It has not been difficult for me to find graphic novels from the Ultimate Marvel series in my various used bookstores. I don’t have all of them by any means, but I’ve been able to pick up a lot just by keeping my eyes open. And then there’s the ambitiously numbered volume one of the Ultimate Elektra series, which seemed to have five or more copies available at every store I entered over the course of 2008. Which, despite the underlying snarkiness of that fact, is not to say that it was a bad book.

I imagine that if you knew nothing about the characters, even had not seen the Daredevil movie[1], then Devil’s Due might have told a pretty good story. See, there’s this ninja chick named Elektra, and she wants to protect her father from various lowlife thugs who are trying to destroy his business and / or manipulate him as part of a money-laundering scheme, presumedly because he owns a dry-cleanery. There’s also a blind lawyer who will probably be the Ultimate Daredevil someday, only he’s shown up in other Ultimate entries as himself instead of a shoddily-costumed law student; am I to assume this occurs before the rest of the Ultimate universe timeline? But I digress.

Anyhow, Daredevil, being the law and order type, wants Elektra to stop being such a deadly vigilante, she wants him to get off her back and stop being such a drag, and Manhattan crime boss Wilson Fisk, AKA the Kingpin, wants the lot of them to stop doing things that might result in his prosecution. The story has potential for nuanced shades of grey and moral quandaries; I think the biggest failure of the book lay in the knowledge that no character was ever going to budge from their initial position, which removed any hope of moral drama.

On a more nitpicky note, if Matt Murdock is going to dress all in dark clothes with a bandanna mask over his eyes, can they stop showing him in the red Daredevil uniform on the covers?

[1] You are incredibly lucky, by the way, for this one.