Daredevil breaks my heart: Black Cat and sexism in comics

As I've said before, I don't pretend to be a comics expert. I just started reading them in the past month or so. But a quick google search of "comics sexism" brings up an embarrassing 2.82 million results as of this writing, so I'm not alone in thinking it's an issue the medium must deal with.

So far in my short comic-reading career, I'd avoided anything overtly sexist. And I absolutely loved the first collected edition of Mark Waid and Paolo Rivera's Daredevil. But then I got to Daredevil's two-part crossover with Amazing Spider-Man.

The crossover revolves around Daredevil and Spider-Man teaming up to deal with the Black Cat. It's the first appearance of a female costumed character in the series, and Black Cat's depiction is utterly shameful for the twenty-first century.

Neither Spider-Man nor Daredevil have a great track record with respect for women--but that's okay with me, since it's generally presented as a character flaw for both of them. Peter Parker is a hormonal teenage boy, and we all know plenty of those in real life. I may or may not have been one myself at some point. Rich guy Matt Murdock is presented in Waid's Daredevil as a womanizer in the Mad Men vein, fitting of Paolo Rivera's retro art during his tenure working on the series. Maybe it's telling that as soon as Rivera stopped doing all the artwork for Daredevil, we got this sexist crossover.

Daredevil: a breath of fresh air, except for the part where Captain America is a jerk again

After reading Ultimate Spider-Man and Batman in my quest to become versed in comic books, I wanted to try a slightly less popular superhero. I've heard great things about Matt Fraction and David Aja's Hawkeye, but the first collected edition of that series doesn't come out until the end of this month. So I went with another critically-acclaimed series about a more upbeat superhero: Daredevil, by Mark Waid and Paolo Rivera.

The most immediately striking part of Daredevil is the artwork. While many of today's mainstream superhero comics go for realism in their art, Daredevil features a retro style full of bright colors. It reflects the tone of the series, whose swashbuckling adventurism is in stark contrast to the Serious Business of people in other modern comics like Batman and the Avengers.

Click to see full-size image so you can appreciate it fully

Just look at the cover of issue 1! At first glance I thought the background was just abstract scribbles, but then it hit me: it's actually a detailed cityscape that Daredevil is traversing, and because he's blind it represents his interpretation of that cityscape through his other senses.