New Avengers #1, or Out of Costume Goodness

Gather 'round, DD lovers, for I have a great story to tell you about, featuring our favourite superhero, in his civilian identity of blind lawyer Matt Murdock. There's a sprinkle of Foggy Nelson goodness in it, too, and I'm sure some will appreciate that.
The above panels are from the first issue of New Avengers, by Brian Michael Bendis.
The chronological setting is right after Avengers: Disassembled, the disastrous event that lead to the dismantling of the group of Earth's Mightiest Heroes.
That's right. It is hard to believe, seeing as how nowadays we have something like five or six different flavors of Avengers (Mighty Avengers, Young, New, Secret, Dark, diet, with almonds etc.), but at that time there were no more Avengers in the Marvel Universe. The story narrates how, by fate or chance, a new team of Avengers spontaneously formed itself during a time of crisis.
At that time, Bendis was in the apex of his run in Daredevil, with Matt having unmasked after beating the daylights out of Kingpin and with the FBI on his tail incessantly seeking proof to his activity as the red-clad vigilante.
New Avengers #1 is set just in those times. Along with his friend and partner Foggy Nelson, and with Luke Cage working as a bodyguard for them, Matt arrives by helicopter to the Raft, a maximum security installation designed to hold the most dangerous supervillains. He's welcomed by the woman who will be their guide through that dantesque hell: Jessica Drew, aka Spider-Woman.

Under a request by Mr Fantastic, Nelson & Murdock are there to confer with Robert Reynolds, a superhuman said to have confessed to the murder of his own wife.

After having convinced a rather scared Foggy to get out of the helicopter, and after the proper introductions are made, Jessica leads the three of them to the sub-basement.

All the while, Foggy expresses his perplexities about him being dragged there, in a claustrophobic facility crawling with dozens of murderous individuals, and in general about the opportunity of locking up all of said individuals in the same place.
Jessica Drew tries to reassure him that everything is under control (yeah, and we all know how it always goes in fiction whenever "everything is under control"). She also lets a comment slip about Matt's outing by the tabloids, to which Matt adamantly restates that he's not Daredevil. Nice to see that Bendis is consistent with what he's writing in other books (mostly because not always he does that).

So, the quartet reaches sub-basement 7, which is possibly even creepier and more claustrophobic than the rest of the place, and they are joined by two SHIELD redshirts.

The Fogster complains some more, and Jessica reassures him again, saying that there are three superheroes there with him besides the SHIELD agents stationed there, implying again that she doesn't buy that Matt is not DD. I wonder if she is doing that on purpose, to tease Matt, or if she's just desperately searching for a way to make Foggy's incessant whining stop. Then there's a blackout.

A total blackout in the maximum security prison. Crawling with supervillans. With them in the sub-basement.

As if it wasn't enough, the corridor is rocked by the shockwave of an explosion occurring elsewhere.

Faced with such a critical situation, Matt keeps his cool and orders Foggy to stay behind Luke's unbreakable hide, while he goes to check Reynolds' cell. Reynolds, he recalls having being told by Reed Richards, is one of the most powerful beings on the planet, and he's supposed to be a good guy. Matt asks him to help them get out of there. Unfortunately for them, Reynolds appears to be distraught and apathetic to the point that he doesn't listen to him, or even care about whatever is happening outside of his cell...

The tension keeps rising, and the dialogues become more concitated. The most panicked of all is of course fun-loving "Foggy" Nelson, who goes all "I told you so" on the others, especially on Matt, whom he irrationally blames of having forced him to come to that place.

- Please, get me out of here before something... ...insane...

And there he is behind him. The K2 of insanity. The in-continuity answer to a careless fanboysh question like "lol ppl what if teh Venom symbiote bonded with a dude wh's already a bloodthirsty psycho?!?".
Cletus Kasady. The nightmare known as Carnage.

He pops out behind poor Foggy as the others watch (or sense, in Matt's case) in horror. Matt thinks fast and shoves Foggy out of the way right before Carnage unleashes in a sudden madness of tentacles, fangs, spikes, superstrength, spider-sense immunity and freaky-colored speech baloons. Bendis also provides a handy B&W freeze frame for a quick reference on who he is and what he does (a useful device for such a setting, I must say. It certainly beats having the characters on scene introducing the newcomers with improbable lines, as happens often).

Matt pushes Foggy inside the relative safety of Reynolds' cell. Foggy can only watch in anguish while his partner closes the door, warns him not to open it for any reason, and gets hit by one of Carnage's flailing appendages.
The three plain-clothed heroes are barely managing to contain Carnage, as an inhumanly muscular figure emerges from behind Matt.

Tall, bare-chested, its facial traits stretched in a grotesque grin. And he knows Matt Murdock, apparently.

Matt welcomes the newcomer with a well placed rising double kick, to which the monster retaliates with a hammering of a punch to his face. Attentive readers may already have recognized the guy as Mister Hyde, a semi-regular foe to Daredevil.
Matt takes him on on his own, leaving Cage and Jessica to deal with Carnage. In the meantime, in the darkness of the cell, we have Foggy's defining moment for this issue:

Hearing the sounds of the battle coming from the corridor, Foggy begs Robert Reynolds to get out of his alienation and help his friends to face those impossible odds. Can the words of a simple man like him reach his mind and convince him to return being the hero they said he was? Who knows? Matt Murdock surely doesn't know, and he has more pressing troubles to deal with, namely avoiding the one punch Mr Hyde needs to turn him into paste.

- You put me here, Murdock!!
- Actually, Zabo, you put you here... ...but I see that you might not be in the mindset to see it that way!

Classy.

The dialogue between the two here is consistent with how Bendis has already depicted Hyde in Daredevil in an issue set before this one. In that circumstance, too, Mr Hyde was irrationally blaming Murdock for having constantly beaten him in the past and sent to prison, like if it was Matt who told him to inject himself with some hormonal filth to become an oversized freak and go play the superbaddie.

Those unfamiliar with Daredevil might also wonder how can Matt have Mr Hyde - a guy who has traded punches with guns like Thor and Hulk - in his rogue gallery, considering that he doesn't have superstrength and all. Well...

...he usually does fine by going the classical way: kicking him in the head as hard as he can.
The artist, David Finch, does a good work with representing the agitation of the scene. His style of portraying characters "good looking" also fits in nicely. For example, as you can see above, Spider-Woman is drawn to look like one of those impossibly attractive multiracial fashion models (you know, half Vietnamese, half Swedish, half Czech etc.).
Anyway, the sound effect was actually them getting reinforcements: Foggy's words have managed to touch Robert Reynolds, who emerges from the cell as The Sentry, grabs Carnage, flies him to space and rips him in half. It's the only deus-ex-machina they get, however, because he doesn't re-enter until the end of all that mess.

No longer occupied with the symbiote, Luke Cage easily takes Mr Hyde out.
But the group still has to find a way out of there. And a quick one also, because the place is filling with... is that water? Foggy wonders if they're sinking...

I love how, despite these dire situations coming one after the other, far from being panicked or even frightened Luke Cage goes simply "Aw, crap..." and Matt just looks irritated. Anyway, our heroes manage to swim out of there before Hydro-Man can drown them, with Foggy grabbed and flown to safety by Spider-Woman (that lucky son of a...).

The heroes emerge on the main deck, where hell has broken loose and Spider-man and Captain America are already fending off against a multitude of inmates (most of them superpowered). They join the dances. While fighting, Matt notices how Spidey has lost his mask, and promptly points out how that's a "bad career move". Bonus points to Bendis for the "dry humor + DD continuity reference" combo.

So, the five of them fight against the horde of psycho supervillains (is that the Mandrill in the left foreground?), and we have our Matt Murdock displaying the best of his agility and physical prowess, as he somersaults over the heads of the multitude, kicking bad guy after bad guy.

Of the group of superheroes there, he's theoretically the weakest. He cannot fly or shoot electricity like Spider-Woman. He doesn't have unbreakable skin like Luke Cage. He doesn't have Peter Parker's spider-powers. He's the only one, besides Cap, who doesn't have superhuman strength. And unlike Cap, he's bare-handed, without his usual billy-clubs.


He has powers of his own, certainly. But you'd think that in such a pandemonium, they're probably an hindrance more than anything else. Bendis could have Matt being disabled by an overloading of his supersenses, or even toss up some caption or some dialogue reminding us about this factor. He doesn't. Readers are left to imagine for themselves just how tough a time Matt is having, unarmed and underpowered, in all that mess. All of this, and yet there he is. Giving it all. Fighting with no less tenacity than his other companions. An amazing display of heroism.

In short, Matt Murdock, outside his own book, comes out as pretty hardcore.

The good guys, later joined by Iron-Man, manage to defeat the rampaging inmates and contain the breakout. Afterwards, inspired by what has transpired, Cap will offer all of the heroes who have been brought together in this incident to join a new group of Avengers. He will also invite Daredevil (who will coolly reject the invitation), but that is another story.

Team-ups ain't what they used to be...

As most comic book readers probably know by now, in the wake of the events occurred in the One More Day storyarc, Spider-man's continuity has been radically altered.
I'll summarize it for those who don't know. Joe Quesada, current Marvel EiC, believing that Spider-man being a married man was aging the character, and thus scaring away potential new, younger readers from the related books, decided that the marriage was to somehow be erased from Spider-man's past history.
They did so by having Peter Parker and his wife Mary Jane Watson strike a deal with Mephisto (a powerful demonic entity of the Marvel Universe), in exchange for the life of Aunt May, who at that time was on the brink of death after having being shot by a sniper sent to kill Peter.

Along with the erasing of the marriage, the new "younger readers-friendly" Spider-man was given, in the same package, a number of other significant continuity changes.
Among these changes, in particular, there was this one:

Absolutely no one knows that Peter Parker is Spider-man. Not Daredevil, not the Avengers, not anyone. His identity is truly secret, although some people seem to recall that Spidey unmasked himself during civil war, no one quite remembers whose face was under the mask.

...

If you're about to ask, yes. That is retarded. Accepting this and the rest of the continuity implies a significant number of ramificated absurdities and contradictions. But apart from that, why on earth did they feel to introduce this change also? Was Spidey's revelation of his secret identity aging the character as well, like the marriage?
No, it was more likely because, after the big fat event of Spidey's outing (which gave Marvel an enormous mediatic visibility and made sales sky-rocket), they realized that mess had deprived Spidey of a huge chunk of his character and they didn't know what the heck they could do with him anymore. Sure, initially they had him go hunt for the instigator of the sniping, back in his black costume because he had become all angsty (or better yet, to reflect the look of the contemporary Spider-man 3 movie, and attract new readers), but what else could he do after that? Nothing, unless the status quo was to be dramatically (and irreversibly) altered.

Daredevil didn't have this luxury. He didn't have the same visibility when he unmasked, relatively recently, and didn't get a similar plenary indulgence after the party was over. In fact, Matt Murdock's life is still a mess in large part because of his outing, and he's still paying the price for it. But I digress.

All these gratuitous changes to the character's continuity have pretty much had the effect of a reset button. Spider-man started his Brand New Day as a hard luck hero, young, pennyless, with a fixation on mantaining his identity a secret, with a new supporting cast and a new set of bad guys (in addition to the existing ones). Plus, he got to somehow fit in the continuity of the other characters - like Daredevil or the New Avengers - as if nothing had happened. With DD this was particularly weird, because there is really no way to concile their past mutual history - rich with encounters both in and out of costume, team-ups, shared adventures - with the fact that Daredevil doesn't know who Spider-man is (especially considering he has heightened senses).

In addition to this, the all new continuity (I'm struggling not to use the term "new status quo" they have used, because, as anyone who understands some Latin knows, it is an oxymoron) sort of gave the authors the illusion that they could, for the moment, write any Spidey story they wanted without putting much attention to the details. This lead to the poorly written Spider-Man/Matt Murdock interaction seen in Amazing Spider-Man #566, by Guggenheim with art by Phil Jimenez and others.

In this story, a villain captures Peter Parker's roommate, believing him to be Spider-man, and takes him away after having forced him to wear the Spider-Man costume, which she had stolen right before. Peter has to do something about it, but needs another costume to conceal his identity before getting into action.
Instead of just putting a potato sack over his head, he decides to borrow a Daredevil costume from Matt Murdock. Don't ask me why.

He heads to Matt's law office at Hell's Kitchen, calling him on the phone at the same time:

So he calls and Matt Murdock doesn't believe him to be Spider-man and thinks it's a prank call, because, y'see, Peter is a clumsy hard luck hero. Ha ha ha. How funny.
Yeah, funny. Apart from the fact that Matt Murdock is blind and has been training himself for a lifetime to not only recognize voices, but also to detect anomalies in the voice and speech patterns (enabling him to tell if someone is saying the truth or not even when he cannot hear that person's heartbeat, like in this case). You really think that the blind superhero with heightened senses cannot tell the voice of a long time ally from that of a prank calling nut? I say thee nay.
The Superman bit was a nice touch, though.

Peter then tells Matt to look out of the window, so that he can see him - wearing a facial disguise made of webbing - sticking on the outside wall of the building and be convinced that it was actually the real Spider-Man calling him.
I repeat. He's telling a person whom he knows he's blind to look out of his window. According to Guggenheim's twisted logic, not only Matt Murdock doesn't believe the identity of a person he was talking to on the phone (not an unknown guy, a person he should be familiar with), he also has to put his head out of the window to detect the presence of someone outside in the immediate vicinities.
This is ridiculous. Last time I checked his powers were "superhumanly heightened senses and radar sense", not "is a lawyer and wears shirts and red sunglasses when out of costume"

Sure, anything for you, webhead. After all, it's not like I'm currently having a hard time now, with my wife having been driven mad by a maniac and a case of an innocent in death row who will be executed in a handful of days. Oh, also, do you realize how irrelevant is to me the mask you're wearing? I can recognize your odor and track you by scent if I ever wanted. By the way, how is aunt May?

Peter, anyway specifically asks for a costume with eyeholes on the mask. He apparently knows that DD doesn't need those, being blind. And to think that just three panels before he had asked Matt to "look" out of the window...


Wow. What do ya know? Brand New Day Spidey is also somehow aware that there are cartoon series about him with characteristic theme songs, and he's made up a Daredevil variant! I don't know, it's supposed to be a witty/funny thing, I guess.
Anyway, he goes to the police precinct to gather some informations on the kidnapper. He is aware that Spider-man, to the public, is menace, and so he expects to be treated with more respect by the police, since he's posing as Daredevil.

About that, I'm sure everyone at the precinct loves DD, especially considered that Daredevil is unregistered too and that he has beaten two policemen to near death in recent issues, under the effect of Mr Fear's gas. But this is "younger readers-friendly BND Spidey", it's a safe bet to say that 90% of them don't read a book like Daredevil (which is commonly considered to be dark and depressing).

As for the remaining 10%, they can suck it up, just like they did with the rest of the One More Day/Brand New Day mess.