It’s odd because when I flip through the pages I think, “wow, this looks amazing” but when it comes to actually reading it I find it hard to fully engage. Admittedly, the caricatures give the art personality and they are interesting in that sense, but by lightening the tone in this way Sienkiewicz prevents Love and War from having a more profound effect. Bill Sienkiewicz’s work here is undeniably rich and he paints a multi-faceted Manhattan in ways we haven’t previously seen in the Daredevil stories, but, and this is something I never thought I’d say, I dislike some of the choices that Sienkiewicz made here, chiefly with the way he painted the main three protagonists: Daredevil’s exaggerated musculature is almost demonic at times and feels out of character the kidnapper is given the face of a baboon as a short-cut to making him unattractive and the Kingpin is drawn as an immense, flat ball which robs him of any menace. A bigger problem for me, however, is the art.
The writing is similar to that of Elektra: Assassin, which was written in the same year, and uses fragmented internal monologues – it’s an interesting device which has been endlessly copied but which I’ve sometimes found over-stylised and distracting. I get the impression that at this point Miller wasn’t really that interested in writing about Matt Murdock/Daredevil, perhaps feeling that he’d exhausted him in his initial work for early 80s Daredevil, and like the tail-end of that run, where he chose to write episodes from the point of view of the supporting characters and enemies rather than the hero’s, Love and War is focused around the Kingpin and a kidnapper working for him. In all but one of these instances, obsession leads to the characters acting impetuously and without due thought to the consequences, or awareness of how their actions will be perceived. Love and War is essentially about obsession in a number of forms: the kind of obsession that springs up suddenly and unexpectedly and in the excitement makes you lose focus the kind that you try to control and even deny but which ends up taking over you the kind that slowly insinuates itself into your thoughts and before you know it has overturned your priorities and the kind that has long established roots and is an unwavering and inescapable part of who you are. I managed to find one of the seemingly rare initial copies which just has “Daredevil” on the cover – my postman obviously didn’t think it was that big a deal. My read-through of the Frank Miller Daredevil and Elektra comic books continues with the 1986 graphic novel, Daredevil: Love and War. Writer Frank Miller, illustrator Bill Sienkiewicz
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