“The Secret Life Of Foggy Nelson”
Writer: Ed Brubaker
Artist: David Aja, Frank D’Armata (colours)
Publisher: Marvel Comics
With Ed Brubaker’s first arc on the title a roaring success, it seems odd that he’s chosen this point in the story to take time out to provide a stand-alone issue about Foggy Nelson. Whether this was a conscious storytelling decision or an art/scheduling problem that forced Brubaker’s hand, it saps the momentum of the book slightly, especially after the excitement of the last couple of issues’ prison break. The flipside of that, though, is that this issue gives the writer some room to breathe, and to address the cliffhanger from the end of last issue: that Foggy Nelson, apparently stabbed to death at the end of the new creative team’s first issue, is very much alive – and in the hands of the FBI’s witness protection program.
Guest artist David Aja provides the visuals for this issue, and although his style is not a million miles away from that of regular penciller Michael Lark, he definitely makes his mark here. The most successful sequences are the flashbacks to Daredevil tales of old, which employ a Schindler’s List-esque black-and-white-with-dashes-of-red colouring approach, and look suitably stark and attention-grabbing as a result. The silhouetted figures which appear in the issue’s fight scenes are a great way to illustrate how efficiently Brubaker’s ninjas operate in the darkness, and a frequently-employed visual metaphor of bars and lattices over windows, walls and floors effectively conveys the trapped, restricted mindset of Foggy as he adapts to his new life.
The writer drops one or two hints about his long-running story into the mix, but for the most part this is a character study of an ordinary man in an extraordinary world who has started to realise just how precarious his position is. Caught between an impotent and corrupt FBI and a heroic friend who has been forced to abandon him as he flees the country, Foggy’s plight seems unlikely to affect the book’s core plot to a huge degree at the moment, but makes for a fairly illuminating character study for those of us who have been following the book for a while. Just give us some Daredevil in the pages of Daredevil next time, please.
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