Brubaker, I hate and also love you, you heartless bastard.

SPOILERS AHEAD IF YOU HAVEN'T READ VOLUME 1!!!

This is one of those dark, fucked up stories that I was still thinking about hours after I'd finished it. This second volume covers issues 100-105 and holy shit is it brutal. I mean, even with as little knowledge as I have of Daredevil's past, I probably should have expected it to not end well. But damn. At the end of the first volume, it was revealed that an old foe of Daredevil's, Larry Cranston, AKA Mister Fear, was behind the strange behavior of both the previously gentle criminal Melvin Potter and Matt's wife Milla Donovan. This Mister Fear is not some laughable asshat in a mask though. He's reborn as a sociopath totally without fear. Turns out that Mister Fear has been less than pleased with the fact that Matt was getting his life back together again.



So he sets out to make sure that Matt learns the true meaning of fear by breaking Milla Donovan.



Watching Matt struggle with what's been done to Milla and how to fix it was painful. And the ending...damn. It's Brubaker so you can't expect a happy ending but that was just seriously fucked up.

The following spoiler is a MAJOR one so please don't click unless you've read it and/or would like the ending spoiled for you.

Mister Fear doesn't play around. After all the other seriously unhappy endings in his romantic life, to have his wife literally driven insane by a villain has to just be the cherry on top. Seriously, no one wants Matt to be happy ever. At least, not without there being a very long fall coming.

The artwork was all over the place in this one and not in a bad way. The first issue has a fear hallucination sequence that has different styles every few pages which made for an interesting break and was really well done. The rest is in Lark's standard dark, gritty style which pairs so well with Brubaker's writing.

It should go without saying that Brubaker writes dark stories extremely well and this has to be one of Daredevil's darkest yet. Just an incredibly well written disaster for the Man Without Fear and yet another reason to love Brubaker.