Running with the Devil
Throughout the Red Fist Saga, Daredevil promises to save everyone. So as soon as he breaks free of the Avengers, who have arrested him and Elektra for the apparent murder of the President, Matt goes to Hell to retrieve his best friend’s soul.
After killing himself at the end of the previous issue, Matt arrives in Hell at the start of Daredevil #13. With his father Jack and his faith in God serving as his guides, Matt makes his way through the underworld. Now in a white version of his traditional Daredevil costume, Matt encounters spirits of dead friends. Those of Karen Page and his brother Mike taunt him for his failures. But Matt’s faith reminds him that those people are not in Hell, that these are demons who take the faces of people he loves to hurt him, and so he battles through until he finds Foggy and his old mentor Stick, also killed by the Hand.
And yet, when he faces the towering Beast and prepares to fight to release Foggy and Stick, Daredevil notices a change in his father. Jack Murdock transforms into a hideous white demon, while Stick explains that Matt has been used by the Fist. He brought the Wild, the god of the Fist, to fight the Beast, the god of the Hand, to help the Fist gain power.
In the span of three panels, Checchetto draws Daredevil with his head bowed and clutching the bars of Foggy’s cell, seemingly in defeat. Matt’s face and most of his body remain in shadow, the hard edges of Checchetto’s line work accentuating DD’s tense muscles and torn costume, while Wilson sprays glowing red embers and ash around DD’s white costume, making him look like an angel in Hell. Clowes spreads out Matt’s narration in rounded white caption blocks across the three panels, placed to the sides of Matt’s head to emphasize the rhythm of his thoughts.
“God may never have been behind the Fist… but He’s behind me,” Matt tells himself as he tears open the cage and turns to fight the Beast, two glowing batons in his hands. “I keep focusing on the wrong things. God is love. The thing that drives me is love.”
Even more shocking than the fact that this transition into a figure of love occurs in Hell is the fact that it allows Matt to shuffle off his Catholic guilt. Where Zdarsky, following Miller and others, started out by imagining Matt as a man whose fear of God and fear of damnation drove him to do good, the finale of the Red Fist Saga turns that concept on his head. Daredevil is the man without fear. Daredevil is the man with love — love of his friends, love of justice, and love of God.