Finished up Kevin Smith's Guardian Devil story arc, which kick starts volume two of Daredevil. Ultimately I feel like it's a really lazy, cheap story arc. To begin with it all just feels like a rip off of Born Again mixed with other greatest hits. Had Smith just owned that and made it a story about a villain trying to drive Daredevil insane and then DD slowly notices various inconsistencies and other problems then the arc would've been fine though unremarkable. But, no, Kevin Smith needed the story to be clever and super important.
The center of a lot of problems with the arc is the main villain - Quentin Beck, aka Mysterio. He has next to zero connection with Matt and his motivation - essentially "well, we're both b-listers, so, eh, whatever." - doesn't make for a good story foundation. A combination of Purple Man, Jester, and Mister Fear would've allowed for essentially the same plot and would've been a more bombastic way to start volume two. Hell, if you wanna jerk off to continuity like Kevin Smith seemingly does then bring back Starr Saxon, an old villain with actual ties to DD and a similar skillset to Mysterio. One of the reasons for choosing Mysterio was likely to make it nearly impossible to figure out who the main villain was during the early parts of the story but the main reason for it is was to give Smith an out on the lazy writing and give him the ability to lampshade copying older, better stories.
Yes, the story and characters know they're ripping off of Born Again and other stories. Mysterio seriously has dialogue that's like, "of course it isn't original, i did steal these ideas! ha ha" and "ha ha, wouldn't it be funny if i stole even more ideas? like from kraven's last hunt? ha ha" Now if all the stolen ideas were just part of Mysterio's narrative that he crafted I could've accepted it as just Beck being a hack but you also have stuff like the idea of Beck's cancer essentially being stolen from a J.M. DeMatteis story wherein the Vulture found out he had cancer due to the energy from his flight pack. Karen's death, too, feels like a lazy retread of Elektra's death in Miller's original DD run. As such it feels less like intentional meta commentary and more like Kevin Smith being a hack, realizing he had no original ideas for the story, and deciding to use his own laziness as a plot device, trying to sell his unoriginality as clever writing. Lastly on the topic of Mysterio, I wonder how much of his seething over not being recognized alongside greats like James Cameron was Kevin Smith's own feelings of inadequacy over not reaching the same heights of fame as the likes of Quentin Tarantino.
Going back to Karen's death, it just isn't handled very well. Firstly, the preceding fight scene between Daredevil and Bullseye is extremely low energy and boring. Then Karen's death is basically Bullseye going, "opps guess i hit her by accident lol later dd", which really hurts its dramatic punch. Could've also used DD's heightened scenes to much better dramatic effect. As for killing off Karen in general... I don't really care much. Nobody really knew what to do with her. Mary Jane Watson had the benefit of Gerry Conway and later Tom DeFalco really fleshing her out and making her three-dimensional, plus Len Wein solidifying her and Peter's relationship. The most Page had going for her was Miller turning her into a junkie whore porn actress... which was a little too much for most writers to work with. Nocenti having Karen Page set-up a legal clinic was interesting but didn't really go anywhere and Karen herself was still fairly bland during that run. Chichester made her into a weird anti-porn crusader which was just strange and dumb (I'll never understand why he didn't go with the more obvious anti-drug angle). After that the most they did with her was making her into a radio host, which also wasn't very interesting. Ultimately, much like Gwen Stacy, Karen Page being a haunting failure for the hero is the best thing that could have happened to her.
Finally, there's Daredevil's characterization throughout the run. It's solid but unremarkable. A big plot point of the arc is that Matt's supposedly being pushed to the edge of his sanity... but it's never really sold well. In Born Again Miller and Mazzucchelli really show how broken and beaten Matt is in that story, they make Murdock feel like he's really at his lowest and one step away from giving up. In Guardian Devil, though, DD only ever seems annoyed and angry, yet he's supposed to be over the edge enough that he tries to yeet a baby and then later try to kill himself and the baby. I guess we at least get the hilarious inner monologue wherein Daredevil goes full blown incel and starts to blame women for all his (and humanity's) problems and seethes over Natasha being a whore. Even after Page's death he just cries for a few pages and then just goes "I'm not gonna give up!" like the protagonist in a generic shonen anime.
Overall it just largely felt lazy to me. Had the story been credited to Alan Smithee instead of Kevin Smith and if the issues were #381 - 388 instead of the launching pad of volume two then I think most of the fanfare for it wouldn't exist.
