Daredevil vs. Bullseye 4

You love ninjas, right?  Of course you do, because you love Batman and Wolverine and the hundreds of other superheroes who’ve studied with the hordes of ninjas roaming around the world.  Seriously, they’re everywhere – I don’t know how any politician or businessman makes it through a single day without a blowdart in the neck or ninja sword through the abdomen.  I’m not great at math, but did you know that comic book mysteries begin with ninja assassinations 100% of the time?  So Marvel has this great idea: instead of always having our superheroes go to Japan or another vague Asian country to fight ninjas – which take at least ten pages of airplane humor and a foiled terrorist attack – why not bring the ninjas to New York City?  Create an entire ninja society with appropriate architecture and culture smack dab in Hell’s Kitchen.  And these new New York-based ninjas’ proud grand leader? Daredevil, of course.

In Shadowland #1, written by Andy Diggle and drawn by Billy Tan, you’re about to witness supervillain-on-supervillain crime.  The Hand, Marvel’s premier ninja group, has to be led by someone evil and Daredevil’s turned to the bad side.  It’s also a weird demon possession, but we can ignore that.  Right after Bullseye leaves the Dark Avengers pretending to be Hawkeye, he returns to Hell’s Kitchen to do whatever supervillain stuff he normally does.

Notice the black outfit, always a bad sign in the superhero costume community.  Though it’s odd his ninjas get to rock that famous crimson, but Daredevil has to look like an actual ninja.  Note that like all supervillain henchmen, these ninjas are terribly weak and ineffective.  Spider-Man could take on hundreds of them without breaking a sweat, and he hasn’t spent his entire life in an obscure monastery devoting his entire life to learning martial arts.  That’s the life of a henchman.  Bullseye has no actual superpowers, but you know without a bead of hesitation that he can wipe out entire small countries of ninja henchmen before he even takes the smallest knife wound.  And he does.

How could this fight end in anything but Daredevil versus Bullseye?  All Daredevil’s doing is dumping his ninjas straight into the toilet.  Luckily since this is comics, his ninjas number somewhere between all of them and infinite, but still, someone has to clean up all the ninja goo splattered all over the pavements and ceilings and everywhere else they futilely attack a better fighter.  Poor ninjas.  They should really try techniques like body armor or shields or finding a non-murdering line of work.

It took two-thirds of the fight, but finally the two of them get to fight.  Also, this Daredevil lacks all the charm and good vibes and mercy that normal Daredevil has.  Turns out a hundred and twenty issues of non-stop misery wears Daredevil down a bit.  So while what happens next is easily dismissed as demon possession (giving Daredevil a pass when this Marvel event ends), it’s delightful to know that Daredevil is still suffering lingering effects of this five years later in current continuity.  Because he’s a jerk.  Because he deserves this.  Because we as readers don’t have the strict moral compass of superheroes.

Daredevil’s dead!  On an unrelated note, you like lists, right?  Lists are the cool thing now, right? Good, let’s do one of those next time.