The Cast: Daredevil, Magdalena

The Catalyst: A child has gone missing, courtesy of a demon.

The Convergence: It just so happens that while Daredevil is looking for the child, so too is the Magdalena.

The Critique: At one point in time, Magdalena was one of Top Cow’s top properties, and 2008 would see her team up with Marvel’s Daredevil, all of it courtesy of writer and penciller Phil Hester. Each hero has a faith-based background, so having the two meet up made for a good fit. Hester would also give them a villain who would speak to that shared background in the form of a demon. Being a demon would also make it somewhat familiar with faith, and Hester would give this demon a history of its own, captured and tortured for centuries by those in the church. They would confess their sins in ink upon the demon, and finally, after too many years, the demon would be forgotten and its prison run down, so much so that it could escape and take its vengeance upon the children of those priests. That leads readers to Daredevil and the Magdalena, who are not only hunting down one missing child, but a number of them. Hester does a fine job of telling the story. While nothing really makes a person jump out of their seat with excitement or surprise or anything of the like, it is a good and solid merging of two properties that fit together nicely and finds the heroes doing what they do best. What would have been better was seeing where it went after this. What would they do in a second team-up? One of the more interesting things that Hester does is skip the usual heroes’ fight before they get together, though there was a smidgeon of that; it was short, and they reasoned with each other throughout the extremely short scuffle. As for the artwork, Hester does a great job as he always does, with this book slightly darker than his Green Arrow work, for example. Seeing the man on Daredevil regularly would be a good thing, the man’s style a great fit, though, were there a Magdalena ongoing title in need of an artist, seeing him bring that book to life would not be a bad thing. All of it finishes off strong as the two heroes find the missing children and discover where the demon is hiding, with Hester throwing in a bit of a curveball. The pace picks up exponentially after starting things off a bit slow, and when all is said and done, Daredevil pulls off a Hail Mary to win the day while Magdalena frees the kids. A good read all around that deserved a sequel of some sort.

The Credits: Phil Hester – Writer, Phil Hester- Artist, Ande Parks – Inker, Blond – Colours, Troy Peteri – Letters

Companies Involved: Top Cow, Marvel Comics

Chronology: May, 2008