Marvel Pick Of The Week - March 25, 2015 [SPOILERS]

Pick Of The Week:

Daredevil 14, by Mark Waid and Chris Samnee

In recent months, a trend in character design has moved female characters like Silk, Batgirl, Spider-Woman, Starfire, and Spider-Gwen away from the sexualized fantasy outfits and into practical uniforms that both make sense for a grounded character and look like a ton of fun to put together as cosplay. It’s not the first time comic characters sought a more grounded look. The original X-Men movie led to the team spending the next few years in black leather until Joss Whedon and John Cassaday reminded us why the bright uniforms help us to recognize our heroes. The trend we see this year combines the best of both worlds, functionality and spectacle. My friends in the cosplay community see this movement as a respect for the fans who want to get involved with the medium they love, and from a feminist angle, I love the way these female characters look empowered, confident, and sexy without appearing reduced to the first sixty seconds of an XTube clip.

Daredevil adapts the trend perfectly in this week’s issue, and let me tell you, if Shinesty.com put this outfit on sale, I would buy it today and wear this to work.

But this being a Mark Waid book, it’s not just about a costume change. The issue playfully and respectfully explores the meaning of costumes to the superhero community. In Marvel’s New York, costumes are synonymous with vigilantes, and he can’t change that, but by moving Matt Murdock to San Francisco, he gets to approach the idea in a fresh way. In California, this is just another way to interpret celebrity, so if Matt wears a costume in public, he has to stop for autographs and selfies every few steps (and he does, and it’s really funny), but the citizens aren’t yelling at him. This version of the blind lawyer relishes the opportunities fame has given him – by fighting crime in the open, his girlfriend can scan the news and the blogosphere to find out where he is at any given time. If he needs to get from one end of town to another (and the series has already established that San Francisco architecture means that he can’t bound across rooftops like in Hell’s Kitchen), he can ask a stranger for a ride, and that stranger can tell all his friends about it in a status update. Brian Michael Bendis spent so much time carefully exploring Matt’s concept of a secret identity, and Waid honors that by spending equal effort looking into the changes brought by coming out of the costume closet.

Honorable Mentions:

Uncanny X-Men 32, because Cyclops is not blind to how ridiculously traumatic his origin story is.

Inhuman 13, for this scene of Inferno and Gorgon doing their best Spider-Gwen impersonation.

New Avengers 32, because even though I haven’t really enjoyed much of Hickman’s Avengers run, this Hyperion-Thor bromance is a thing of beauty.

Amazing X-Men 18, because sad Cytorrak is so emo. This is a bizarre and wonderful little issue where instead of fighting the bad guy, the team makes a campfire and talks about their sad feelings, then takes a strategy that boils down to “Convince an ancient god that he would be better off committing suicide than trying to rule the world.” This panel needs to be on a T-shirt at Hot Topic.

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Marvel Pick Of The Week – March 25, 2015 [SPOILERS]

By Matt Conner | Mar 25, 2015

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