Daredevil [2016] #4 - Marvel Comics

DAREDEVIL No. 4, April 2016

It’s easy to imagine that a number of the 43,741 collectors who bought Issue Four of “Daredevil” felt somewhat misled by the twenty-page periodical's action-packed cover illustration. For although Charles Soule’s narrative does indeed partially concern Bill Everett’s co-creation foiling “the whole bomb maker’s Pantry” in the Red Hook neighbourhood of Brooklyn. The costumed crime-fighter doesn’t actually do so in the company of the “veteran super hero” Captain America, and seemingly prefers instead to undertake the distinctly solo mission with the silver-haired Sentinel of Liberty simply providing communications support from his supposed vantage point outside in the street; “He might not be doing the fighting himself, but the problems get solved.”

Equally as frustrating, though perhaps less ambiguous, is the Brooklyn-born writer’s secondary suggestion that Matt Murdock’s alter-ego has actually turned to the elderly Steve Rogers for some much needed guidance in dealing with the blind lawyer's current foe, Tenfingers. The entire sequence depicting Hornhead’s fraught mission to defuse the detonator before it takes “down the whole damn building” is painfully punctuated with the athletic acrobat’s hopes that the World War Two veteran can help dispel his personal doubts as to how best to defeat the Chinese crime-lord. Yet at the end of the magazine when the former Avenger asks him why “you called me in the first place”, the supposed Man Without Fear simply mumbles “Just… reassurance, maybe.”

Admittedly, Samuel Chung’s revelation to his eight-fingered mother that he is the Church of the Sheltering Hands’ mysterious “enemy” she so earnestly wishes to personally eliminate, does in some way further progress the title’s over-arching story concerning the disfigured magician’s plans to build “a power base in Chinatown.” But even their subsequent enthralling exchange of blows is short-lived as a result of The Hand’s abrupt return, and infuriatingly only hints at the potential exploration of an infinitely more complicated relationship between illegal immigrant and his misguided parent in a future publication.

Ron Garney and Goran Sudzuka’s pencilling for this comic book is also rather disappointing in many respects. The creative collaborators' breakdowns showing Daredevil’s billy club zinging around the residential apartment block, brutally battering the bombers’ heads and legs are well enough dynamically drawn. However the same cannot be said for some of their illustrations of Steve Rogers, the actual bombers or Blindspot’s mother.

The variant cover art of "DAREDEVIL" No. 4 by Michael Cho