This Forgotten Marvel Story is Hailed as the Greatest Ever Made by Frank Miller

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Comic legends tend to have a wide array of hits under their belt and the icon Frank Miller is no exception in that regard. Starting his prolific career as an artist under the company Western Publishing, Miller would eventually score more high-profile gigs at Marvel until he became the writer and artist of the then-failing Daredevil title. Editors thought they had nothing to lose with the book, as it was on the verge of cancellation, so they were more inclined to take risks with the talent. This paid off quickly, as sales and acclaim for Daredevil would skyrocket almost immediately after Miller took the reins of the book. Miller was a creative wonder and, despite only writing/illustrating for less than thirty issues, his run on Daredevil would go down in history. He was granted fame within the comic industry, as well as many more creative opportunities that would further cement his skills. However, for almost the whole of the eighties and a bit of the nineties, Miller would frequently come back to the world of Daredevil to tell more compelling stories.

Miller usually returned with a collaborator in tow, such as David Mazzuchelli, John Romita Jr, or Bill Sienkiewicz. These co-creators would leave a distinct stamp on the comics they were involved with, like Daredevil: Born Again, The Man Without Fear, and Elektra: Assassin. All of these titles are loved by fans, either in a wider sense or as cult classics, and can usually be found pretty easily online for purchase. However, one of Miller’s returns to Daredevil often flies under the radar. Published as a one-shot under the failed Epic Comics imprint, Elektra Lives Again looks like an oddity in Miller’s work. It is a contained, melancholy, surreal story that spans ten days at the start of an unusually cold and miserable April. Matt Murdock is tormented by memories of Elektra, even dreaming of her trying to escape her demons and the forces of the Hand on a snowy mountaintop. These dreams intensify before they leak into the waking world when The Hand comes to New York. The mysterious cult is on the hunt for a new champion, and they decide to kill and resurrect the wicked Bullseye to fulfill this goal, leading to a final confrontation in a church where all but Murdock seemed to perish. The now-forgotten comic is a masterwork, arguably one of Frank Miller’s best comics at Marvel—if not ever.

How Was Elektra Lives Again Forgotten?

Despite how fantastic the comic is, it’s been sadly forgotten by many due to how inaccessible and underpromoted it is

When considering Frank Miller’s portfolio, Elektra Lives Again is one of his works that gets some of the least attention. It’s not a quality thing, and it’s certainly not because it came out when he wasn’t quite as famous as he is now, like some of his early work on Spider-Man. Elektra Lives Again released in 1990, in between Miller dropping Batman: Year One, Lone Wolf and Cub, and Sin City, right at the height of his notoriety. It even won a UK Comic Art Award for Best Original Graphic Novel and an Eisner Award for Best New Graphic Album.

It is not on platforms like Marvel Unlimited due to its explicit content—regardless of how tasteful the gore and nudity in Lives Again is, it makes the book persona non grata on the platform as a standard MAX comic—and it has been out of print for decades. The original Epic Comics imprint from Marvel shut down in 1996, with none of its titles getting a reprint unless it was acquired by another company. While the comic found its way into the Elektra by Frank Miller & Bill Sienkiewicz omnibus in 2008, the volume was very overpriced ($75 for 384 pages) and has also not been reprinted in about a decade.

Another damning reason for the comic’s obscurity is Miller’s unwillingness to speak about it or his motives for its creation. There aren’t that many, if any, interviews about his thoughts on Lives Again. It’s been speculated that it was intended to come out sometime between the conclusion of his main Daredevil run in 1982 and his return on Born Again in 1985, due to the comic’s chronology having it occur before the events of the latter. It’s easy to guess that Elektra Lives Again’s inception was the result of many fans pestering Miller and Marvel to bring the Elektra character back or elaborate more on her story after her resurrection in Daredevil #190. There’s a very bitter undercurrent to it all as Matt Murdock wishes to be free of Elektra haunting him and ultimately, the two lovers do end up leaving each other alone. The comic feels like a spiritual coda to Miller’s Daredevil, as it is not a story that falls into any boundaries of “canon”.

Though, of course, the idea of this being a farewell is an ironic sentiment for two reasons: the first, and most obvious one, is that Miller would return only a few years later to retell the character’s origins in The Man Without Fear. The second is due to an agreement that went badly between Frank Miller and Marvel, an unwritten arrangement in which the latter would not use Elektra unless the former was involved or gave his blessing. This was a deal that Marvel ultimately reneged on when Elektra returned to the main Daredevil ongoing and eventually got her own ongoing series in the late 1990s.

Miller would never quite forgive the betrayal, and the grudge would persist for years—around the time of Daredevil Season 2, when Elektra was set to play a major role in the show, Miller would go on to say that “They can call it whatever you want, but it will not be the real Elektra…Yes, I’m her father.” This mistreatment, the comic’s inaccessible nature, and Miller’s own desire to move on from the Elektra character all give more than enough reason for the one-shot’s faded relevance.

The Comic Has Career-Defining Art

Created by Frank Miller, Lynn Varley, Jim Novak, & Steve Miller, Elektra Lives Again is a visually stunning work in which the time it took to make it shows

Elektra Lives Again has been largely forgotten, but let it be said that the reasons for that have nothing to do with the book’s innate quality. While this comic is an ending to Frank Miller’s Daredevil saga, it is a comic that is paradoxically a tremendous jump forward for his craft while also hugging the snuggest corners of Miller’s comfort zone, amping up his strengths.

The comic is a typical Miller masterclass, made notable by the fact that it was pencilled and inked by him. Up until now, Klaus Janson had been Miller’s typical inker and there is quite a notable shift in the differences between the two’s styles.

Janson’s inks feel like obviously quick gestures, smooth and slick and stark. Miller’s inks, on the other hand, feel scratchy, though not amateur. They lend a jagged quality to the book and Miller knows when to exaggerate the sharpness of the lineart depending on the intensity of the scene. His paneling also has a wonderful range to it, going from picture book-esque refrains during many scenes to neurotically plotted pages with panel counts in the double digits.

Another excellent aspect of Elektra Lives Again is its colors, provided by Lynn Varley. She’s been a collaborator of Miller’s for years, lending her coloring talents to books like Lone Wolf and Cub, The Dark Knight Returns, 300, and Ronin. Elektra Lives Again has to be the colorist’s magnum opus. The book utilizes a uniquely painterly style she hasn’t utilized before or since, and the colors elevate Miller’s artwork to new heights, coating it in a dreamlike haze. She especially shines in depicting the nuances of light, be it the twisting grasp of fire, the stark way the sun bounces off crisp snow, or the way light subtly interacts with stained-glass in a church. It’s a funny parallel to how Miller relies so much on heavy inks and shadows, and ultimately complements this style of his well, creating a contrasting yet cohesive atmosphere.

What Makes Elektra Lives Again’s Story So Compelling?

Despite being criminally underrated, Elektra Lives Again stands the test of time as a nuanced farewell

Elektra Lives Again has a story that is odd at a glance, something that leans heavily into the surrealism that comes with dreams, but it’s not that hard of a concept to understand upon a reread. Miller captures the typical quiet melancholy he tended to write Matt Murdock with in his main run, a tragic and compassionate man who seems close to the verge of some sort of collapse. What induces this sensation this time is Elektra, who appears to be haunting him in dreams. Guilt over her demise eats at Murdock throughout, but he tends to suppress these feelings as mere dreams he must overcome, acting like a frightened child shivering under the covers.

This is emphasized by the way Miller utilizes silence throughout the comic. Elektra is an interesting case. She does not say anything until the comic’s finale, where she perishes for a second time in Matt’s arms, only uttering a simple “goodbye.” It is a moment that firmly grounds her and the events of the past several days in reality, and upon realizing this, Matt can’t take it anymore. He burns down the church with the bodies of the Hand, Bullseye, and Elektra inside as a solemn farewell.

But it is in the final pages that readers learn this was a two-way street, that Murdock was haunting his former lover just the same. According to Matt’s nightmares, Elektra was desperately trying to atone in the mountains, facing zombified literal personifications of her demons—those being the hundreds she has mercilessly killed over the years—only for Matt to act as the most painful part of her past. Elektra’s simple farewell doubles as a command. With the church she died in being burnt down, the spot operated as a sense of closure between the two parties as they react to this final breakup very differently, paralleling Matt’s dream from prior in the book in which New York is aflame, yet no one is screaming or anguished.

Throughout this story, Matt descends into grief and madness as signs of his faith judge him from above—crosses and angels are common visual motifs—and it’s not exactly subtle that he ends things in a hellish state when looking at the comic’s penultimate page: a burning church. This is juxtaposed against Elektra, located “someplace cold.” Readers are then treated to a double-page spread of her on a snowy mountaintop illustrated in pleasant whites and blues. There are two ways to read this ending: either Elektra’s corpse was burnt in that church, and she is now in a literal heaven or purgatory, forever clad in red despite having died in stained white, or she was somehow whisked back to those snowy mountains, able to live her own life and atone properly.

For this matter, much of the book is coated in a waxy layer of dreamlike ambiguity, constantly shifting in and out of hallucinations, nightmares, telepathic battles, and reality, allowing the reader to perceive it how they wish. It’s entirely possible that Elektra was never on that mountain battling her demons, with Matt potentially conjuring up an idea of Hell for her in his dreams, damning his lover subconsciously and frightening himself with such a dismissal.

Elektra Lives Again’s flirtations with the power of dreams allow the comic to end on an open-ended note without feeling too jarring or unsatisfying. It serves a larger picture regarding Miller’s Daredevil stories in a wonderful way—not only their wider themes of compassion and violence, which are addressed here, but it also loops back around to the very start of the Elektra Saga (as well as Miller’s time on Daredevil).

The conclusion of Miller’s first Daredevil issue, #168, has Daredevil reveal his identity as Matt Murdock to Elektra, leaving her alone on a dock to cry as he walks off into the night. She is left spiraling about her choices in life as Matt’s specter seems to haunt her throughout the run, something that is reversed in the conclusion of Elektra Lives Again, where she leaves Matt in a similar state of emotional turmoil to pursue peace.

The relationship between Elektra and Matt is complicated and, in chronological terms, he’d undergo his own sort of spiritual cleansing not too soon after in the story Daredevil: Born Again. But where Matt was reborn in that comic, this one has its titular character find the strength to say goodbye to her past in a nuanced way, finally allowing her to live again.

“}]] Frank Miller left his unique mark across many comic imprints, though many fans have unfortunately forgotten his best work with Daredevil and Elektra.  Read More