4 out of 5

Chris Samnee gets to totally own an arc and Mark Waid once again comes up with a killer way to put DD in his place.  If not for a fairly bonkers conclusion – even by comic book standards – volume four is gold.

So, thank godness, we pick up with the resolution to the Dr. Doom debacle, and though it’s a one-and-done wrap-up, it’s paced effectively – super effectively, since we even get an epilogue that brings us into the next arc – and the brevity is preferred in the wake of Omega Effect’s never-ending conclusion.  The issue is a little shaky, with Tony Stark and Dr. Strange and Ant-Man all teaming up to do some brain surgery and destroy them nano-bots, as Waid can’t quite justify needing all of the characters there and then tries to smooth it out by joking about it a bit – but this is written by a professional scribe of comic pap who knows how to whitewash over these fan-servicing blips, and thus he keeps things shuttling along fast enough where it only really hurts if you stop to think.  And I appreciated that Night Nurse was bumbling around in the background – no dialogue, no mention.  Things end with ol’ Matty Murdock – sense restored – stumbling back into the office to find a furious Foggy, who wants to know why Matt is insane and storing his father’s bones in his desk drawer.  But who doesn’t, really?  And the right response is to flip it around and demand to know why Foggy was opening his drawers.  That’s private stuff for a reason, dude.  But this is why I’m not a lawyer / comic-book character – I’m too smart at deflecting questions about my storage of the remains of the dead.

There’s a pause for issue 17, Matt reflecting on a a good Foggy moment from when the practice just started, and it reconfirms to Murdock that he has to set things right.  Mr. Mike Allred does this issue, and I must say – I was impressed.  …Which I’m normally not by Allred.  I’ve certainly appreciated what I’ve read of Madman, but when Allred is written by others, I don’t often ‘feel’ his art as it always looks the same.  His style drives the content, even if the writing doesn’t demand.  He was a perfect choice for X-Statix because of Milligan’s play-like writing style, but otherwise… ?  However, issue 17 was a good show, and it felt like a perfect balance of Allred’s traditional look with the needs of the script.  I dunno if it was Waid’s intuition in writing for his artist, or perhaps Allred has made some adjustments with his recent emergence as part of the Marvel stable… no idea.  End result was good either way.

Issues 18-21 run us through the first piece of the puzzle in ‘who’s causing problems in Matt’s life now,’ and smoothly ties back to the first episode of Waid’s run.  He introduces a pretty wickedly weird character – Coyote – the surprise of which was well done since he’s just an amped up version of Spot.  The road to discovery of Coyote also laid plain the skill it’s taken to keep Matt Murdock Matt Murdock while not slipping into the dramaturgy of yore – Waid is pushing DD to break and Foggy is first to assume that that’s what’s happening, while meanwhile Matt’s actually doing a helluva job of keeping a smile on his face, and not faking it – we’re not getting mopey tears in narrative captions.  It’s a very human struggle, and has been a really wonderful touch to this volume of DD.  These issues also allow Samnee to settle into a vibe.  It’s a look he’s used since his first few issues – a dash of Lark realism and shadows mixed with the ‘friendly’ linework of Marcos Martin before him – but the unbroken run and mix of action and dialogue really help to sell it.

So the big minus for me, as mentioned, is the conclusion to the Coyote bit.  It’s such a devastating build-up that leads to, for once, a matching reveal… and then the villain’s monologue just felt filled with so much illogic built on illogic that I couldn’t get with it.  Hero comics obviously must exist in a super-real version of reality, but since about the 70s we’ve had a fair dose of pretend logic to get by on.  Sketchy science based on enough real science; sketchy physics based on enough real physics.  So issue 21 stretched it too far for me.  On each reread of the storyline I shake my head a bit… and it’s too bad, because it’s not really integral to the plot, but it was like Waid wrote a cool little idea – Coyote using Spot’s powers to separate DD’s head from his body – and then decided to flesh it out more.  Only it can’t be fleshed out more as it already doesn’t make much sense.  A rare example of this run setting it’s sights too big.