DAREDEVIL (2009)
by Ed Brubaker & Michael Lark
Issue #500, Page 40
(Final Page of Series):
Murdock Leads the Hand
Graphite on paper and ink on board
Signed by Michael Lark
11" x 17" (x 2)
Eisner & Harvey Award Winning Run
$1500

Frank Miller�s work on Daredevil from 1979-1983 and then again in 1986 stands as one of the greatest achievements in the comic book medium. It became the gold standard of great comic book writing against which all other remarkable stories would compete and inevitably fail to compare. With such grandiose footsteps to follow, merely maintaining the status quo of such quality was a daunting if not impossible task.

In 2001, indie comic writer Brian Michael Bendis not only held firm the high water mark set by Frank Miller, he may have actually exceeded it. His scripts tackled that sacred cow of comic book conventionality: the secret identity. It was a ballsy, progressive move to expose a fairly well guarded secret, and follow the complications arising from such public knowledge.

Bendis� collaborator Alex Maleev used a controversial digital art layout that drastically changed the look of the series from traditional illustration to stark realism. Most of his published pages were composites of simple sketches that were scanned and digitally completed. This made original artwork from the series basically non-existent, as hand rendered drawings were mere composites that were scanned and digitally finished. The team won the Eisner Award for Best Continuing Series, and set a new standard for graphic realism in a superhero world.

Before Bendis left the title, he had a chance to select his successor, so his final scripts were forwarded to Ed Brubaker to make their transition seamless. Impossible though it may have been, Frank Miller�s classic and groundbreaking Daredevil tales were bested not once, but twice. Brubaker didn�t merely continue with Bendis� ideas, he expanded them. If Miller had created the comic book equivalent of Taxi-Driver, Bendis had delivered Goodfellas; but Brubaker used the monthly narrative format to tell a more complex and deeper character study that was like a combination of HBO�s rough and realistic crime dramas Oz and Sopranos �and without much superhero drag. Collaborator Michael Lark�s gritty, realistic style complimented the Alex Maleev work that preceded it, but Lark utilized a pencil layout to produce a blue-line working page that he himself would detail in ink for completion. During the first of Brubaker and Lark�s three-year tenure, blind lawyer Matt Murdock (aka Daredevil) is sentenced to real prison time in a maximum-security facility on the same cell block with high-profile convicts Kingpin, Bullseye and the Punisher. It was a year long story in which Murdock�s loved ones were left to fend for themselves while he remained imprisoned with his secret identity exposed. Brubaker lost the 2006 Harvey Award for Best Writer to his own work on Captain America, but won it again in 2007 for Daredevil, which also took home the Harvey Award for Best Continuing Series. The team also took home the Eisner Award in the same category that year and the next.

The final showdown in Brubaker and Lark�s Daredevil channels Miller�s original run by tying off all the loose ends involving The Kingpin, The Hand and Murdock�s dual role as costumed vigilante and lawyer. It�s a satisfying conclusion to perhaps the greatest superhero-noir tale ever told in sequential form.

Page 40 (The third and final page displayed above) is the very last page of Brubaker and Lark's Daredevil. Following a grueling battle with the Kingpin, Japanese crime organization The Hand gives Matt Murdock (here flanked by Black Tarantula and White Tiger) a choice: either assume leadership of their mystical order or face death.

This issue went through eight different printings, and this single page represents the culmination of several years of some of the best comics on the newsstand.

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$1500