Daredevil #20: Hot In The City Tonight

During the pandemic, I really missed comics. Now that they’re back, I realized that I missed them even more than I thought. Specifically, Daredevil. Each month author Chip Zdarsky takes us to Hell’s Kitchen for a pretty wild ride and this issue is no exception. In fact, it’s even more of a thrill ride than normal, which is saying something. It’s all-out war in the Kitchen with Daredevil fighting pretty much his whole rogues’ gallery with only a few allies to back him up. While a story like this could get really cluttered or confusing, Zdarsky manages to tell an entertaining, linear story that is going to be on the checklist of “must-reads” when it comes to Daredevil comic. When someone asks me where a good place to start with Daredevil is, this will be the book that I’m going to put in their hands. I’m not exaggerating when I say this one’s got it all, but what I enjoy most is one thing that it doesn’t have and that’s Matt Murdock’s doubt in himself. That story has been played out so many times, that whenever it shows up, I usually mentally check out from the story. But in this story, Matt embraces every aspect of himself, his powers, and the Daredevil identity and that’s a really nice change of pace because it frees him up to just save people and beat up some villains.

Artist Marco Checchetto is so good at drawing chaos, and in this issue, he definitely puts that skill to use. Without going into too much detail,  the city is literally falling down around everyone and that’s reflected on every page and in 90% of the panels. That’s quite an artistic feat in itself, but Checchetto also tells a story involving multiple multiple characters all fighting each other and tearing up every more property in the process. The battle between Daredevil and the villains is extremely well choreographed and it reaches out from the pages and grabs your eye forcing it to stare longer than usual than you normally would look at it. Checchetto has officially peaked, but I predict that he’s going to hang around this peak for quite a while.