Grimlock ♥ Ultra Magnus

As much as I felt the last Miller book I read was overhyped, this was one that is far less well known - and fared far better.   Sometimes Miller gets it right, but he seems to want to wallow in despair and depravity.  Or at least he writes far more consistently when he does. 

And when he does get going?   This is a brilliant portrait of the Kingpin, a man who fits Miller's bill.   Then again, Miller elevated him from a joke into a arch nemesis worthy of Daredevil, so he modeled the Kingpin into someone who would work for him.   And he made the Kingpin work for him for a long, long time. 

This is a brutal and bleak look at what The Kinpin will do for his sick wife, Vanessa, and how his love for her can be used against him.   It's lushly illustrated, and it holds up very well; the man who Fisk employs to hold the doctor's wife hostage is just as twisted as the Kingpin but in a different way.   It expands this beyond a simple hostage situation that is tit for tat (the doctor's wife will be killed if Vanessa doesn't recover; the Kingpin wants the doctor to be just as desperate, just as frenzied by fear, so that he's more motivated to cure Vanessa.)

It's about a little more than that, and yet that's the core story.   The ending was inevitable, and beautifully done.   I'm going to walk into Miller books with a little more care, and awareness of what his forte is, and try to stick to those.   (It's depravity, by the way, just in case I didn't make that clear.)