For the first time in a long time, we get a Daredevil story that’s … kinda bad. It was bound to happen.
When Brian Michael Bendis left the title, he left a whole bunch of loose ends. One of them was Matt Murdock’s bride, Milla Donovan. She’ll be the center of this story.
Melvin “Gladiator” Potter is in jail for attacking Matt (albeit he really didn’t want to, but was being blackmailed), and now he’s been framed while in jail for having killed a bunch of guys in the prison shop with buzzsaws.
And to be fair, that is his M.O.
Foggy and Matt take on his defense, but it’s not going well so Melvin escapes confinement and then interrupts Matt and Milla while they are out for dinner, beats up Daredevil, and leaves him for the cops to pick up.
Gladiator hasn’t really been able to beat Daredevil this soundly before.
Anyway, Daredevil is arrested for being unregistered–and while he’s in the back of the cop car, Gladiator goes to his home to kill Milla.
Milla started as an interesting, sexy, and smart blind woman who offered an interesting companion for Matt Murdock and who had depth of character as well. But now she’s just typical bait.
Gladiator is holding her hostage, waiting for Daredevil, and she convinces him that he shouldn’t be doing this because he knows how to sew.
Matt busts out of the cop car and arrives to rescue her before we know whether her appeal to his Etsy side would have worked.
Daredevil beats him up, he’s re-arrested, and it is determined that someone made him go crazy and do all these horrible things. Guess who?
Yes, Mr. Fear of course.
There’s more with Milla in a subplot that’s really not worth mentioning except that she’s essentially baited into throwing someone in front of a train and killing them.
This is the end of an arc, but obviously not the end of this story and, since I’m not thinking much of it, let’s just plow through.
Having killed someone, even by accident, Milla goes nuts. Yeah, it’s Mister Fear again.
Daredevil breaks into prison at night to have conjugals. Then he tries to track down Mister Fear by beating up a whole bunch of people in sequences drawn by a whole bunch of artists to celebrate issue #100. Also hallucinations of beating people up and of the yellow costume.
Whatever. I’m having trouble paying attention at this point. But I am looking at the pretty pictures because they’re by all of the best Daredevil artists of all time. And also Al Milgrom. (But he’s only an inker.)
This includes a sequence where Matt tortures Ox, of the Enforcers, with a blowtorch.
Very out of character, and this one is definitely NOT hallucinated.
Milla ends up being released because she wasn’t responsible for the death but she’s still crazy and can’t get sane. After a few more issues (this story just goes on and on and on), Matt finally beats up Mister Fear.
But Milla? She’s incurably nuts now.
Sad that this series took such a sudden, sharp downturn.
English (US) · 