Daredevil #21 - Awesome, But Just a Bit Disappointing.

Let me start by gushing a bit over this book before I get into what I thought of this individual issue. Since Mark Waid's run on it began, it became my favorite comic that Marvel puts out. Excellent art by Paolo Rivera and now Chris Samnee and a great old school comic feel to the writing had made it one of my favorites by any publisher.

*Spoilers ahead:

This specific issue concludes Matt Murdock's run in with Coyote, a creepy looking, teleporting mind game mastermind (awesome character design by Rivera!). This guy was a scary villain that I was really frickin excited about. Daredevil had seemingly been going insane, and was losing friends left and right, including his bestie Foggy Nelson. As they revealed in previous issues however, this was all a brilliant plot by Coyote (and Mark Waid of course) who used his teleportation abilities to make Matt think he was going crazy thanks to creative use of Daredevil's dad's skull and his ex who currently resides in the psychiatric hospital. So there you go, Coyote = awesome damn villain.

That changes in this issue. Now, the art by Chris Samnee is excellent, and the colors by Javier Rodriguez amazingly bring it to life. The plot is well put together and the continuing development of the riff between Matt and Foggy is well written, and the surprise visitor at the end is great. But Coyote, well, he turns out to be... how should I put this... simply just a punk-ass bitch. He doesn't go down in a blaze of glory or anything, he wasn't some mastermind, and tho he looks menacing, once he can't teleport anything he's got no fight in him. We knew from a previous issue that he was working for someone, but in this issue we find that it wasn't even him who figured out how to freak out The Man Without Fear. Coyote was just a mutated low-life small-time criminal on puppet strings.

So, my potentially favorite new bad-guy basically sucks. I still loved this issue overall, and it is still one of my favorite ongoing series, but I'm not going to be doing any Coyote tribute art anytime soon.

Now the monster that Spot has become, holy crap I hope they bring him back!