Daredevil Visionaries - Frank Miller, Vol. 3

Story and art by: Frank Miller
Additional artwork: Klaus Janson

Finally in volume three of Miller's Visionaries collection is where we start to see a more mature tone to Miller's writing. With Elektra dead, Matt Murdock (aka Daredevil) must learn to deal with the loss of his first love. The grief over his ex-lover's death makes this once squeaky hero shirk his career as one-half of New York's finest (or as the comic actually states, most expensive) law firm, break off regular contact with those closest to him and destroy the life of his new fiancee.


Daredevil and Elektra play nice on the cover of Visionaries 3

The highlight of the book, appropriately enough, is the last Daredevil issue in the collection. In the issue Daredevil plays a game of Russian roulette with a quadriplegic Bullseye--Daredevil's Lex Luthor--while examining the complex influence violent media has on a child's mind. Miller admits to such violence being culpable of influencing children to perpetuate violence, but he also illustrates that there is an interplay between how a child is raised and what kind of influence that this combined interaction has on an imaginative child. Miller doesn't come up with a solution to the problem of violence in American youth, but he also doesn't simplify the problem either.

Even the What If...? issues at the end of the collection are interesting pieces of work (as opposed to the "What If...Spiderman Had Been Bitten By a Radioactive Frog?" kind of stories). The issues pose entertaining possible alternatives to Murdock's life that are more than just curios. Rather, they reveal different layers to already existing narrative (for the better).

A notable improvement over the second Miller Visionaries volume--and also the first (unreviewed)--we see the mature themes originate here that Miller examines in greater depth later in his career (such as violence in the media in The Dark Knight Returns). Although these are only preliminary probes into this themes, the quality of writing and maturity of the work is astounding, especially considering the standard superhero fare of the other comics of the day.

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