hopeless. Maybe Bendis and Mack need to stop being coy, and say what it means, instead of all this "let the reader fill in the blanks" non-writing. And Mapone is in Mozambique, but that's all I can find about it. I still don't even know how to pronounce it.

[Sparko]

You guys are putting me on right?
You're trying to pull my leg over the net?
Today isn't April first though and it wasn't when you wrote that...

Rosemary Pone?! You've gotta be kidding...

Damn... I think I even wanna laugh...

Who's in charge of quality control over these things? I dunno, maybe someone out there thinks this was a great way to tell a story. I'm going to keep trying to find a positive but damn...



On a side note, I recently read Battlin' Jack Murdock and I thought it was pretty awesome. I wasn't such a fan of Father, but Battlin' Jack was great.

[Francesco]

Oh. My. God.
That story is too horrible and absurde for it to be made up.

I think that Bullseye committed suicide after going to Bendis and Mack and asking what "Mapone" means. The absurdity of the answer made him lose the last vestiges of his sanity.

[qtmxd]

Okay, I hope Kuljit will make it a mission in life to interview Bendis and/or Mack and get them to make sense of this. They got paid to write this story... let them write it.

[james castle]

I might be wrong but the impression I get from the interviews surrounding this turd is that Mack did a lot/most of the writing. A lot of the dialogue had Bendis' special "inside joke-a-thon" feeling to it but I get the sense that the plot came from Mack.

Even if it didn't, I gotta wonder why Mack was on this project at all. At what point did Mack become so (unfairly) connected to DD? In one of the interviews about End of Days either Bendis or Jansan says something about how the intention was to bring together a bunch of creators who had had a significant impact on DD. Okay, but what the heck is Mack doing in that list? It's like in the movie where there's some line about "Miller, Mack and Bendis" as though those three are important DD writers. Miller? Yes. Bendis? Yes. Mack? What? No. He wrote a handful of issues and drew another handful. There are literally dozens of creators who had a much greater impact on DD. So why does everyone keep pretending that he's an important part of the DD story?

The only thing extraordinary about the man is that he somehow made a DD story in which the worst thing wasn't that Leap Frog's son is the new DD!
_________________
JC

So why can't you see the funny side?
Why aren't you laughing?

[qtmxd]

I think it's due to the personal/professional relationship between Mack and Bendis, Mack's current prestige in the field, and that his role is relatively recent, and generally consistent with the Miller and Bendis versions. Waid feels significantly different, and few people want to be reminded of Diggle or Gale. And before that, you'd need to go back to Kevin Smith's brief run, and then to eras pre-dating a lot of current fans.

[Francesco]

I think it's due to arrogance.

[Sparko]

The completionist in me wants to buy this collection as a trade paperback, but another side of me wants me to run my face into a wall a few times for even coming up with that.

I'll tell you that I didn't hate this like I hated Spider-Man: Reign, I put that up for sale as soon as I finished it and almost while reading it.

And damn, I loved Bendis' other stuff on DD (minus the Ninja tpb), so this is hard to believe. Maybe I'm in denial?

I dunno. Maybe I'll reread it one day and find something I missed...

[Nightwing2001]

I've got to agree about the Mack thing, I'm not sure where this "Mack is up there with Miller as an important part of the DD stories" came from. Hell, a nobody writer like Roger Mackenzie has a more important impact on the DD stories than David Mack ever did.

I think this has got a lot to do with the post-Marvel Knights, Vol. 2 propaganda DD that has been shoved down our throats for a long time (that we are finally starting to get away from slowly now with the new Waid run) that before guys like Smith, Mack, Quesada and Bendis came along that DD was nothing and that these guys created genius works of art on the title. I'm sorry but I didn't buy it then and I don't buy it now.

[james castle]

[Dimetre]