Polite Dissent

Daredevil #1-8 “Guardian Devil”
Kevin Smith, writer
Joe Quesada, penciler

In a brilliant post over at Peiratikos, Rose does an excellent job of summarizing “Guardian Devil” and highlighting all that she finds wrong with the storyline. Her points are all excellent and she sums up the flaws in the story better than I could. What I remember most about the storyline was the senseless death of Karen Page and the worst d鮯uement in comics history. Rose’s post did remind me of all the questionable medical aspects of the story that I had blocked out…well, until now:

1. Foggy’s new client is seeking a divorce because her husband had her sterilized without her knowledge and she didn’t know it until her last gynecological exam. This is ridiculous. Sterilization requires surgery, and you’d think someone would know if they suddenly developed a scar and a sore abdomen. It sounds like the patient had a hysterectomy, which is a significant surgery with a good sized scar and at least a week of recovery. It turns out later the client was lying, but they should have been suspicious from the start.

2. Matt Murdock can hear a pair of heartbeats, so he knows the young mother and baby are nearby. It’s nice that Quesada’s art correctly shows the baby’s heartbeat as significantly faster than her mother’s, but why is he showing EKG waves? EKG waves are purely electrical in nature and could not be heard, even by Daredevil.

3. Daredevil takes a tranquilizer dart to the neck and quickly slumps into unconsciousness. As mentioned in a previous post, intramuscular injections take time to have an effect.

4. There is a hallucinogenic toxin on the cross Mr. Macabes hands Matt Murdock. If Matt absorbs it through the skin on his hands, why didn’t Mr. Macabes? And don’t tell me he had gloves or latex on, because Matt’s heightened senses would have felt that. Speaking of gloves, why did Dr. Strange get affected by the toxin when he was wearing them?

5. To deaden the sound of the baby crying, Mysterio has placed her in a vacuum chamber and now she only has twenty minutes to live. Does this make any sense? Yes, a vacuum chamber would block the child’s sound, but the child would also be dead from lack of oxygen and lack of air pressure. However, in the twenty minutes it takes to pump the air out, the chamber would not yet be a vacuum and Daredevil could still hear the baby and rescue her.

6. Mysterio has a brain tumor and lung cancer, both inoperable. Yet, when he is shown without his helmet on, he has a clear surgical scar along the side of his skull. And where did all his hair go? He had a full head of hair when he left prison a year before.

7. The young mother is drugged, kidnapped, and “artificially inseminated.” It takes more for artificial insemination to work than most people realize, including hormone treatments beforehand to maximize the chances of conception. The timing has to be just right too. This one is possible, but highly unlikely.

8. On the bright side, Quesada is one of the only comic artists to draw a nasal cannula correctly.

9. Her parents were killed by Mysterio’s men “before [they] could order a blood test…” I’m unclear as to which blood test is used to test for an Immaculate Conception. If you learn nothing else from this post, please remember that there is no blood test for virginity. Or maybe her parents were going to DNA test every male in the greater NYC area?

10. Finally, in one of the last scenes of the storyline, Matt is standing in front of a hospital nursery and says he can feel the breathing of the babies through the window glass. He says he can feel the glass expand with their exhalation, and shrink with inhalation. Even if this were physically possible (which I doubt), this presupposes that all the babies are breathing in unison in some weird Children of the Damned sort of way.