Read because it was in an Eisner category, but it’s actually insufferable. I could not care less about anything was happening and thought the art was… “not my style” (horrible).

The art vacillates, but can be very very good. The cover of this volume is actually a card in Marvel Snap, which I play daily, so that’s fun. This run doesn’t have anything new going for it still, though. Daredevil has gone to jail before, and this whole weird doppelgänger brother thing is just weird and dumb. However, the end was promising. It seems like it could go in an interesting direction.

The problem with reading daredevil is if you’ve read any two long runs, especially the most formative, they tend to go in the same loop. As does this. Though, there are two new villains: a rich power couple to fill in the Fisk storyline, which culminates, kind of incredulously, in a number of villains being sent into Hell’s Kitchen, to wreak havoc. It’s fine. It’s fun.

Im making my way through this because it’s nominated for the Eisner best continuing series. This is still 2020, so we shall see if it improves.

As was always going to be the case, Murdoch begins to navigate to becoming daredevil again, only with Elektra in the picture now as well, as a teacher. The drama of the arcs is good, and where the arc goes makes sense, but it is old ground being treaded on. Even if it is pleasant, it’s also more shrug worthy because it’s what is expected.

I can see why this would be so well regarded. It is better than quite a few of the fear of the bomb books. But by virtue of in the times we live in it is also very antiquated and, I think, flawed in the core conceit of what would happen, even for its time. I liked that it was grounded in verisimilitude though, and had a methodical plot arc.

Most of this is business as usual from the time of the bomb, though. Things we take for granted no longer work. Old knowledge and grit allow for the protagonist to eschew the normal challenges one would have, once distribution and tender is non existent, which I felt was the main flaw, regardless of time period. Why bother having a fear of the bomb when the main character can pretty easily circumnavigate it? Dystopias have diverged very meaningfully from this genre, probably in part, as a reaction to that conceit being mishandled so often.

Near the end things come together well enough and, though poignant, I did like the decision at the end; even if it is somewhat, again, unrealistic.

One of the few books where I don’t mind having a focus in children as characters. Though, usually it’s a gripe when the perspective is solely from a child, but still I’ve not read a book where kids were as interesting as in here (and the first book).

In this mark forward, Patrick is married, though not wholly unhappily, but progressively tumultuously. He and Mary have two kids and their eldest more-or-less embodies the cyclical pattern from the first, where a young, impressionable person internalizes things from their parents. Patrick may not be as horrible as his father in some departments, but he is severely lacking as a father figure and husband, which are certainly inherited and supported by learned behaviours and vices. Which, because of his mother being in terminal care, only become exasperated, as he is unwilling to confront the source of any of his mental ailments, just as his mother confronts the decision to seek end-of-life options.

The prose are still fantastic and the character work improved over the others. No characters are “good”; all of them are interesting.

Still delightful but does fall into somewhat predictable tropes of both romance and superheroes. But it’s very charming and down-to-earth, and I’m invested in the characters, more so than most. And it’s doing something different than most titles, remaining feminist, all while having this really distinct milieu of things that maybe shouldn’t work, but just do.

The sequel to Batman and Superman’s World Finest, which was solid enough and had great art. This, though, descends into incredulity further and just has some really tried and failed tropes - including the titular batman vs Robin itself, a rehash. It’s all exposition dumps and the story goes no place interesting whatsoever. Waid often doesn’t know when to put a story down though, so it’s perhaps not that surprising. He tends to run hot and then fizzle out, which is what this does. Nothing compelling about it, unfortunately.

Couldn’t make it through half of this. The visual craft is fantastic, but it feels very much like any other dystopia, though with a really incredulous method of people being wiped out. On top of that, stories where queer people immediately die—which is not a spoiler, it’s in the opening lines—just feel very suspect to me, in this day and age. And from that point on it was emotionally manipulative and gruesome to try to make up for really tropey narrative beats I couldn’t connect with. For the life of me I don’t know why these dystopias interest people so much. Read a few, you’ve read them all.

What if I told you making a story with anthropomorphism should actually have a point? I’m not a pet person, so I guess the first thing I ask myself when I read stuff like this is: why is this the way it is. And the answer, in this one, is that there’s no particular reason; they just like animals, I’d wager. The story is exceptionally plodding, the worldbuilding didn’t make any bit of sense. And once again, people throwing their notion of how animals act and behave just rings completely untrue, fetishistic, and wreaks of colonialism. If you can’t empathize with people going through hardships and immediately connect with animals enduring human hardships, well, therapy exists.

I assume this was in the Eisners because pet people are a thing and the visual craft is actually stunning. Imagine being an artist and getting paired with writers like this. Hope they made money because I’d love to see more of the art, at least.