Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Daredevil (Vol. 2), Issue #3 (Legacy Issue #383) – “Dystopia”! In the previous installment, there’s a whole lot on Matthew Murdock’s plate: he was given a baby, he was told the baby was the antichrist, he now has to decide between keeping the baby safe and ridding the world of this problematic baby!

Natasha “Black Widow” Romanov popped in to assist Murdock with the baby situation. Foggy Nelson is banging a client. Gwyneth was kidnapped by the people who have been after her. Murdock’s ex-girlfriend Karen showed up out of nowhere to tell him that she has AIDS. That part was pretty nuts!

What will Murdock decide to do with the baby? Should he even believe this baby is the antichrist in the first place, just because some guy with a mustache told him it was? Why should he believe him? Something funny is going on!

Remember when Kevin Smith got kicked off a plane for being too fat? And then that plane crashed into the Twin Towers! He should be thankful, but instead he bitched about it for two years on his 45 podcasts. I might have gotten my timeline off by almost nine years.

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Daredevil (Vol. 2), Issue #3 (Legacy Issue #383) [January, 1999]
Written by: Kevin Smith
“Dystopia”

Blind Guy Soliloquy Time! Kevin Smith’s got 56,000 words to cram into these 20 pages and time’s a-wastin’! Blah blah blah, here’s the crib notes: Murdock’s ex-girlfriend Karen showed up out of nowhere to say she is HIV+ (which is not the same as AIDS, by the way, but maybe this is some SUPERHERO TWIST CHEKHOV’S GUN!) on the same day an old man with a mustache popped into his office to say he was gonna be cursed if he didn’t kill a baby! Wow!

The soliloquy continues with some unsolicited law school college boy shit: in law school you’re taught the concept of “judgmental vacuum” wherein you are a lawyer who does lawyer things, and if that means defending a clearly guilty client then so be it! You’re taught in law school how to get past all the self-loathing that may manifest itself in your gut from day after day, week after week of constant moral indecency that comes from it. He got a call this morning, it turns out it’s Foggy, and Foggy looks worse for wear as a couple of cops drag him into the office.

Foggy tries to explain, but he’s a bit FOGGY about the details! But also, he doesn’t even really believe it. Previously, Foggy had been starting an affair with one Ms. Lydia McKenzie. You may remember her kissing his dopey Barney Rubble face and pulling him into a bedroom? Well, shortly after he was pulled into the bedroom, LYDIA MCENZIE TURNED INTO SOME CRAZY, GREEN, RAZOR-SHARP-TOOTHED OLD HAG WHO SCRATCHES UP FOGGY’S FACE AND JUMPED THROUGH A BUTTFUCKING WINDOW! Comic books!

But when Foggy looked out the window he saw a normal, dead Lydia on the ground instead. Well, I guess not normal, because normally Lydia would be alive. But she happened to not be in an abnormal way, you see. Foggy calls the cops about this, which is immensely dumb considering it looks like he threw a woman through a window. Understandably, he’s taken away for murder when the police don’t believe his story that he probably tried to tell the truth about! Nicely done, lawyer guy, for thinking this could have gone any other way.

Murdock uses his heartbeat Spidey-Sense to determine that Foggy isn’t lying. Foggy cries about thinking God’s punishing him for cheating, and I’m rolling my eyes because THERE’S THE GOD GUY AGAIN GETTING MENTIONED AGAIN! Murdock gets started right away on trying to clear ol’ Foggy Murderer’s name, but there’s already a giant media circus surrounding the law offices and before he can really say “boo” he gets called into Foggy’s mom’s office. Yes, that’s right.

Meanwhile, Karen Page is at Murdock’s apartment standing around smoking in Muhammad Ali shorts and looking photos of her failed relationship. She also holds a curious (to me, at least) sticky note that says “Mr. Murdock: As per your request. -Peter Parker” and I’m wondering when the little twerp had time to stop jacking off long enough to write those eight words! She is interrupted by a knock at the door. It’s Old Man Macabes, the mustached bearer of apocalyptic news! But here’s here to see Karen, which is weird.

Foggy’s mom wants to fire Foggy. Murdock thinks she’s cuckoo nutso, but he doesn’t want her big, porky, murdering rapist son tainting the good name of their very respectable law firm! Murdock’s all like “HE’S INNOCENT AND YOU KNOW IT!”, he says this spittily. She’s all like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. “I’ve been a lawyer longer than I’ve been a mother” she tells him, justifying her decision to cut him loose. I really don’t blame her, I thought he looked like bad news since I first laid eyes upon his doughy, droopy-eyed face! Murdock has had just about enough of this BULLSHIT.

“I have to go, Rosalind — have to figure out how to prove my partner’s innocence.” he says as walks on out of there like he has a broom up his butt. She stops him and reminds him that “cutting all ties” means, no, you’re not getting fucking involved. “You’re saying I CAN’T defend him?” he asks, and she, in essence, answers with a “…well, you just won’t have the firm’s resources, hint hint.” He doesn’t take the hint. “THEN I QUIT!” he says, hobbling out of the office like a 140-year-old feeb.

“MINUTES LATER, A FAMILIAR FIGURE LEAPS INTO THE MANHATTAN SKY…” says the narration. Murdock didn’t waste any time! As he’s prancing around town doing backflips he’s thinking about all the stuff he has to try to take care of: Foggy (murder/rapist), Karen (AIDS girlfriend), Baby (antichrist). As he jumps around, he encounters a mugging in broad daylight. He subdues the mugger, but then the muggee shoots him in the back with a tranquilizer. You got trapped, bitch!

Back at Murdock’s fancy Gordon Ramsey Hell’s Kitchen apartment, Macabes is telling Karen that it’s the antichrist’s fault she is HIV+, but she’s not without most of the blame! He basically calls her a junkie slut while happily sipping his tea. She agrees with him. At least they’re on the same page about things! Apparently, Karen’s been worried about being HIV+ for years and just kind of stopped going in for tests after they kept coming back negative over and over again. And now suddenly she gets a positive test the day that Murdock gets BLINDSIDED by a baby thrown into his lap? NOT A COINCIDENCE, DEAR! I guess.

Macabes twists the knife further by telling her that this was no accident. Karen is just a pawn, just like Murdock. Macabes then takes advantage of this shift in the conversation to advocate for his baby-murdering agenda again. Karen says she would never murder a dang baby, which Macabes finds “ignorantly valiant”. He tells her that she should probably, maybe, kinda, kill the baby anyway why not! And then tells her that he probably infected Murdock with HIV too, and I’m not sure why anyone needed Macabes to let them know this.

In some sort of white void, Daredevil awakens from his tranquilizer-induced stupor. He notices that someone deliberately placed him into cool-looking sensory-deprivation abyss of a room to keep him disoriented. But, aha, a room is still a room, and that means a room can be exited! So he starts blindly feeling around like just the type of blind guy who was blinded by radiation as a kid or something. He tries to kick down a door he finds, but then the room becomes filled with the “shrieking of angels” which completely incapacitates him. It works on dogs too. A big, beefy demon, wearing the same black sweater that I think my own mother owns, enters the room. He says, in a Paul Simon voice, “You can call me Baal”. He tells Murdock that the angels are shrieking because they are the fallen, cast out of God’s, you know, nightclub.

“What do you want from me?” Daredevil asks, but it comes out more as “Wha…w…wh…whah….whabh….bhub….blub….blublubl…blub…”. Baal explains that he’s preparing from the second-coming of someone. Jesus, maybe? Or Humphrey Bogart? And Baal says “people like you are getting in my way all the goddamn time, sir”. Meanwhile, Daredevil is trying to pinpoint the source of this hellish–heavinish–shrieking, and he can tell there’s a speaker on the wall somewhere.

Baal keeps on talking, but Daredevil’s not paying attention to this fool anymore. He has discovered patterns in the shrieking-angels.wav file, and has figured out exactly when the recording starts back over again. He has precisely one nanosecond to focus his mind and get something done, whatever that may be. Oh, ok, he needed to focus on where the speaker was so that he could throw one of his Big Daredevil Rod weapons at it and break the fucker. He does just that, and Baal gets worried. Daredevil leaps onto Baal like Baal is a delicious ham and starts trying to beat his face in, but then Daredevil is knocked out of the way by two scrawny guys from Archie Comics! Before they can really do much damage, Daredevil sprints out of there into the rainy Manhattan night completely disoriented and ruggedly hapless! He stumbles comically into traffic instead of, you know, staying still for three seconds?

The issue ends with Daredevil a moment away from getting hit by a truck! Woo!

Final Thoughts

Too much biblical mythology! Angels and demons don’t interest me quite nearly as much as this storyline requires from me! Baal? Suck on my baals, how about that?!

I don’t think I’ve seen Daredevil do anything truly heroic yet. I’ve seen him get assaulted repeatedly. I’ve seen him have no upper hand in any situation yet!

If this were truly a Kevin Smith production, we would be seeing lesbians throw themselves on Daredevil by now! Now I’m picturing Daredevil in a fucking hockey jersey. I wonder if he had to argue with penciller Joe Quesada about drawing Daredevil into a New Jersey Devils jersey with “DAREDEVIL #1” written on the back. Yuck.

I like this series so far! Lots of moral gray areas! I don’t trust Macabes one bit! That guy is too into the idea of systematically murdering babies! It’s like, mellow out man! Ok, I’m done.