MYTHCOMICS: ELEKTRA BLOODLINES (ELEKTRA #1-5, 2014)

Though Frank Miller's Elektra had a somewhat rocky beginning in the pages of DAREDEVIL, he and his collaborators produced two outstanding works centered upon her spiritual growth out of darkness, the RESURRECTION arc and ELEKTRA ASSASSIN. However, the story goes that someone at Marvel promised Miller that they wouldn't use the character without his permission, and that, when they reneged on that promise, Miller ceased to work for the company. And for a time it seemed like Marvel had reaped the consequences of this disagreement. None of Marvel's post-Miller features starring Elektra seems to have sold particularly well, despite her high level of recognizability, and neither of the live-action movies in which she appeared earned much approbation. But though the 2014 ELEKTRA was no more successful than other iterations, the BLOODLINES arc from the first five issues is at least in line with some of the symbolic discourse used in the Miller mythcomics.

To be sure, while writer W. Haden Blackman and artist Michael Del Mundo agree that Elektra came back from the dead as she did in the RESURRECTION arc, they ignore Miller's idea that Daredevil purged her of the spiritual pollution she'd suffered since the death of her father, and the activation of her eternally unsatisfied "Electra complex." This Elektra begins her story by focusing on her utter lack of identity, ticking off all the things she is not-- not dancer, nor artist, nor hero, but only "somebody's assassin." The dominant suggestion is that her lack of identity has allowed her to be molded into whatever shapes others wished her to take.

So for this arc, Blackman and Del Mundo gave Elektra two new adversaries-- and when I read their names on the back cover, I thought, "These guys have no talent for naming super-villains. 'Bloody Lips?' 'Cape Crow?' Even Bill Mantlo came up with better names, and he made up a character called Razorback." Well, Bloody Lips grew on me, but Cape Crow is still a lame name and not much better as a character. In fact, the part of the story involving Cape Crow and his son Kento is meant to play on Elektra's anomie about not having had a proper familial upbringing, and so bears a resemblance to the 2005 ELEKTRA film. Blackman's BLOODLINES script is not as stickily sentimental as the movie, but the resemblance does the writer no credit. Lest you wonder, he doesn't even try to come up with some justification for the guy to use the weird cognomen "Cape Crow."

Like Elektra, CC-- which abbreviation I'm adopting to avoid that awful name-- is a bounty hunter, but he's pissed off a whole guild devoted to the profession, and they've sent a passel of other hired guns after him. He kills or half-kills all of them, including Elektra's onetime murderer Bullseye. Elektra accepts the commission to seek out CC, but so does a metahuman assassin, "Bloody Lips."

Bloody Lips is not given a straight origin as such, but it's implied that he's an Australian aborigine who can absorb the memories and skills of adversaries after eating their flesh. Blackman and Del Mundo work in a lot of references and imagery suggestive of aboriginal religion (these are the "metaphysical myths" of the narrative), but Bloody Lips' main attraction is that he revels in the lack of identity that distresses Elektra. He doesn't care that his identity is compromised by absorbing the strengths and skills of other beings, just so long as he can kill people. 

In a long sequence, both Bloody Lips and Elektra are plunged into mental psychodramas in which shadows of their pasts seek to task them with their foul deeds. Elektra feels but rejects her guilt. Bloody Lips, who slaughtered his family for whatever reasons, realizes that even if he hadn't done the deed in that way, he would have committed some other version of the crime. He's practically the incarnation of Nietzsche's eternal recurrence:

What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness, and say to you, "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence" ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine."

Elektra, however, remains haunted by the possibility that things might have been different, If Only. But her ninja training leads her to a conclusion similar to that of Bloody Lips, but without any false self-aggrandizement. When a psychic image of her mother tries to guilt her for the scores of deaths she's caused, Elektra rejects the notion of feeling guilt for her carnage. "You want me to see victims," she tells the false mother-image, "when all I see are murderers, terrorists, sadists, despots." She slays the image of the mother she never knew in life.

Later, Elektra later learns that all the psychic specters experienced by her and by Bloody Lips were conjured up by the mental powers of Kento, who wanted to protect his father against both bounty hunters. She doesn't know this when she saves Kento's life or when she battles CC, though her lust for battle is sufficient that it overrides any "rational" attempt to reason with the rival bounty hunter. She spares CC, only to figure out what Kento did to her. Yet because he did it for his father, she essentially forgives him that trespass.

But the CC battle is just a prelude to the heroic assassin's duel with her opposite number. All through the story, Bloody Lips has gone on and on about how much he likes incorporating the experiences of his victims as well as their skills, and he hungers to take in "everything you've felt, everything you've seen," to which Elektra responds, "See if you can survive being me."

There's nothing blazingly original about the villain who realizes he just can't measure up to the hero he wants to overwhelm, but it's an appropriate punishment, however temporary, for the omophagic evildoer. But once again, Elektra is tempted by the "If Only" lure of becoming someone other than who she is-- and again she rejects it, accepting eternal recurrence with far more self-awareness than her erstwhile opponent.

MYTHCOMICS: ELEKTRA: ASSASSIN (1986)

“Let mind and soul give way to bone and blood”—Jonin of the Hand

“You only want to fire that very large gun of yours”—Elektra

With the possible exception of Dave Sim, there’s no one that ideological critics, ranging from Gary Groth to Whatisname from Seekfart, have disparaged more than Frank Miller. Sim tended to get castigated for having renounced his comparatively liberal early tendencies in favor a conservative, religiously informed stance. However, critics may have most disliked Miller for his tendency to take ideological concerns lightly. In other words, Robert Crumb was always funny because he took his biggest shots at the Right. Miller took shots at both Left and Right. Clearly that made him a reactionary, and reactionaries can’t be funny.

But though Frank Miller is best known as a maker of hardboiled crime tales and wild superhero adventures, he's much funnier than almost all of the underground cartoonists put together (except maybe Gilbert Shelton). ELEKTRA ASSASSIN, appearing about three years after the culmination of the “Resurrection” arc in DAREDEVIL and in the same year as THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, proves this by taking a quirky ironic take on one of Miller’s signature characters.

Readers of this blog will know that I never use the term “irony” in a casual manner. Although all previous stories with Elektra resonnate with the dominantly serious mythos of adventure, this eight-issue “limited series” aligns with the ludicrous mythos of irony. It is not a comedy, in which silly things happen to people in a more or less normal world. In an irony, the whole world is fundamentally crazy, no matter how characters try to make sense of it, or how they may strive to be heroes.

That said, ELEKTRA ASSASSIN is not nearly as dark an irony as some. Miller’s sardonic tone is well complemented by his collaborator, penciller Bill Sienkiewicz. If I had to compare the Miller-Siekiewicz collaboration to that of the preceding Miller-Janson work on DAREDEVIL, it might be that while one is slightly expressionstic within a cosmos dominated by realistic representation.

ELEKTRA reverses the formula. Siekiewicz began his career emulating the extreme “photo-realism” of Neal Adams--

--but he quickly moved toward an expressionistic mode, with more affinities with Surrealist Art than with the “house style” of Eighties Marvel Comics.

Like the Sienkiewicz art, the story behind ELEKTRA ASSASSIN is just as subversive of “the Marvel style," though without any of the posturing self-importance of Crumb and his ilk.  In all eight issues the internal title page supplies the series with the subtitle  “The Lost Years.” Thus the series purports to tell the inside story of what happened to Elektra between the period of the character's college years, when her father’s death caused her to leave Matt Murdock, and the period in which she came back into the life of Murdock / Daredevil in the persona of a bounty hunter who eventually becomes a paid assassin.

But the subtitle is a clever hoax. In terms of tone alone, ELEKTRA ASSASSIN exists in a different world than DAREDEVIL. Yes, most of the boxes are duly checked off. Elektra as a child experiences an erotic fixation upon her father, which will later make her incapable of dealing with his death. She seeks out a substitute father in Stick, the same mentor who trained Daredevil, and he rejects her. She tries to infiltrate the criminal ranks of the Hand, and they turn the tables on her, enhancing in her the potential for evil action. But Miller has no interest in dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s of Elektra’s continuity. Even though Miller mixes in a few standard Marvel support-characters—notably Nick Fury and his SHIELD agents—the author also elevates a reprobate to the position of the President of Marvel’s United States of America.

The cult of the Hand is very different here than in their DAREDEVIL appearances, as well. They register as little more than garden-variety “bad ninjas,” who seem to operate with no particular end except to do bad things. Here, Miller and Siekkiewicz posit that they have always been servants of a demonic figure, “the Beast,” who plots the destruction of Earth. The Hand’s leader says, “No one is innocent,” and it’s no surprise to hear a villain make this sort of pronouncement. When Elektra herself echoes it, it’s plain that the traditional superhero ethic of protecting innocents doesn’t apply in this world.

Perhaps because of the Hand’s magical influence upon her, this Elektra is not just a skilled martial arts fighter, but a super-woman, capable of punching through metal or emitting sonic screams. In other words, this is an Elektra who could never have been slain by a mundane opponent like Bullseye—but more importantly, she is Frank Miller’s meditation on the unholy joy of super-humanity.

To be sure, Elektra is still an emotional basket case, and her meditations make her sound more than a little insane. Yet, because it’s an insane world, this proves to be an asset in battling the Beast and its adherents. By dumb luck Elektra forms a mental link with the aforementioned reprobate: a ruthless, hard-ass SHIELD agent named John Garrett.

Garrett starts out as a human being, and is turned into a Six Million Dollar Operative after Elektra almost kills him. Yet because Elektra now has vast mental powers, she can dominate Garrett, virtually enslaving him as the Hand tried to enslave her—and in time, he comes to take a quasi-masochistic pleasure in her dominion. Romance as such is impossible between two such amoral, messed-up characters. However, faced with the threat of worldly destruction, they do become one of the foremost examples of the “oddball partners” trope.

The series’ closest link to DAREDEVIL is that the combination of sex and guilt follows Elektra wherever she goes. Yet in ELEKTRA ASSASSIN, their confluence is not tragic, but ironically humorous. A psychologist examining Elektra concludes that she had a “stringent Christian upbringing,” which she rejected in favor of Eastern mysticism: all of which sounds like Miller dissecting his own character as a “lapsed quasi-Catholic.” For good measure, Miller also introduces a supporting adversary, SHIELD agent Chastity McBryde, whose very name denotes sexual ambivalence, and who appears at one point dressed as a sexy nun. 

In addition, one telling exchange strongly suggests that none of Elektra’s Asian disciplines have vanquished her Christian demons. Some time after escaping the Hand, but before launching her campaign against the Beast, the lady assassin meets with a client who wants her to kill a South American president. The client comments that the official has invited in so many outside interests that he’s made the country “as a popular as a two dollar whore.” He then asks Elektra what she wants to assassinate the President, and she answers, “Two dollars.”

I mentioned the storyline’s many satires of Left and Right, but I won’t cover them in detail. I must, though, allude to the visual absurdity of American Presidential candidate Ken Wind, who has the face of a Kennedy newspaper-cutout but who secretly serves the Beast. Political passions, as much as sexual ones, are a morass of delusion-- and even an individual's attempts to dispel delusions just lead to other delusions.

To be sure, Miller and Sienkiewicz mount a lot of violence-scenarios to please the fans who expect them from a Frank Miller work. But even these are often a little off-kilter compared to action-scenes done through a representational lens. The explosions and gun-battles here have the same cartoonish intensity as Elektra’s distorted memories.

 Early in the first issue, Elektra mentions that at some point she conceives of her mother—slain by terrorists long before her father’s death—as Clytemnestra, and her father as Agamemnon. Since the mother-figure dies first, Elektra’s backstory can have no direct points of comparison with the initiating action of the Greek Theban Cycle, as this starts off with wife Clytemnestra slaying husband Agamemnon, and so incurring the wrath of Elektra. But one other parallel suggests itself. In the Greek cycle, daughter Electra dominates her brother Orestes and guilts him into doing the dirty work of killing their murderess-mother. In essence, Garrett is as much a pawn to Elektra  as Orestes was to his sister. However, Orestes’ reward for following his filial duties was to be pursued by the Furies. Garrett may not get any romance from his harsh mistress, but he does reap a much more pleasant reward than Orestes. In the world of ELEKTRA ASSASSIN, even though no one is innocent, the people who get the best toys are the ones who are in on the whole cosmic joke.

MYTHCOMICS: "RESURRECTION" (DAREDEVIL #187-190, 1982-83)

"The road of the emotions leads me to True Philosophy."-- Rousseau (as quoted by Poe).

"Resurrection" is the title of the story in DAREDEVIL #190, the final collaboration between Frank Miller and Klaus Janson in their highly regarded rejuvenation of the blind superhero's franchise. In addition, this title was also assigned to five issues of the comic as they were collected in the fourth issue of the 1984 reprint THE ELEKTRA SAGA. The issues in that collection were #182 and #187-190, but as should be apparent from my title, I don't regard #182 as part of the second and last "Elektra arc." The story in #182, "She's Alive," is a brilliant coda to the previous issue, in which the villain Bullseye murders the lady assassin, and it's also a great "reverse-homage" to the 1981 noir-film BODY HEAT. However, if "Resurrection" can be used as the title of any arc, it should be the one beginning in #187, wherein the titular hero once more encounters his old mentor Stick, Stick's "good ninja" allies, and the "bad ninjas" of the Hand. The aforesaid villains initiate the action of the arc, first by declaring war on Stick's small ninja-clan, and then by deciding to resurrect the dead Elektra, so that she will become their obedient servant.

In this essay I stated that Miller's early Elektra-stories failed to make her character dramatically or mythically consistent. However, by late 1982 Miller's scripts showed major strides, perhaps in part because he had ceded penciling duties to Janson, who had supplied inks to Miller's art during their run. In the early stories Miller had only made intriguing but unsatisfying references to his character's psychology. Only after her death, it seemed, did Miller really grapple with the character's soul.

As noted before, the psychological concept of the "Electra complex" was intended to be the mirror-image of Freud's most famous formulation, though Freud rejected the term, insisting that "Oedipus complex" ought to apply to females as well as to males. Yet one should not assume that Miller was entirely guided by his knowledge of psychology, and the "Resurrection" arc shows that Elektra's nature is better glossed by the concepts of religion and myth. At the outset of issue #190-- a prologue that shows Elektra in the years immediately after her father's death and her parting from Matt (Daredevil) Murdock-- she hears the following psycho-profile of herself from her sensei:

Your dream, in college, was to save the world. But alas, that world was a fabrication-- ripped down by the senseless, pointless murder of your father. You see the world now as a chaotic place, huge and terrible. You hate it.

Many superheroes, including Daredevil, become crusaders in response to pain and humiliation, but the idealistic cast of their adventures, of their mission to save innocents, suggests that they are still able to love the world that hurt them. Elektra's morbid fixation upon her pain is more characteristic of the vengeful super-villain. At the point in time when her sensei drops this pearl of wisdom, Elektra has just been denied the chance to join the "good ninja" clan of Stick, because, as Stick says, "You ain't clean. Yer full of pain and hate."

The emphasis on mental cleanliness is one element that shows how Miller's account of good and evil diverges from the world of materialistic psychology. Elektra's problem is not something that can be solved by sublimation or "the talking cure," and her sensei's advice-- that she should seek to benefit the world despite Stick's rejection-- goes unheard. Having been unable to prevent the death of her father, she wants to prove herself to Stick. She chooses to infiltrate Stick's enemies, the Hand-cult. The evil ninjas are prepared for her, and they seduce her to the ways of evil, in part by causing her to slay her own sensei (this time, a father-death for which she is directly responsible). Though at a later date Elektra breaks away from the Hand's influence, and becomes a more-or-less-legal bounty hunter, Miller's script implies that she never entirely escapes this pollution. With this concept of spiritual pollution in mind, her previous actions become relatively consistent. In the early issues she keeps calling Daredevil her "enemy," long before he's done anything to merit it. The later issues make clear that her former lover represents the altruistic ascension she failed to complete, so that he becomes her "enemy" in a spiritual sense. This failure is given a tangible manifestation at the beginning of #190, when Elektra falls during her attempt to climb the great mountain where Stick's clan dwells.

By now the astute reader will have noticed that I'm not giving a blow-by-blow of the many twists and turns of the arc from issue #187 to #190, much less the various subplots.  Such plot-points are less important than Miller's overall thematic project. Within these issues, Miller elevated the base trope of a conflict between "good ninjas" and "bad ninjas"-- a trope which appeared in dozens of cheap 1980s flicks as the cinematic "ninja subgenre" became popular-- and used the vague Eastern mysticism associated with ninjas to meditate on the metaphysical interactions of good and evil.

In some Judeo-Christian traditions, the most prevalent role of the "resurrection concept" appears with respect to the sussing-out of individual good and evil. During the End Times, all the people who have ever lived will be physically restored, so that they can be judged as deserving either eternal bliss or eternal damnation. But there are no gods in the Miller DAREDEVIL, though the two ninja-clans eventually function as angels and devils, struggling over the fate of the late female assassin. That said, the parallel is not exact. The devils want to doom Elektra to further damnation, as she will presumably serve them as a zombie slave. Stone-- the only good ninja to survive the battle of issue #189-- wants only to destroy her body so that the Hand cannot use her.

Daredevil, despite his diabolical name, is the only one who believes in Elektra's essential goodness. In issue #190 he and his allies invade the Hand's hideout-- fittingly, in an abandoned Christian church-- as the evil ninjas attempt to revive Elektra's corpse. While Daredevil and Stone are in battle with the Hand-henchmen, the blind hero hears a single heartbeat from the body of his former beloved. Displaying the obsessional quality Miller lent him throughout the run, Daredevil gets the idea that he can use his own latent psychic talents to fully revive Elektra. In so doing, he fails to guard Stone's back, so that Daredevil's ally is wounded, possibly in a mortal sense. Both of them are only saved from the Hand only by the intervention of the Kingpin's thugs.

The thugs usher Daredevil out of the church, but Stone remains behind, preparing to chop Elektra's head to make sure her body is never misused. Then through his own talents Stone divines that "somehow, in [Murdock's] futile attempt to revive her, he has purged her. She is clean." Stone, wounded and weary of the life of a good ninja, sacrifices his life by discorporating, transferring his energy into Elektra's semi-resurrected body, so that she revives and steals away without anyone seeing her.

Again, no psychologist would credence this method of healing, in which the patient's soul-pollution is cleansed from outside her consciousness, by the good intentions of the patient's former lover. But Elektra's true way out of her dead-end complex-- the way that she should have taken in her normal life-course-- was to invest in those still living, particularly her lover. Significantly, the spiritual energy given her by Daredevil allows Elektra to return to the mountain where Stick's ninjas once made their home, and to successfully scale it at last. It's not clear what she will do from then on, aside from seeking to stay out of Matt Murdock's life (since it is implicitly too late for her to follow the 'plunge back into life" course), but her ascension signifies the advancement of her spirit.

That said, Miller's scenario does not entirely damn the unrighteous. Daredevil and his allies only find the abandoned church because the Kingpin's informants discover its location, and as said earlier, the Kingpin's gun-toting thugs destroy the Hand in the end, though one presumes that this is only because the more heroic types have served as distractions. The Kingpin, a devil-figure in his own right, confers this largesse only to eliminate the Hand as a competing force of evil, and to force his enemy Daredevil to do his bidding. "We need each other, Daredevil," says the criminal mastermind with Mephistophelean sophistry, "We are partners after a fashion. We are the power in this city."

Miller never recounted Elektra's further adventures, and he parted from Marvel Comics when they did so. His next (and final) work on Daredevil was devoted to declaring war between Daredevil and the Kingpin, which might be taken as his follow-up to Kingpin's speech, in which hero and villain have become mutually exclusive. Nevertheless, within the span of the "Resurrection Arc," good and evil are inextricably tied together, as all good abstractions-- angel and devil, hero and villain, life and death-- should naturally be.

NEAR MYTHS: SAND SAREF AND ELEKTRA

I've been re-reading Frank Miller's first run on DAREDEVIL to suss out its possible status as a myth-comic.Though I've not finished the re-read, it's evident that most of the issues are strong in terms of the kinetic and dramatic potentialities, there's not a single symbolic thread weaving through all of the issues. The closest thing to such a thread is Miller's famous character Elektra, who, as Miller himself has admitted, owes something to a 1950 SPIRIT story by Will Eisner.

A pause for confession: over 15 years ago, I played around with putting together a book proposal that would have focused on myth-analytical essays. One of the stories I sought to analyze at the time was that Eisner story, a two-part tale focusing on how the law-abiding hero found himself pitted against a criminal who had once been the love of the Spirit's juvenile years. (Note: the story had originally been designed as a stand-alone work featuring a new Eisner character, John Law, but Law's comic book never got off the ground, so the artist reworked the pages into a Spirit episode.)

I haven't reread the old essay, but I wouldn't seek to rework it today. In my current view, the Eisner story lacks the symbolic amplitude that I look for in determining a mythcomic, and so only qualifies as a "near myth." The single mythic idea of the Eisner story is that "best friends divided by fate." The trope was a favorite one among many melodramatic crime-films that appeared in the Classic Hollywood of Eisner's youth, perhaps best exemplified by the 1938 film ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES.

Eisner chose to make the law itself the factor that divided two young people, a young law-abiding boy with a somewhat shady uncle, and a young girl with a cop-father.

Sand Saref then turns against the rule of law as represented by her father, while young Denny Colt, the future Spirit, becomes dedicated to keeping order to atone for his uncle's misdeed. The aptly named Sand soon drifts away from young Denny and embarks upon a career that's not initially criminal, though she's largely defined by her own self-interest. When she returns to America, she becomes affiliated with a scheme to smuggle a postwar germ-warfare weapon. The Spirit shows up and foils the scheme, but she recognizes him despite his mask and saves his life. In return, the hero lets her get away. The lady crook and the crimefighter encountered one another a few more times before the end of the SPIRIT feature, but this noir-ish ode to lost romance remains the most significant story for Sand Saref.

Long before Elektra ever appeared, Daredevil's backstory turned upon the hero's paternal influence. Boxer Jack Murdock pressured his son Matt to excel at school and become a lawyer so that Matt would never get bogged down in the dubious world of the fight-game. After the father's murder, Matt Murdock chooses to both disobey his father and to imitate him, by becoming a superhero devoted to fighting evildoers. However, in Miller's added backstory in DAREDEVIL #168, Murdock does more than study at college: he also meets his first love, Elektra Natchios. Everything goes well until terrorists take Elektra's ambassador father hostage. Murdock, who has not yet assumed the Daredevil identity, tries to rescue the ambassador, but the man is killed by the "friendly fire" of the local police.

Though Elektra has as much reason as Sand Saref to be cheesed off at the law, Miller chose not to follow that trope, though Elektra becomes just as self-oriented as Sand.

In Classical mythology, the original Electra plots the downfall of her mother for the latter's murder of her husband, Electra's father Agamemnon. The Greek character does not have an "Electra complex" in the modern sense of the word. Still, according to some theorists she's mad at her mother not just for killing Daddy, but because Electra can't be legally married with her father dead. I can't judge the truth of this, but in Miller's continuity, Elektra rebels not against the abstract law but against the possibility of romance with Matt Murdock-- much less with a crime-fighter like his alter ego, Daredevil.

Perhaps because Miller originally meant Elektra as a one-shot character, he never quite articulates the conflict between her and Daredevil in the fullest sense. When the two first meet she's not doing anything illegal; just pursuing her interests as a bounty-hunter, and though she does clout Daredevil to keep him out of her business, she also binds one of his wounds while he's out-- and that's before knowing that the red-clad adventurer is her old flame Murdock.

Perhaps thanks to fan-response, Miller chose to integrate the character into his ongoing DAREDEVIL saga. Yet in re-reading the early issues, they've quite frustrating in terms of dramatic motivation. In issues #174-76. Elektra twice thinks of Daredevil as an enemy, even though (1) he's done nothing against her, (2) he's professed his love to her and even tells her about a newly acquired physical weakness, and (3) she comes to his aid, or that of his friends. She does contravene Daredevil's code of no-killing by slaughtering the ninjas of The Hand, who are belatedly mentioned as a band of assassins who trained Elektra in the martial arts. Yet given that they're all murderers, it's hard to imagine the hero shedding any tears over their deaths.

At the conclusion of #176, though, Elektra does deliberately kill the defenseless boss of the Hand ninjas-- who, incidentally, put out a hit on Elektra because she chose not to sleep with him (another rejection of sex, albeit not romance). Daredevil witnesses this and threatens to take her to jail, but he faints before he can make the attempt. Again Elektra spares his life, and yet, for some reason, this threat pushes her over the edge. The sai-wielding siren suddenly accepts the Kingpin's offer to be his new assassin, and following this decision, readers do see her kill an innocent, as well as making attempts on the lives of reporter Ben Urich, Murdock's friend Foggy Nelson, and Daredevil himself. This sequence of exploits ends in DD #181, when she's killed by an even more ruthless assassin, the psychotic Bullseye.

A later sequence displays more mythic potential, and will be addressed in a future essay. But as far as the issues up to #181 are concerned, Elektra's dramatic arc mirrors the sudden criminal turnabout of Sand Saref in her original story. In a purely dramatic sense, neither sudden development proves satisfying. However, Miller does explore deeper symbolic currents with Elektra than Eisner ever did with any of his femmes fatales-- as future essays will show.