Daredevil: Unleash Hell- Red Band #1 // Review
Hell’s Kitchen finds itself home to a small lab that is preparing some particularly dangerous synthetic narcotics for the black market. A certain blind lawyer has been put behind bars. His after-hour pro-bono passion project would normally have no problem dealing with the issue, but since he’s a way, someone else must take-up the red suit and horns to defend Kitchen in Daredevil: Unleash Hell- Red Band #1. Writer Erica Schultz returns to Elektra Natchios in a whole new series with the art team of Valentina Pinti, Jose Luis and Jonas Trindade. Colors comes to the page courtesy of Dee Cunniffe.
Matt Murdock told ELektra that if she’s going to serve as Daredevil, she can’t kill. Fine. She can still make those involved in manufacturing the drug wish they were dead. She’s been an assassin, so she knows what she’s doing with respect to that. She’s an expert. There’s something on the horizon that she may NOT be all that experienced with. There are things more dangerous than a trained killer lurking in the shadows and it’s only a matter of time before they come out to greet her and put her into an entirely different kind of hell.
Schultz crafts a very tight and clever action opener to a whole new series. The first person narrative of Elektra feels very earthbound and pragmatic without lacking in a clever sense of humor that shoots out in various directions from behind a quick-moving action story. The series continues to work its magic as Schultz and Natchios once again find a really nice rhythm. They have worked together quite a bit better than most others have in the past. Schultz and Natchios are a solidly entertaining team that have a great deal of energy that shoots through the entirety of the issue.
Pinti and Luis sharply choreograph the action as it dances across the page with style and poise. The determination in Elektra’s face can be seen even beneath the mask that she’s wearing. She cuts a very dramatic and powerful figure on the page that feels darkly heroic in all of the right ways. Pinti’s layout at the beginning of the issue is particularly strong. Pinti finds the right ways to frame the action as it catapults across the page in various different directions. It’s all quite well-articulated and modulated from beginning to end in a variety of different ways.
Elektra works particularly well as Daredevil. Schultz does a very sharp job of putting it all together in a way that gives the artists plenty of room to explore the impact of the story without bogging it down in too much unnecessary dialogue. It’sall quite well-executed from beginning to end. Nice to see Schultz returning to Elektra now in addition to the new series that she’s writing with Laura Kinney. Schultz has a particularly good grasp of what makes the more aggressive and physically dramatic heroes so appealing. It’ll be fun to see the two crossover in Kinney’s next issue of Wolverine.
