When last we left our hero... actually, skip that, because rather than picking up after last issue's cliffhanger, Bendis and Maleev take us back a few steps to show us a little more of what Typhoid Mary and the Kingpin have been up to while Matt Murdock has been enjoying a relatively quiet day trying to reconnect with Milla. And, as with most of the Kingpin-related stuff Bendis has written, it's riveting stuff, an involving look at the food chain of organized crime with a little musical mayhem and psychotic slugfest thrown in for good measure. These bad guys haven't been this scary since they were first created, and "Hardcore" is shaping up to be a high point in what is fast becoming a Daredevil run to be reckoned with.
The opening sequence of this issue is terrific, shifting the reader from the street buy of drugs up the ladder of suppliers and couriers until we run into the realm where the Kingpin (and recently, the Owl) have been operating. It's a clever way of showing the reader where the Kingpin operates and how he fits in on the street food chain, and it is of course full of the usual believable but fun Bendis dialogue between the various buyers and sellers on the Mutant Growth Hormone pipeline. It also demonstrates more fully what purpose the Kingpin served on the streets, and how the Owl utterly failed at taking over for him.
Perhaps most importantly, it leads in to the big introduction for Typhoid Mary, and an action sequence, which is a rarity for this title. I'll be honest, Maleev's strengths do not lie in action, and at times the action sequence does look a bit stiff, but he certainly conveys the bloody and violent methods of Mary, her insanity and the effect it has on her foes, which is probably more important than a well-choreographed fight like the ones we used to get from Frank Miller or John Romita Jr. Bendis's use of "music" works well in the scene too, illustrating both Mary's insanity and her skill, in that she can remain mentally distanced from what she's doing and still do it so well.
While the Typhoid Mary sequence is probably my favorite in the book, though, there's a close second in the sequence where the Kingpin holds court in Josie's Bar. The confrontation between Kingpin and the FBI agent builds up this new agent, who comes across as a dangerous adversary (and thus probably a dead man) even as it shows that the Kingpin won't buckle under his pressure the way the Owl did. And just as he's built up a great amount of tension, a true battle of wills between two worthy adversaries, Bendis drops in a humorous scene that bursts the bubble at just the right time, reintroducing a familiar face from the Miller run for a hilarious cameo.
So where's Daredevil in all this? Well, that was covered last issue, and he's really not in this book until the last page. However, the dialogue and the situations are so good that I didn't even notice, and odds are good that the average reader won't either. Bendis and Maleev are delivering a crime-tinged super-hero story worthy of Miller's legendary run without simply echoing or copying it, and there's clearly story material to keep them going for a while here.
