You Gotta Suppose When to Hold ‘Em, Guess When to
Fold ‘Em
Written By:
Charles Soule
Art By:
Goran Sudžuka, Matt Milla
Letters By:
VC’s Clayton Cowles
Cover Price:
$3.99
On Sale Date: June 8, 2016
**NON SPOILERS AND SCORE AT
BOTTOM**
Though I am definitely what many would consider “a DC
Comics guy,” I have long been a fan of Daredevil. I began reading comic books
in earnest right around Frank Miller’s run on the character, but I thoroughly
enjoy Matt Murdock from every era. The run previous to this one by Mark Waid
and Chris Samnee was one of my personal favorites and pretty difficult to top
for many D.D. fans, but I had faith that one of my favorite current writers,
Charles Soule, was up to the task. I read the first three issues…and I drifted
away. Has anyone reading my reviews noticed a theme yet? It was that Secret Wars shit, just put a bad taste
in my mouth and made me largely detach from Marvel. I hadn’t even noticed the
correlation until I did these Marvel Mondays reviews, that’s how natural the
effect was. Well, I’m through drifting, and ready to reconnect with one of the
best characters in comic books that isn’t a billionaire in a bat suit! Read on
for my review of Daredevil #8!
Our tale begins in Macau, China, where a high-stakes
Texas Hold ‘Em tournament is taking place at a lavish casino. It’s the
semifinals, and seated at the table is the corpulent Chang, the pensive Ms.
Marcos, the indecipherable wannabe cowboy Hank, the A.C. Slater lookalike Flex,
and Laurent Levasseur, a debonair gentlemen in round-rimmed red-tinted
spect…HEY IT’S DAREDEVIL! HEY GUYS, IT’S DAREDEVIL!! ‘RRRAAAYYYY! Wait…I think
he’s playing incognito, let’s keep it on the hush. So he’s in this poker
tournament, despite being blind and therefore unable to see what is on coated
playing cards, and he’s using his super sonar sense to read the other player’s
heartbeats and tics in order to guess at what they’re holding. I’d call it
cheating, but even Daredevil…er, I mean Mr. Levasseur admits it’s sort of a
flimsy gimmick. Ultimately, in order to gamble, one must take a gamble.
Big surprise, Matt Murdock wins the semifinals and is
on the balcony of the casino, celebrating by himself with a drink. He’s
approached by a very beautiful and mysterious woman named Adhira, whose nosy
questions help the reader learn more about what’s going on. Matt’s come to
Macau in the first place to retrieve something stolen by Black Cat, something
that is connected to this tournament. Adhira says he’d better steel himself for
the final round of Texas Hold ‘Em where he’ll be up against Alexander Apex, who
is in fact not the lead singer of a 1980s new wave band but instead a telepath
who works in the employ of the casino to retrieve all of their money, and then
some. Matt actually reveals Apex’s telepathy and his being a plant to Adhira,
who feigns shock…but something tells me she knows what’s up.
Finally on to the, uh, final round of this poker
tournament, and Alexander Apex is there looking suspiciously like one of the
characters from Clone High. Alex
tries to probe Matt’s mind in order to find out what he’s holding…but Matt
doesn’t know what’s holding either, because he can’t see! It becomes a duel of
wits between Apex and Murdock, eventually turning into a duel between duel
machetes and the boxer’s son wielding a pair of gloves, pummeling and slicing
each other as this important poker game plays out…and you know what? I’m going
to leave it there in this recap. Does Matt win the poker tournament? Is his secret
identity revealed, and if so, which secret identity? What web-slinging
wall-crawler does he meet up with in the last panel of this issue—remember in
the current Marvel landscape, you can’t just outright assume it’s Peter Parker!
Everything new! Everything different!
Thankfully, not everything is so different that
Daredevil is now a swashbuckling space pirate or something. He wasn’t even
Daredevil in this issue, except in flashbacks; it was just Matt Murdock playing
poker and schmoozing with a hot lady. And I thought it was great. Well-paced,
great dialogue, and great renditions of a duel between Apex and Matt that
worked fine in lieu of real flying fists. The art was great, but either the
coloring or the general style made it read a little flat to me. In a
slow-paced, text-driven tale like this it worked fine, but when those action
scenes on the mental plane played out, I couldn’t help wishing they looked a
little more dynamic.
Bits and
Pieces:
A gripping tale of high-stakes poker, and I'm not being sarcastic! The pacing and potting of this issue take center stage to tell some engrossing mysteries, some for the Matt Murdock to solve and some for the reader to solve alone. The art serves the story well, but I think the muted color palette made the action a little less than it could have been. Still, a very good issue worth picking up if you like good storytelling.
8/10
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