Thoughts on Daredevil: The Man Without Fear (Part 1)

I’m going to hold off on adding my voice to the ever-growing chorus of people analyzing The Dark Knight Rises until I at least see it a second time and the urge to engage in hyperbole is a little less. Those of you who know me know that my love for Batman is such that the character’s mythology is pretty much religion to me, so you can probably imagine that I have a lot to say about Christopher Nolan’s third and final Dark Knight film as well as the trilogy as a whole. Stay tuned to this space for that post, which is sure to be long and intense.

For now, I want to talk about arguably my second favorite superhero character of all time behind Batman – another street-level, noir-based hero whose modern adventures also happen to be based on the visionary early work of Frank Miller. I’m talking, of course, about Daredevil: The Man Without Fear. As will be the case with pretty much everything comics-related I write about on this blog, I’m going to deal with why I love the character as well as where to start reading if you’re interested in what he has to offer.

Random Shit: A Grab Bag of Miscellanea to Get You through the Weekend

Between periodically patting myself on the back for actually getting this blog up and running, I spent much of last night brainstorming a list of the topics I want to tackle in this blog over the next few weeks. Believe me when I say there’s a ton of them.

That said, as much as I want to dive in and pontificate about my love of The Dark Knight Rises, Daredevil, Scott Snyder’s Batman or the potential of creator-owned Grant Morrison comics – just to name a few of the posts coming down the pipeline – I figured I’d hold off on anything too in-depth until after the weekend. For now, here’s a couple links that’ll give you a better idea of who I am, what I like and how I think about comics:

Leaving the Comics Shop, Digital Comics and the Question of Pricing

I struggled for a while to think of a topic for my first official post following my big introduction, and I eventually figured it’d be most fitting to continue on the topic of what I’ve been up to this past year, specifically how it relates to my reading habits:

2011 was a tumultuous year for me on many levels, one filled with more changes to my life, lifestyle and habits than I care to count. Among other things, 2011 saw me leave IGN, my writing home for five years, as well as my actual home of eight years for one a few towns over. After my brother Matt, lead guitarist extraordinaire for The Frank Stalloners, moved to Denver to start a family of his own, 2011 also saw me throw myself headlong into a new band and musical project, The Greens Family Band, for the first time since the birth of the Stalloners almost an entire decade ago. I won’t bore you with the other radical changes that shook my life to the core last year, but trust me when I say they were many.

Perhaps most pertinent to the subject matter of this blog, though, is the fact that 2011 was the first year since at least 2004 in which I never once stepped foot in a comic book store. For someone who has been reading and collecting comics since the age of eight with only a brief hiatus from the hobby in high school, that’s a big fucking deal.

Welcome! Or, Where the Hell I've Been and What I'm Doing Now

As you’ll be able to tell by glancing over at the ‘blog history’ section of this site, I set up this blog in 2010 with the intention of making it a home for my various and sundry musings about comics and the comic industry, only to let it languish untouched for two whole years without writing a single damn post. That’s pretty bad, even for me, a serial procrastinator and all-around lazy ass known to bite off way more than I can chew. But now I’m back and rededicated for a number of reasons I’ll get into later on in this long-delayed and long-winded initial post, which you can consider part bio, part statement of intent, and part explanation of what the hell I’ve been up to in the year-plus since I last had any sort of consistent presence on the web.

For those of you who don’t already know, my name is Dan Phillips and I’m a writer, musician and miscreant with serious delusions of grandeur. Many of you know me from my time writing for IGN Comics, where I contributed reviews, interviews, feature articles, columns and podcasts from 2006 to 2011. Others might know me as the singer of my two NY-based funk-rock bands, The Frank Stalloners and The Greens Family Band. A few of you might even know me personally, in which case I apologize for my behavior that time and thank you for letting me crash on your couch.