Review - Ultimate Daredevil & Elektra

During the first few months of her freshman year at college, life seems to be idyllic for Elektra Natchios. She makes new friends and falls in love with law student Matt Murdock. Everything begins to unravel for Elektra when one of her best friends is assaulted on campus. After the police fail to press charges against her friend’s attacker, Elektra decides to seek out justice on her own.

Ultimate Daredevil & Elektra is a four issue mini-series, written by Greg Rucka and illustrated by Salvador Larroca.

Ultimate Daredevil & Elektra reimagines the college years of the titular characters, plotting their romance from its beginnings to its end. While the series gives Daredevil top billing, it is Elektra who is undeniably the main character. It is through her perspective that the events are filtered through. It’s a nice reversal of her original introduction, where she was a supporting character in Daredevil’s narrative. Rucka and Larroca present Elektra as the daughter of a middle class businessman who owns a dry cleaning company in Queens. She enters college uncertain of what she’d like to study and spends much of her time building friendships with her roommate Phoebe and fellow student Melissa. During this time, she meets Matt Murdock and starts dating him shortly thereafter. Their relationship strains as Elektra’s focus shifts to exacting justice (with a slice of vengeance) for the sexual assault of one of her friends at the hands of a privileged rich boy named Trey Langstrom.

This mini-series reads like an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (there’s even a detective who resembles Mariska Hargitay’s Olivia Benson that shows up). Its remains focused on the central theme of how privilege and wealth are used as tools to evade justice, as well as weapons against those without or with less privilege. I struggled with the use of sexual assault as a plot point in this mini-series especially since it was used as motivation for Elektra, which taints the story with the whiff of fridging. I think that the creative team could have come up with a different reason for Elektra to go after Trey Langstrom, but I also understand that it could also be of importance to acknowledge the very real problem of sexual assault on campus colleges and how perpetrators often get away with their crimes. Rucka and Larocca do ensure that the story never strays too far from Elektra and her friends. The decision to have her supporting cast as two women and to portray them as layered individuals was smart. It was neat that Stick was reimagined as a woman as well, which helped to further populate Elektra’s world with a female presence. This is especially noteworthy as this character has largely been devoid of such friendships in the main Marvel Universe. It’s refreshing. It’s also nice to have an origin story for Elektra where she isn’t fridged at the end.

Larocca’s art pairs well with Rucka’s writing. He’s able to accurately present the necessary range of emotions that occur throughout this trauma-filled mini-series. While there aren’t many action scenes, the final fight sequence between (spoiler?) Elektra and Daredevil. One of the things that interest me most about Larocca’s work on Ultimate Daredevil & Elektra is his redesign of Elektra. She’s given a mane of curly hair, which recalls Mike Deodato Jr’s version of the character from the ‘90s. She’s also given a black leather costume that looks suspiciously similar to the one Jennifer Garner wore in Daredevil (which came out the year this mini-series was published). The costume is totally impractical as she’s bearing her stomach and it only has one strap, but it’s kind of cool. As a side note, we never actually see Daredevil in costume aside from on the covers, which is a bit odd and mildly anti-climactic.

Ultimate Daredevil & Elektra is an admirable attempt at updating Elektra’s origin story. It re-centers the narrative to be about Elektra and gives women the most prominent roles in the story. I like Rucka’s take on Elektra since she isn’t presented as an emotionless assassin without any interiority. As I said earlier, I’d have preferred if the narrative eschewed the use of sexual assault as a plot device and motivation for Elektra. That’s the one major issue I had with this otherwise topical and layered mini-series.

RATING: B