Daredevil/Elektra: Love and War (Daredevil)

Rating:
Summary: Miller And Sienkiewicz At Their Best!
Review: This large hardcover collects the Daredevil Graphic Novel (Love and War) as well as the entire Elektra Assassin series. Both stories were written by Frank Miller and illustrated by Bill Sienkiewicz.

I missed reading these stories when they first came out in the 1980s but I'd heard so much about the great Miller-Sienkiewicz collaborations that I just had to get this book. The bonus is that you get the glorious Sienkiewicz art in a much larger size here than in the original - so you can spend hours poring over all the details. After all, this is the work that made Bill Sienkiewicz into, well... BILL SIENKIEWICZ!

The "Love and War" story is essentially about Kingpin and his wife, Vanessa. For those who have followed the storylines in Frank Miller's Daredevil comics (collected in the 3 volume Visionaries tradepaperbacks), you'll know that Vanessa went through a hell of a mental ordeal - finally reducing her to a vegetable. This is the follow-up story for those wondering how the Kingpin-Vanessa story went. This story, more than any other, shows Kingpin as a human who CAN be hurt... and hurt deeply. Not by do-gooder superheroes but by love. Sienkiewicz illustrates this story in a lyrical yet surreal fashion. The scenes showing Daredevil cradling Vanessa while jumping across the rooftops are so poetic and lyrical that you'll cry reading them.

"Elektra Assassin" is the real MEAT of this hardcover collection, though. Daredevil doesn't appear in this. It's all about Elektra and this secret agent. Miller mixes in Japanese mysticism, political paranoia, Greek tragedy, shadow-play espionage, gender issues, sex, violence, claustrophobic mind-games, media manipulation and the Biblical apocalypse into this story. Sienkiewicz takes the whole witch-brew and hammers the whole thing into form. The result is a heady trip... an experience, an encounter with a dangerous woman who may be the only one who knows what the hell is going on - and how to FIX it. This is the greatest example of comics-experimentation in the 1980s (Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen are the other examples).