I, for one, would like to be caught in her web – Daredevil #188

In recent years Frank Miller’s work has slipped into that most dangerous of ruts — unwitting self-parody.  He made popular the oft-imitated (aped ad nauseum in the opinion of many) “dark and gritty” style with landmark works that I don’t have to list.  Everyone knows the titles and characters that he took into the stratosphere of popularity, and that oeuvre makes lines like “I’m the Goddamn Batman” all the more painful.  Now he’s floundering in a style that he once made his own, and I’m not buying that he’s operating on some higher intellectual level where we mere mortals don’t get the meta effects of what he’s doing. 

It’s like watching Willie Mays fall down at home plate.  It’s painful.

But that doesn’t diminish what came before.  I arrived too late to the comics world to absorb Miller’s runs on Daredevil as they unfolded, but I can look back and appreciate the noir-y visual vocabulary that he brought to those stories.  By this issue, #188, he had handed over the bulk of the artistic chores to his inking partner, Klaus Janson, contributing layouts in the way Jack Kirby did on titles back in Marvel’s glory days.  Janson’s inks are so bold, though, they often consume the lines of his penciller teammate, so the transition to him merely bringing life to Miller’s designs is very smooth.  The art looks and flows like it did when Miller handled the full pencilling chores.

The Man Without Fear takes a backseat in this issue, appearing sparingly as the Black Widow chops and kicks her way through the underworld of New York City, poisoned by the Hand and looking for a way to stay alive.  This issue falls in mid-arc, so I won’t go too deeply into the story.  Let’s just say that it’s still a treat, all these years later, to sit back and enjoy the quality of the action sequences.  Wonderful stuff.

There’s just something about a sassy redhead in a skintight bodysuit that oftentimes displays just enough decolletage wailing on a phalanx of baddies that’s sure to get every man’s blood pumping (and it’s worthy of a breathless run-on sentence, at that):

I guess we should thank the geek gods for the casting of ScarJo as the flesh and blood Natasha.

And I suppose that, while we’re at it, we should also give thanks to a younger Frank Miller for not having Natasha utter a line like “I’m the Goddamn Black Widow.”