Review time! with ‘Daredevil: Cold Day in Hell’

“I’ll accept what I’m told, take what I’m sold, there’s no question to ask”

I got this fancy hardcover of Daredevil: Cold Day in Hell on a bit of a lark, but here we are. This is by Charles Soule, Steve McNiven, Dean White, Clayton Cowles, and Nick Lowe. It is, of course, from Marvel (and printed in Turkey, which is interesting, and also — Marvel isn’t calling it “Türkiye”?), and because it’s a fancy hardcover, it costs $22 (even, that is, which is fun) even though it’s only 90 pages long, which is 4½ regular issues in today’s Marvel world (although this is three issues, each 30 pages long). But hey, it’s a fancy hardcover!

I’ve been a fan of McNiven’s for over 20 years, since he worked on 4, that Marvel Knight FF series, but he often draws stuff for Marvel that I simply don’t care about (Civil War, anyone?), so I just don’t get to see his art too often. I know he can change his style pretty easily, so I don’t know if what he’s doing in this story is his regular style these days or if he’s just working really hard to ape Frank Miller, because I’m unclear why he would do that, especially a particular Frank Miller style. This book looks very much like Elektra Lives Again, the 1990 comic in which Miller was caught in a transitional period, as he was still doing kind of the more detailed work he did in his early career, but you could see him moving toward the more impressionistic stuff he did in Sin City and 300 and other later works. Elektra Lives Again, to be sure, is a very crisp, detailed work, but it’s not as rough as earlier Miller, and it’s kind of unique in his oeuvre, as it’s not a style he returned to and he seems a bit uncomfortable with it, as if it’s just something he needs to get out of his system before he moves on to other styles. It’s a good-looking comic, but it doesn’t seem to be too important — Elektra coming back to life wasn’t unique even back in 1990 — but perhaps it had a big impact on McNiven. McNiven wasn’t a professional in 1990, but he was a younger dude (if we can believe the internet, he was in his early 20s) who, presumably, had grown up with Miller, and perhaps it hit him at the right time and place. I’m not sure, but it’s interesting that he chooses to draw Cold Day in Hell — which, sure, is a Daredevil story, but doesn’t really have much to do with Elektra Lives Again, except maybe that Daredevil “lives” again in this comic — in a similar style to Elektra Lives Again. It’s weird.

As McNiven is a very good artist, the book certainly doesn’t look bad. His somewhat excessive use of hatching fits the tone of the book, as most of the participants are old and New York is a collapsing mess. McNiven put a lot of work into this book, and it shows. He creates a city that has been through some tough times, using sharp, harsh lines to make the surroundings appear as if they would hurt anyone who touched them, while also cleverly dropping holding lines in some places to make the city look less solid than it is, as if it’s slowly but surely fading away. His people are terrific, too — Matt Murdock is old but not decrepit, while Bullseye looks as if he crawled out of a tomb. The contrast is deliberate and a bit manipulative, but it works. McNiven gives us an old but still spry Foggy Nelson, and of course, his Elektra still looks young, because who the heck knows what kind of magic is flowing through her system, but at least she looks a bit older. She’s the most “Miller-esque” of the characters, with her square-ish face and thin, ropey hair that brings to mind (deliberately, I have to think) Medusa. McNiven also gives us a Frank Castle who’s at the end of his rope, and the way he shows how life has been very bad for Bullseye and the Punisher makes me wonder if he and Soule are commenting on their choices. Bullseye is almost a corpse, and McNiven does well to show how close to death he is, but the way he draws him also shows how dangerous he can still be. Perhaps the best thing he does is put stitching all over Daredevil’s outfit, which very deliberately echoes Frankenstein’s monster — it’s a very clever choice, and is nice shorthand for one of the themes of the book, which is rebirth. The coloring is nice, too — McNiven uses more blacks than usual, so we get a dark-looking book, certainly, which matches the tone, but the actual colors aren’t dark, so it’s a nice push-and-pull between darkness and brightness. You’d think they would want this to be a gloomy-looking comic, but it’s not, which helps the art stand out quite nicely.

I’ve liked a lot of what Soule has written in the past, and this isn’t a bad comic with regard to the story, but it does seem like it’s searching for a point that it never really finds. Soule must have pitched this as “Old Man Daredevil,” which, thanks to Mark Millar and Wolverine, makes Marvel see dollar signs, but there’s not too much else here, and that’s a shame. His work with Matt Murdock is pretty good, actually — he’s lost his powers, so he’s just a blind man at the end of his life, trying to hold his little corner of civilization together in a world gone to seed. There’s an explosion in the subway, and Matt gets his powers back, but he knows it’s not permanent, so he devotes the time he has left to finding a girl who’s been kidnapped by Bullseye, a girl who was at the site of the explosion and who appears to have her own powers. Bullseye is using the girl for his own schemes, which I’ll get to in a bit. Soule has written enough Daredevil stories to know how to do a good Matt Murdock, and he does so here, as he’s a decent dude who tries to do the right thing but is also incredibly stubborn, as he always is. Soule does a good job with the renewal of Matt’s powers and the rush it gives him, as well as the despair he feels when he realizes they’re already fading away again and he’s on a clock. Soule also gives us a good, unhinged Bullseye — I mean, he’s always unhinged, of course, but senescence hasn’t done him any favors — as he plots to get Daredevil where he wants him. Soule writes a good Frank Castle, too — his brain might be too far gone for speech, but Soule makes him even more frighteningly single-minded than usual, as he realizes the end of his own life is nigh and he’s going to fight his war right to the end. The individual characters are well done, including his haughty Elektra and noble Steve Rogers, and it makes the book zip along nicely.

The problem with the book is with the plot, honestly. First of all, we never learn very much about the circumstances of New York’s semi-destruction. There’s been a superpowers war, it seems, and they don’t really exist anymore, and that’s probably all we really do need, but it’s the tiniest bit frustrating. Bullseye has a scheme, sure, but his motivation seems to be that he’s … bored? I mean, ok, that’s kind of quirky reason, but I’m not sure it works. It doesn’t have to be a big super-duper plot to destroy the world, sure, but it feels like it should be a bit more important than that. The problem with it is that Soule, as I noted, doesn’t give us enough context for what happened to all the superpowered beings, so Bullseye coming up with his scheme doesn’t have as much impact as it would otherwise. Soule hints at something much bigger with regard to super-people, and Bullseye … might be involved in that, I guess, but even his kidnap scheme doesn’t come to much, even though he hints around that the girl is important. This feels like the first arc of a longer series, but it’s not going to be, so I’m unsure why Soule even throws it in there. It’s kind of strange and it doesn’t really work. Soule does a good job with the characters and his big confrontation between Bullseye and Daredevil is quite good, but overall, the plot feels incomplete. Frustratingly so.

I don’t know — this is a nice artistic showcase for McNiven and an intermittently interesting story by Soule. Is that enough to overcome its inadequacies? To a degree, yes. But it keeps it from being a really good comic. Oh well!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆