Rating: 
Summary: Saurrealistic epic
Review: This experimental graphic novel is one of the most orginal comics I have read. Both writer and arist let it al hang out as wacky plot and bizarre art mesh together in this work. However they both go over the top at ties and so do not earn a 5 star rating from me. It is still quite good and worth the price.
Rating: 
Summary: Awesome - sorry for those who don't get it
Review: Yeah, the art is incredible - just that is worth rushing to buy it - but the story is too. Let's face it, there aren't that many women in comics: this book makes up for that. Here Elektra is WOMAN as she could never be while flirting with Daredevil - femme fatale, unscrutable, kicking-ass, mind-bending, ninja woman-on-a-mission. This is a heart-rending love song, carried on by a hapless male caught in her multi-layered traps. He may start out the book looking like a repulsive south american mob hit man, but by the end of the book you're just as tied up with him as you are fascinated by her. It may be the best (unrequited, tragi-comic) love story in comics. OK, so maybe his being totally dominated is probably where some male readers dropped off. Well, the rest of the story is over the top, but perfectly timed and hugely entertaining anyway. Frank Miller even manages to squeeze in a bit of his stinging social and political commentary. Just watch Ken Wind, the presidential candidate who suckles milk from the Beast, check notes with reality, and be afraid...
Rating: 
Summary: Insane and surreal... but to what end?
Review: Yes the art is beautiful; yes, the plotline is completely (at times hilariously) ridiculous. But there just don't seem to be any ideas in this. Frank Miller was trying to take the violence and political satire he had begun in DAREDEVIL to over-the-top levels, and the result is both childish and self-indulgent. As time has shown (and as I feared when this book came out in the mid-Eighties), rather than take this as a lampoon most people chose to take the extreme cruelty and violence in the book as something to delight in: thus we saw in its aftermath any number of "kewl" over-the-top studies in gore and sadism.Miller is capable of extremely intelligent work: BATMAN: YEAR ONE, the entire run on DAREDEVIL... but he has also released some extremely irresponsible and silly material. This falls into the latter category.
Rating:
Summary: Full of Too Much Wind...Like The Air!
Review: You won't find a much bigger fan of Miller anywhere as his Daredevil work got me into comics in the early 80's and has kept me in comics for the past two decades. But frankly (sorry, couldn't resist), there are aspects of this large and sprawling story that are simply a mess. Sure it is innovative and its groundbreaking storytelling style is STILL being copied in current Daredevil comics today (thanks mostly to David Mack). Sure it turned a lot of heads in its day as nobody had ever seen anything quite like it. Sure it was courageous to take Elektra totally out of Daredevil's world and establish her as the baddest assassin on the block, especially in a no-holds barred mature reader format. Sure it was chock full of social commentary, psychological insight, sexual tension and political satire. BUT...it all adds up to simply a decent rather than a great read.
There are just too many things that bog this story down. The worst has to be that this was originally done in an eight issue format so there are a number of recap pages in this story telling you things you have already read. What's worse, this is usually done as military type briefings or reports on pages with tons of tiny panels that you have already seen with copious amounts of text telling you things you already know. It was annoying when I read it in the comic format back in '86 and it really brings the story to a grinding halt in this collected volume. The art by Sienkiewicz is inconsistent (which was a planned feature of the story) going from beautiful and detailed to crude child's scribbling at times which is not only disconcerting, but it seemed to get much more arbitrary as the story went on. In the early chapters, this choppy art style is very well done and moves the story along nicely, but in the latter portion of the book, it seems to have no other purpose than to follow the art style that had already been established. Finally, while the first part of the tale is very verbose with lots of intricate panel work, the end of the story has very little text with huge splash pages of very simple art. While some may argue that this was to depict the doom of the atomic apocalypse that the story was moving towards, if you really stop and look at it, it appears that Frank and Bill were trying to fill pages to finish out their eight issues of comic.
While I have many gripes with this work and place it very low on my list of Frank Miller output, I cannot deny that the core story and concepts are very good. There are amazing sequences in this work that are some of the best comics I have ever read. When Garrett is sitting at his computer researching Elektra's history and suddenly realizes she may be in the room...man, I have never seen anything like that simple sequence. My big problem is that this intricate little story is burdened and complicated by too much extra material that chops up the flow. If this were edited down to its basic story, keeping the innovation, but cutting out all of the extraneous stuff, I would certainly be writing a different review.
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