Daredevil, Vol. 2

You can definitely see the progression from volume 1 to this one, wherein Miller drops all the silliness (well, most of it...Stilt Man makes an appearance) Marvel had long been known for and shows us what comics can be. I love how Daredevil shifts from realistic crime with Kingpin's reintroduction to more exotic mysticism with the advent of the Hand and Elektra. Wish Miller had stayed with the character even longer

After the introductory period involving other writers, Frank Miller's classic run on "Daredevil" enters into its most famous period, the climax of the Elektra Saga, which would define the title character and his relationships with several of his key villains. This volume collects issues #173-184 of the ongoing title, all written and illustrated by Miller. Some spoilers follow. After Miller took over as writer, he immediately introduced the deadly assassin Elektra, Daredevil's former love in college, and instigated the return to New York of the mob villain the Kingpin, who came to believe his wife Vanessa had been tragically killed, though readers know better. As Kingpin and his puppets tighten their grip on New York's power structure, this comes into play (for all Miller's reinvention of Daredevil's world as a street-level noir, you get somewhat got intrusions of the unreal such as an underground society of mutants who live in the sewers). The key story of Miller's run, indeed, perhaps in the whole history of Daredevil, is the death of Elektra at the hands of the villain Bullseye, whose place Elektra had usurped as the Kingpin's chief assassin. The fight between the two is wonderfully depicted in the space of a few pages, and the final blow now counts as among the most endlessly homaged moments in the history of comics (indeed, any appearance of either Elektra or Bullseye has a decent chance of homaging it). Subsequent years have seen quite a bit of talk about the tendency of female characters to be killed in such a way as to effect the male hero, but this is an interestin example in so many ways: Elektra dies because she, independent of Matt, gets in the way of Bullseye, who isn't even aware of the connection between the two. Bullseye's killing of Elektra after, in the beginning of Miller's run, Matt's decision to save his life, leads into an examination of the morality of superheroes' refusal to kill their enemies. Murdock rages at the cost of Bullseye's survival (true to the preoductions of Lt. Manolis at the time), and, in an unrelated case, finds himself dealing with the Punisher, the embodiment of the trigger-happy hero. The story plays with the effectiveness of the law and the limits of vengeance in society, ending uneasily on Murdock's side, an issue that will continue to fester through the end of Miller's run. Miller also introduces another important part of Daredevil's mythos, the ninja group the Hand, assassins who trained Elektra. This is perhaps the most important creative period in Daredevil's history, and is well worth the time of any comics fan.