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Apparently, someone forgot to tell these guys that the Team-Up genre is really tired.

Let me first say that I always like the idea of infusing very ‘American’ heroes with foreign creators. I don’t really count the British, Irish or Scottish…or even the Welsh when it comes to this, because they work pretty consistently in American comics. But when we’re talking about someone from pretty much any other country working with ‘American’ characters, they always seem to bring a very unique idea to the table. Now, the idea doesn’t always work, like with the recent Batman: Death Mask by Yoshinori Natsume. It was a really interesting idea, but it just kind of fizzled at the end. And with the one-shot of Daredevil and Captain America: Dead On Arrival, this kind of continues that trend in both ways: A writer and artist team from Italy working on two very iconic American characters and bringing their own particular style and ideas to the characters, and the way that it just kind of… well, sucks.

Essentially, the one-shot starts out interestingly enough with a long-believed-dead villain called Death Stalker resurfaces and takes a young child as a potential hostage. And then we get a overwrought cross-cut sequence of Daredevil and Captain America working out. Well, Steve Rogers is working out, and Matt Murdock is kicking ass. Oh, by the way, you read that right. Steve Rogers. Alive and well. And this is not a What If?-style comic. It just happens to take place before Civil War… and Secret War for that matter, since Nick Fury is still kicking around as the director of SHIELD. And it also must take place pretty long before Daredevil was ‘outed’ in the press, because he’s pretty well-liked by the NYPD. Well, they both get put on the trail of Death Stalker, but for very different reasons. DD wants to take him down because of the trail of murder and kidnapping he’s left in his wake, and Cap, because SHIELD’s geek-tech guys believe that since Death Stalker has possibly ripped open a temporal hole, if he were to die in the present, it would void his death from the past and possibly wipe out this entire plane of existence. That’s right, folks… one Z-List bad guy dies, and it’s Sayonara to Earth-616 (Sorry for the geeky Marvel-speak, but I’ve been reading a lot of the Essential Handbook to the Marvel Universe lately…). So Death Stalker has arranged a series of hostages at the place that Daredevil accidentally caused his death so that Horn-Head can come and get what’s coming to him. And whattayathink happens next? Could we possibly have a fight between DD and Cap where they eventually come to an understanding and eventually defeat the bad guy?

That’s what’s so upsetting about this issue: it’s such a cliché. Now, Tito Faraci must know a thing or two about comics since he’s been working in the industry since at least the mid-90’s. So he must know the rules of the Team-Up Book, and he should also know that we also know the rules and we also know that they started getting old about 10 years before I presume he started writing. I was really hoping for a fresh perspective on the Team-Up Book, but it’s the same old stuff. And I do mean OLD. Maybe it’s Larry Hama, who did the adaptation. He’s not exactly new blood either. And I can’t remember the last interesting thing that he wrote. The one thing that this book has going for it, though, is the remarkable art by Claudio Villa. It really is stunning. His use of color and shading, particularly in DD’s ‘radar sense’ moments, is really quite remarkable. But that’s just not enough to save this. It’s really just old hat. And the other thing that makes NO sense to me is that this was slapped with a ‘Mature Content’ label. If anything, this book is a little more tame that a lot of the T+ titles that are out there.

If Faraci made as much of an effort writing this as Villa did with the art, we would have had a really great book. Instead, it just makes me a little sad wasting these two characters like this.

Daredevil and Captain America: Dead On Arrival
Written by Tito Faraci
Art by Claudio Villa
Translation by Alexandra Hain-Cole
Adaptation by Larry Hama
Letters by Dave Sharpe

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