One sentence summary: A collection of all the later Miller Daredevil tales, this is an omnibus with about 350 pages of solid comic gold.This is a superb collection of Miller's take on Daredevil, following his extended run from the late 70s to the early 80s (a run that, in my opinion, is important as one of the earliest cases of the modern, critically solid comics that would lead to Moore, Sandman, and the entire modern scene really).
Born Again, easily the most enshrined comic in this collection, is chronologically sandwiched between two other significant Miller pieces: The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One. I also think it's fascinating that the other lengthy piece in this Omnibus, The Man With No Fear, is essentially Daredevil: Year One, giving us a chronology where Miller does something original and game-changing with Batman, then mirrors it (successfully, it must be added) with Daredevil. They've always been similar characters, but this really does help cement that.
For ease, I'll just walk through the contents of the omnibus as it presents them. First, the inexplicably contained two issues of Spider-Man. I know that Miller did work on them, but they seem strangely out of place here. While involving Daredevil, it's certainly not the Daredevil that Miller would go on to script. Not only that, but the focus of the book is, outside of these, entirely on late-Marvel era Miller as a writer, while this is him as a tyro artist. Very strange, and while I rarely wish content wouldn't be there, I do wish this, if present at all, would be contained in some appendix, not the front of the book.
Next is Born Again, which is really the reason the omnibus exists. Born Again is the story that Daredevil has been ever since, just set on a loop as various writers remix it slightly. Mazzucchelli is a fascinating artist, as he really adjusts his style radically based on what the story may demand. Here there are shadows everywhere, lines invade the light like dirty water into a white napkin, and every panel presents the action in an incredibly straight-forward manner. Murdock may go insane, but the panels won't tell us this. It's the comic equivalent of using long shots -- a bit of an old style, but brilliantly effective.
It's tough to praise Miller's writing for a number of reasons. For one, though Born Again is sincerely great, the best parts about it have been taken and reused a thousand times since. Also, I realize another reason is something I completely skipped mentioning.
One thing that boils under the surface, but is quite lucid in the script pages in the appendix, is Miller's struggle to find a voice for Captain America, especially given his conflict in the story. I think quite a bit could be written on the differences Miller saw between Superman and Captain America's patriotisms and the reasons why. I won't now, but I'll say that it comes down to intelligence and skepticism, and given Miller's strong and bizarre political views could be an interesting topic. For a later time, though.
Between Born Again and the lousy Spider-Man issues are a couple other DD issues. One is a concluding issue of an arc that came immediately prior to Born Again and, while interesting, isn't especially worth talking about in length. However, the other is a one-off that is simply incredible, and that is "Badlands."
This was a one-off co-scripted by Miller that doesn't even feature Daredevil. While we know who the protagonist is, it barely matters. His name is never said, his occupation and abilities are never questioned, and his speech is kept to an impossible minimum. What happens instead is an entire town and history is created, elaborated, and brought to a close. The story itself is solid, and the writing is pretty tight (given the lack of dialog, Miller lets loose with prose verbiage, which I actually like though I could understand criticisms), but what is marvelous to me is the succinctness of it. When I was halfway through it, I just assumed it was a graphic novel I hadn't heard of, probably in the 64-page length. I was genuinely amazed when I realized it was only a 22 page standard. Anyone looking to see the utmost limits of gently compact storytelling should seek this out and learn it, as it uses all the tricks -- good and bad -- that it can.
After Born Again we have an interesting graphic novel with the bizarre, 80s-90s style art of Bill Sienkiewicz. I miss artists like this. That was thing the comic world of the 80s and 90s had over the modern age -- the ability of not just talented artists to do projects, but the acceptance of artists whose style could in no way be described as pop-art doing conventional comics. It was an era of Mack and McKean, and its passing is a bit of a bummer (not that modern artists are bad, but just that the most "avant-garde" of the artists doing things for the big names are still relatively traditional, like Allred or Cooke). As far as the story itself, it seems a bit of an anticlimatic mess, and I can see why it hasn't attained classic-status despite the creative team. Still an interesting read.
Then comes Man Without Fear, the Miller/JRJR project that oozes its movie-pitch roots. I don't really mean that as pejoratively as it sounds; the series is a captivating read that's almost had as much influence on later DD writers as Born Again. JRJR is an interesting companion to Mazzucchelli -- while Mazzucchelli has a fluid form that adjusts for every project, JRJR has one of the most distinctive looks in comic-dom which has remained largely the same for almost 20 years.
Really, the most interesting part of Man Without Fear is to see how Miller characterizes his most famous creation, Elektra. This early Elektra is not the stern, noble stoic assassin of post-Miller writers. This Elektra is friggin' nuts; she seems more akin to Bullseye than her later characterizations (which, in an aside, is interesting since Bullseye is probably the only classic DD character that does not show up in this mini. It's like Murdock requires that unhinged character to serve as a foil and make the reader see what would happen if he weren't in such tight control of himself).
Overall, it's a great collection and contains essentially all the best work Miller did for Marvel. It's interesting to me how much Miller stresses, both in the comics and out, how for Murdock, Daredevil isn't simply a costume done for protecting his identity or so forth. He has to be Daredevil to do what he does, because Daredevil isn't himself -- it's this "other," a literal alternate ego. It's an idea with subtle differences from the normal justifications for superhero identities (which generally exist in a spectrum from the Spider-Man to the Batman). The extras are nothing crazily unique (no shot against Miller, but his scripts don't tend to add a ton to the understanding of the work, but they're still nice to read over), but they're solid. Actually, my biggest gripe with the work? The name. When I first saw this existed, I assumed it was a companion to the Miller-scripted Daredevil run they had collected earlier, maybe featuring significant comics that influenced or were influenced by it, etc, such as would be expected from a "Companion." Probably should've just labeled this the second Daredevil by Miller omnibus.
Seriously, that's how good this collection was -- that's one of my biggest gripes.
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