Daredevil #29 – Review

By: Mark Waid (story), Javier Rodriguez (art), Alvaro Lopez (inks)

The Story: Daredevil can safely say that this whole courtroom is definitely out of order.

The Review: Part of the critic’s game is trying to read the creator’s intention, to figure out what went through his mind as he was writing.  This is obviously a tricky task, given that writers quite frequently don’t know where their own ideas come from.  The seeds of a story may have been planted by some passing experience so long ago that by the time it manifests as a piece of fiction, it practically comes from the writer’s subconscious.

In the case of this issue, it’s pretty hard not to see the Sons of the Serpent, a white supremacist group who has taken over the courthouse (and perhaps, as Matt suspects, the New York City justice system as a whole), as some kind of comment on the Trayvon Martin controversy.  It’s possible that Waid simply drew from generalized problems in the real world’s system of criminal prosecution, but the timing seems too coincidental for that.  Even assuming he wrote the script months earlier, there’s no escaping the Trayvon connection.