Daredevil Message Board

[Kuljit Mithra]

DAREDEVIL #13 by Waid, Samnee and Wilson ships February 25th.
Please use this thread for all discussion on the issue!

Here's a preview:

http://www.manwithoutfear.com/gallery/Daredevil-V4-013
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Kuljit Mithra
www.manwithoutfear.com

[Dimetre]

This issue started strongly, with a very romantic scene on a beach, then some psychoanalysis from Foggy (he seems to have acquired a psychology degree around the Bendis era), followed by some chilling images of the Owl. Well done on the Owl pages Samnee!

I know I've complained about Kirsten in the past. I've found her very hard to like for all of Volume 4 so far. She reached a new low for me in this issue. I feel I must explain.

I love strong women, both in the real and fictional world. So it's not the fact that she's empowered that I find bothersome. For a while it was her treatment of Foggy that was my main problem with her. She would yell at a sick man for not hiding properly. How can you not hate that? Removing his name from the firm was kind of tasteless too, although Matt's at fault for going along with it. I know she's qualified, because she was the Assistant District Attorney, but Foggy was actually District Attorney. He's due some respect.


{SPOILERS AHEAD}

But this issue, she is attacked by a criminal. Daredevil and the Shroud capture him. She says, "That was awesome," and later cheers that she has her own arch-foe. I find that very stupid. She was an Assistant District Attorney. You have to be intelligent to get that job. How could she cheer about having someone out there want to kill her? At least Daredevil seemed to be pissed off at her attitude.

So I found Kirsten insufferable in this issue. It's hard not liking your favourite superhero's girlfriend. Foggy defends Kirsten by pointing out, "She's a fighter." That doesn't make her unique among Daredevil's past flames, as we all know. And I don't think her toughness excuses her bad qualities.

Now that I'm done complaining about Kirsten, I'll just say that I enjoyed Daredevil's snippy attitude towards Wendall McDuffie's security guard, and the subsequent search through the coffee shop's basement. Samnee's work in this issue is among his best ever, and colourist Matthew Wilson deserves a shout-out too.

Obviously something very cool is being set up with the Owl, but Kirsten really dragged this issue down for me.

[JoeWithoutFear]

@Dimetre

Thanks for voicing your opinion on Kirsten. I actually came to the boards specifically to see how people were reacting to the panels you mentioned. In short, I'm right there with you, buddy.

First of all, it's sad that we have to give disclaimers like "I love strong women" because on the internet these days it's "misogynist until proven innocent." That said .... allow me to present the exhibit A: my wife is a 4th degree black belt who makes more money than me due to the multiple successful businesses she has started. Seriously. That's my wife. So, hopefully that's enough evidence to clear me such that I can safely share my reactions on Kirsten, this issue, and, to a larger degree, Mark Waid.

Regarding Mark Waid, first let me say that I know there has been a lot of back and forth among DD fans about whether or not he treated the character well, etc. The record shows (man, I'm doing well with this court analogy, huh?) that I wholeheartedly supported Waid's take on the character. In fact, I never read DD comics before Mark Waid. Plain as that. I had nothing against DD before, but, I was simply never motivated to pick up an issue before Wade's approach and that's the character I fell in love with.

However, after following Waid on twitter for a while, I came to see that Wade considers himself very progressive. Which is cool. I've considered myself a progressive liberal for as long as I've been of legal voting age. The Daily Show and the Colbert Report were two of my favorite TV shows for a long, long time. However, the same thing that infected those shows seemed to have infect Mark Waid. That is, this hard-to-define, but extreme approach to moral progress that, for better or worse (probably worse) has earned the label of Social Justice Warrior or SJW.

Trust me.... I'm getting to the point about Kirsten...

So, to me, the biggest thing that has kept me from being an SJW or a quote-unquote "feminist" is this mentality that two wrongs can make a right. In other words, bad things have been done to women, and the solution is to do bad things to men in equal measure, hence equality. Now, I know there's a lot more to it than that, but that's just the point that tends to stick with me. In my opinion, we should instead seek to reduce the bad things that are done to both genders, hence equality. But, that takes a lot more work and is a lot less fun and is a lot harder to get clickbait from and... the list goes on.

So, the bit about Kirsten being EXCITED to have a villain and not feeling fearful or threatened at all? That's just lazy writing. Waid is afraid his audience won't understand what an empowered woman Kirsten is unless she has overt, over the top, and as Dimetre pointed out, nonsensical reactions like that.

TL;DR. But the part that bugs me is when Kirsten says she doesn't want DD to waste time "Dare-splaining" to her. This is a reference to the concept of "man-splaining" that many of you are probably familiar with. This is apparently when men assume that women are stupid and so they over-explain things. Thus, any time a man explains something to a women, if the woman already knows that thing, she can mentally chalk it up to the kind of "everyday misogyny" that is just so dangerous.

I don't like that concept because it makes it OK to judge all men on the basis of only their gender. That's sexist. And two wrongs should not make a right. Do men sometimes incorrectly assume a women doesn't know something? Sure. Do women do that to me? Yes. Why? Because that's a thing humans do to other humans. If men do it more, that's not good, but don't try to solve the problem by lumping us all together.

So anyway, it really bothered me how Waid is shoe-horning in little Social Justice nuggets like this. I'm 100% sure he believes he is doing the right thing and advancing moral progress and all that. But, I simply disagree and would really prefer comic books stick to the more black and white rights and wrongs.

OK, I'll stop now. That was waaaaaaaaaaaay more than I ever planned to write on this silly subject. I guess I'm just venting =)

~~~~~

I still think Waid is a brilliant writer though. Outside of Kirsten here and there, the rest of the issue was fantastically written and thoroughly enjoyable. In that regard, I can't wait to see what happens next!! But, overall I gave the issue 3/5. =\

*whew*... that was a lot. My apologies for potentially wasting the time of anyone who read this whole thing. Also, I hope that I did not offend anyone simply for being a liberal progressive but not quite an SJW. In my experience, it's a very "with us" or "against us" mentality and I'm not trying to be against anyone =\

[Nightwing2001]

Matt seems to have a bad track record with having (mostly) irritating girlfriends lol.

Personally if Kirsten gets written out of the book when the next writer comes along (much like Milla did) I won't lose any sleep over it. I miss Karen really, if there is a DC New 52 style reboot for the Marvel Universe I want to see her come back very much.

Joe: Your observations about feminism are pretty spot on in this day and age, I'm sorry to say. As is political correctness too.

[james castle]

I'm trade waiting so I just got to this issue. But, wow. Wow did you guys miss the boat.

The whole point of the back half of this issue is that someone is coming after Kirsten, not Matt. It's a twist of the now super-cliche "my loved ones are in danger" trope. Kirsten wasn't in danger because of what Matt did - she was in danger because of her own heroic actions (of putting a murderer away). I'm not sure how Dimetre and Joe were able to write so much about the issue without commenting on that core concept. Whether or not you think that twist is clever or too cute by a half is up to you but that was the whole point.

Plus, it make the whole Dare-splaining thing legitimately funny and much more clever than I had anticipated. It wasn't simply a pun in which "man" was taken out and replaced by "Dare" because Daredevil was doing the 'plaining. See, the idea of man-plaining is that mean talk down to women because they (men) assume women don't understand. In this case it was Dare-splaining because Matt was assuming the villain was after him. It's a clever little tweak. I assume the naysayers just didn't get that.

Finally, Matt immediately calls Kirsten out for being sort of irrational with her excitement and specifically notes that it's because of the adrenaline coursing through her veins. Did people just ignore that line? Or miss it?

Again, Waid is not my favorite but from the comments of the board it's like people are reading a completely different book.
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JC

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