Christmas Book Club – ‘Daredevil: Born Again: Interregnum’

While discussing Daredevil: Born Again, it might be worth thinking about what might have been. Born Again isn’t the first chapter’s title – it’s the fourth (Daredevil #230). All of the titles have vague Biblical connotations but they don’t proceed in a prescribed religious pattern, not one I can see anyway. Thus, we don’t know if Born Again was originally intended to be thought of as the name for the storyline or even if it was conceived of as a distinct stand alone book. It might have been something tacked on later.

I’m not a fan of the gentrified term ‘graphic novel’ but those who take that term seriously think it denotes a stand alone project, something finite that can be read as a whole and therefore superior to the serial practice of collecting and reading comics, the idea of comics continuity. However, it does seem, due the shift in sensibility of the story, that something different is happening in these chapters, at least until Nuke comes along in issue 232, and DD puts his tights on again and things fold back into the Marvel universe.

At the time Frank Miller came back onto the title, he sought to do some things that were different (get rid of Daredevil’s lawyer identity if you want to look at it on the most basic level) and rebuild the character, a kind of breaking down and rebuilding that was very present in Alan Moore‘s work at that time. However, when Moore rebuilt characters, he also rebuilt and redefined the modes in which he told their stories and the two things went hand in hand. I don’t know if that was Miller’s intent. It certainly seems like it at first but by the end of Born Again, the various big questions and threads sort of trail off and go unaddressed, at least satisfactorily. The episode with Nuke seems like a sort of two parter that’s part of a longer saga – the big picture conflict with the Kingpin certainly feels unsatisfying if this is intended as a resolution, so my gut feeling is that this wasn’t the intended end.

I wonder if Miller initially thought of this as a second run on the title that would outdo the first? Certainly, DD is the character I associate more with him, the one that speaks to me more personally, than Batman or Marv or whomever. When I interviewed Denny O’Neil, he said that both he and Miller had been brought up Irish Catholic and that influenced the way they each handled the character. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the important aspects of Born Again happen around Christmas time and perhaps the episode with Nuke happens around Easter, although I’m not quite sure about the Easter part.

If we count the issue with the Gladiator (Daredevil #226) where Miller rewrote O’Neil’s final script on the title, Miller scripts eight issues of this second run. That’s only one year’s worth of issues, give or take, less than the number he scripted originally. Here, I’m taking 1Daredevil #168 as his first scripting issue (I know he co-plotted with Roger McKenzie prior to issue 168, while he was growing as an artist) because to me, that’s the first one where he really begins Daredevil’s psychodrama (Bullseye-Kingpin-Elektra-DD) that defines that seminal run.

Could this second run have done something similar, but even deeper? My guess is yes, and as many of us know, if Marvel hadn’t been foolish (did they partly sit on their hands because they hadn’t anticipated how Born Again‘s adult sensibility would be received long term?), Miller would have gone on to deepen Daredevil’s origins with his mother Maggie in The Devil’s Own (part of the redesign/redefinition would be to frame DD as forged out of his mother’s legacy as opposed to just his father’s), drawn by Walt Simonson. Of course, we do have Miller’s treatment for the first issue that is interesting to read because we see that in his script work, unlike Moore, Miller wrote fairly streamlined functional Marvel style scripts. It would seem that much of the poetic detail, sensory impression, and deeper insight came out in the actual work process of producing the comic. If Miller had continued on the title, we might not have gotten Batman: Year One and possible other projects so for most people, they would not have wanted to trade away Year One, for another year’s worth or more of Daredevil. And I mean Daredevil, not Elektra. I’m in the minority in that I’d rather have seen what he’d have done with Daredevil at that magical time in his writing career. Now that he’d made Daredevil into a nobody, a cook at a diner in Hell’s Kitchen, what would he have done with that? It seems like a cipher begging to be filled. Ann Nocenti had Daredevil returning to law through a Hell’s Kitchen storefront legal aid clinic, and so the old model was reinstated in a slightly altered manner but I believe Miller would have done something different (perhaps with David Mazzucchelli continuing after a two issue spell by Simonson – Mazzucchelli sort of took these breaks to recharge during the O’Neil run as well), although perhaps Miller didn’t know what that was yet. I bet it would have included the Kingpin though.

Anyway, as mentioned before, Miller’s Marvel script for the first chapter of The Devil’s Own, the two parter he proposed to continue after the episode with Nuke which would have been drawn by Simonson, is extant. It sits in Marvel’s offices but has been leaked – this website explores it here.

Dr. Strange, a character that Miller was once going to work on at one time for Marvel (another waylaid project), guest stars and like the two parter with Nuke which guest starred Captain America, it seems like another episodic tale which would have fit within a longer run. However, this two parter (Miller never wrote the second part as Marvel postponed the story) would have developed the character of Daredevil’s mother and fleshed out some of her past. Miller introduced Maggie in Born Again, chapter three, and we surmise that she left for unknown reasons (something perhaps related to Daredevil’s father and how difficult he could be) and became a nun.

Cartoonist Dan Lauer took it upon himself as an exercise to draw out this long lost, and unfinished, chapter in Miller’s Daredevil oeuvre and you can see these pages amongst his other work by scrolling back through his instagram feed: @dlauer68

He has discussed the possibility of printing up copies and distributing them for free.