4 out of 5

A big villain returns.  Waid navigates handling Foggy with cancer without tipping the scales toward too sappy or too simple.  Waid once again finds a unique way to keep the bar raised for DD that doesn’t involve aliens taking over the world.  Samnee gets ample opportunity to jump between perfectly paced action and character moments, showing his mastery of creating physical space within the confines of one or two panels.

This is a very focused arc that reaches over Omega Drive to try and tie all of the bits and pieces of the run together, each issue giving us a fun piece of the puzzle and, smartly, Waid doesn’t revel in the villain reveal so much as the Why of it all.  While this volume is divested of crossovers and Omega Drive’s Big Picture – this plot is absolutely about screwing things up for Daredevil – we’re still kicking around the slight problem of having gotten away from the freeing and fun tone the series started with before jumping into a larger muddle.  Waid has remembered to bring it back to breezy frequently – a la #22’s Spider-Man team-up to fight Stilt Man – and, as mentioned in last volume’s review, there’s the well-handled theme of how all this madness would have crushed the old DD, but the grinning-Samnee, brightly-colored-Rodriguez version of DD won’t be brought down by it.  Just to drive it home, Foggy gets cancer, and his friend is there for me – bruised and beaten – nonetheless.  It’s noteworthy that in the penultimate issue of the run, when DD has been pushed to the limits, there’s a nice behind the scenes bit of script to page that shows the camaraderie and comfort Waid and his artists share that makes the book so well realized, plus a short backup of Foggy hanging out with the kids cancer ward – the kids are drawing a superhero comic, and Foggy reminds them that even superheroes can’t beat cancer, to which the kids smirk and tell him ‘Duh,’ – that completely summarizes our travels on which Waid has taken us, toward the light and smiles at the end of the tunnel.

Ikari, the main adversary in these issues, is a great invention, playing into an old school trope – he has the exact same powers as you except none of your ‘weaknesses!’ – but making it relevant once more.  And Samnee’s outfit for him is great.  Also of note are the colors and designs of the covers for #23 – 27 – they became very open and simple, generally a main image with a blank background – but are incredibly striking, very relevant to the general mood of each issue.  The last thing I want to add as part of my rating, and this is all spoilery, is that I was disappointed by the villain choice.  I get it – people never die in comics, and again, the reveal isn’t directly the Who, but still – it’s meant to be important.  Three years just isn’t a super long time in comic books, unfortunately, and when Murdock is sitting there racking his brain as to who it could be organizing all of this… well, yeah, it’s Bullseye.  It’s always Bullseye.  It was handled as well as I could hope, and I know I’d be complaining if it was just some random pulled out of the woodwork, but the choice just lacked a bit of punch for me, so I was glad that this volume (theoretically) brings this whole long chapter to a close.