5. The New Challenge
Marvel ComicsMarvel's rich, character-filled world is still - for the most part - very centred around New York City. For creative teams looking to ease their character away from the norm and to try to stand out, moving a protagonist away from this bustling city of heroes and villains can be a little bit of a cop out. For Daredevil's recent move to San Francisco, however, this is far from the case. At the end of Mark Waid's 2011 run with Daredevil, the hornheaded hero was forced out of New York and into relatively unfamiliar surroundings in San Francisco. For a character whose identity had for so long been synonymous with the city in which he was founded, this was a fairly bold move by the creative team. In managing to make this shift organic, necessary and practically flawless, the creative team of this book have avoided some of the typical pitfalls that have hampered characters' locale shifts in the past. Early on in issue #1, writer Waid explores how the challenge of moving to a new city is particularly difficult for a sightless hero like Daredevil and how this run may mirror some of the coming of age stories that heroes face during their earlier years. Through fifty years of comics, Matt Murdock had managed to become adept at manoeuvring the streets of New York with just his own instincts to draw upon. Now, however, he no longer has this luxury and we can expect to see the character have to draw on new resilience and creativity to thrive here. While someone like Dan Slott has given us a new take on the "hero finding his feet" story with his 'Spider-Man: Learning To Crawl', Mark Waid manages to reinvent the same story without having to delve backwards into the character's history. It shows a true understanding of the character and his weaknesses to be able to pull this off and it will no doubt be an intriguing longtime challenge for Matt Murdock to overcome.