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uosdwisrdewoh's review
2.0
A lackluster 90s storyline that shows just how long Frank Miller's shadow fell on the character.
In 1993, Marvel decided to shake up the sleepy Daredevil title. Fall from Grace brought a new costume, tons of guest stars, and the controversial return of Elektra, a Frank Miller character which for nearly ten years had been left alone. Writer D. G. Chichester calls back to a lot of Miller's storylines, bringing in elements from Elektra Assassin and Born Again, but without those stories' economy and verve. Purple prose weighs down so much of Fall from Grace. A typical caption: "Moments etched in time, fragile like glass. Glass breaks so easily. And the jagged pieces cut deep." The dialogue throughout the numerous battle scenes is painful, although the quieter moments of interplay between characters aren't bad.
Scott McDaniel, now a stalwart comic artist, was here very much still finding his voice. Drawing in a shadowy, evocative--but sometimes murky--style, McDaniel is at an early stage of his career, working out his panel to panel storytelling while trying valiantly to impress with unconventional jagged page layouts that sometimes serve to jumble the flow of the page. Combined with Chichester's wordy scripts, this can make for a maze of word balloons across the page. Sometimes McDaniel has to literally move panels out of the way as Chichester's captions or balloons take on page space entirely on their own--a bad sign.
Reading this book twenty years later, the density of the material is astounding. A new guest star appears in almost every issue and at least three separate villains with different agendas all chase after a virus that can remake a person from the ground up. All the while, Chichester adds on a subplot of the revelation of Daredevil's secret identity. Ten years later, Brian Michael Bendis would make a similar reveal the centerpiece of his Daredevil run for the better part of a year, but in Fall from Grace it takes up a few subplot pages throughout, a testament to the huge shift in sensibilities in mainstream comics that happened in the space of a decade. The compression that Chichester has to do to accomodate so much plot causes the storytelling to jump in between chapters, leaving the reader to fill in the blanks. At the end of chapter 3, Daredevil faces off against the cyborg Siege, but in the beginning of chapter 4, they are working side by side. Siege then disappears altogether between chapters 4 and 5, an elision that necessitates an awkwardly inserted page that wasn't in the original comic.
While Chichester and McDaniel attempt to bring something new to the title as they expand on Frank Miller's seminal work on the character, they mostly mine his stories for ideas without adding much to make it worthwhile. They rip open the tidy conclusion that Miller left for Elektra to use her in a wholly inessential sequel. It's a fun nostalgia trip for me, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who wasn't reading comics in the 90s.
In 1993, Marvel decided to shake up the sleepy Daredevil title. Fall from Grace brought a new costume, tons of guest stars, and the controversial return of Elektra, a Frank Miller character which for nearly ten years had been left alone. Writer D. G. Chichester calls back to a lot of Miller's storylines, bringing in elements from Elektra Assassin and Born Again, but without those stories' economy and verve. Purple prose weighs down so much of Fall from Grace. A typical caption: "Moments etched in time, fragile like glass. Glass breaks so easily. And the jagged pieces cut deep." The dialogue throughout the numerous battle scenes is painful, although the quieter moments of interplay between characters aren't bad.
Scott McDaniel, now a stalwart comic artist, was here very much still finding his voice. Drawing in a shadowy, evocative--but sometimes murky--style, McDaniel is at an early stage of his career, working out his panel to panel storytelling while trying valiantly to impress with unconventional jagged page layouts that sometimes serve to jumble the flow of the page. Combined with Chichester's wordy scripts, this can make for a maze of word balloons across the page. Sometimes McDaniel has to literally move panels out of the way as Chichester's captions or balloons take on page space entirely on their own--a bad sign.
Reading this book twenty years later, the density of the material is astounding. A new guest star appears in almost every issue and at least three separate villains with different agendas all chase after a virus that can remake a person from the ground up. All the while, Chichester adds on a subplot of the revelation of Daredevil's secret identity. Ten years later, Brian Michael Bendis would make a similar reveal the centerpiece of his Daredevil run for the better part of a year, but in Fall from Grace it takes up a few subplot pages throughout, a testament to the huge shift in sensibilities in mainstream comics that happened in the space of a decade. The compression that Chichester has to do to accomodate so much plot causes the storytelling to jump in between chapters, leaving the reader to fill in the blanks. At the end of chapter 3, Daredevil faces off against the cyborg Siege, but in the beginning of chapter 4, they are working side by side. Siege then disappears altogether between chapters 4 and 5, an elision that necessitates an awkwardly inserted page that wasn't in the original comic.
While Chichester and McDaniel attempt to bring something new to the title as they expand on Frank Miller's seminal work on the character, they mostly mine his stories for ideas without adding much to make it worthwhile. They rip open the tidy conclusion that Miller left for Elektra to use her in a wholly inessential sequel. It's a fun nostalgia trip for me, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who wasn't reading comics in the 90s.
arini95's review
2.0
The story itself could be more interesting if it was better written. The art sucked so much though.
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