Essential Daredevil Volume 5 by Steve Gerber, et al.

Hardly essential, but decent Marvel fare

Marvel’s Essentials series of trade paperbacks reprints the classic comics of Marvel’s early years in black and white on newsprint paper. Essential Daredevil Volume 5 collects the August 1973 to September 1975 issues of Daredevil, issues numbering 102 to 125. Also included is a crossover issue of Marvel Two-in-One, #3, a side vehicle for the Thing of the Fantastic Four, who would team up with a different hero in each issue. Since issue #93, the Daredevil comic was retitled Daredevil and the Black Widow, up through #108, and then back to just plain old Daredevil again. Regardless of whether she is included in the magazine’s title or not, the Black Widow is present and active in almost all of these issues. She and Daredevil are described as “lovers,” but the reader hardly ever gets to see them loving. Mostly they just bicker with each other. As with Karen Page in earlier issues, the Daredevil title is part romance comic, and the romance is mostly of the tortured soul variety, in which poor Matt Murdock never finds true happiness.

The most disappointing thing about Volume 5 is that Gene Colan, the preeminent artist of the Daredevil title up to this point, is mostly absent from these issues. Gene the Dean only draws four nonconsecutive issues in this run. For the most part, the drawing duties are split between Don Heck and Bob Brown, both of whom are competent artists in the classic Marvel mode but nothing exceptional by that era’s standards. On the bright side, inker Klaus Janson makes his Daredevil debut with #124 and inks the last two issues in this volume.

Steve Gerber handles the writing for most of this book, and Daredevil seems to be a little out of his element. He writes Daredevil as if he would rather be writing some other comic. For instance, Thanos is discussed but not present as Daredevil teams up with Moondragon and Captain Marvel to fight cosmic threats, not exactly DD’s area of expertise. (I never realized before reading these issues that Thanos is called a “Titan” because supposedly he came from Titan, Saturn’s moon.) Daredevil also takes a trip to the Everglades to mess around with Man-Thing, a Gerber creation. These strange adventures feel like irrelevant tangents to the traditional Daredevil storyline. Things improve in the second half of the book when Daredevil returns to being an urban vigilante. He also fights a bunch of Hydra agents, which seems appropriately within his bailiwick. Some enjoyable villains making an appearance in this volume are the Mandrill, Death Stalker, and Copperhead. Silver Samurai, mostly known as a Wolverine villain, makes his debut in Daredevil #111.

In the Marvel Essentials series, “Essential” doesn’t necessarily mean “essential,” it really just means old. Sometimes the stories reproduced are essential, and sometimes they’re just plain bad. The issues reproduced in Essential Daredevil Volume 5 fall somewhere in between. This is competently average fare for the Marvel comics of this era. As a fan of the old stuff, however, I find average Marvel Comics of the 1970s to be superior to most of what they’ve put out in the twenty-first century. There’s nothing very essential about this volume, but if you grew up reading Daredevil it’s a decent trip down memory lane. 

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