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The first trailer for Daredevil Season 2 was focused on the oncoming threat of Frank Castle/The Punisher played by Jon Bernthal. This second trailer, debuting this morning, turns focus over to the other new cast member: Elektra played by Elodie Yung. It’s a bit less of a dour look than the first trailer, but given […]

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Frank Miller is the Donald Trump of comics, replacing Alan Moore who used to be the Donald Trump of comics in that every little utterance of his was fodder for headlines and web traffic. Miller's been retired from public speaking for a while but the Dark Knight III promo process—and a series of appearances in foreign lands—has provided a fresh platform and ample ammo for SEO air strikes. But is this current comment any different from what Millar has said in the past?

Michael Del Mundo is an artist who’s responsible for so many great comic book covers of late, but I didn’t realize, until recently, who he was. The new Marvel Now Elektra series features both cover art, and interiors by Del Mundo, and it’s received a ton of well deserved critical acclaim. In fact, he, and writer William H. Blackman have impressed Marvel so much with their work that they’ve been promised another project once Elektra ends.

Del Mundo has brought the same unconventional, and dynamic style to his interior artwork, that has made his covers so memorable. I’m looking forward to see what comes next for this exciting, young artist!

Michael Del Mundo is from the Philippines, and currently lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. You can follow his blog here.

For more comics related art, you can follow me on my website comicstavern.com - Andy Yates

Normally I’m not in favor of digging up characters who were done perfectly by their creator, but Elektra has been revived so many times, we might as well give it a go again—this time as part of Marvel’s experimental push for female-led titles. This new version comes out in April and features writing by Haden Blackman and are by Mike Del Mundo. In fact these pages by Del Mundo look pretty sharp and remind me of….another book with a female lead.

A life spent in silent pain has led Elektra Natchios to the brink of despair. But as the crimson-clad assassin prepares to shed her blood-soaked past and take the next step, everything you know about her will change in an instant! Death is no escape, but she will find her way as a new option opens up that will take Elektra to places no other hero will go!

Nice variant covers by Paolo Rivera, Bill Sienkiewicz and Skottie Young though!

The Greek tragedies by the “big three” are so formal and often over-the-top to my modern-day ear that I enjoy poking a bit of irreverent fun at them. I was looking forward to doing the same with Euripides’ Orestes but it is such an interesting play that I have to take it seriously. Mostly. I read a fantastic translation by Anne Carson. My respect for her work continues to grow the more I read it. She really is top-notch and better than Robert Fagles in my opinion.

I imagine Orestes was probably the third play in the traditional three-play cycle and we just don’t have the others. But since the introduction doesn’t mention this, perhaps Euripides placed it differently in his play cycle. Oh, wait, Euripides has an Elektra too. So much for reading in order. Anyway, the story that comes before this play is the murder of Agamemnon by his wife Clytemnestra when he returns from Troy. Orestes who has been fostered out, returns and kills his mother. Now, in this play he suffers the consequences: the Furies.

But Euripides does something so totally unexpected and I would love to have seen how the audience reacted when it was performed at the Dionysian Festival in 408 B.C. Whereas others like Aeschylus, portrayed the Furies as actual women flying through the air relentlessly chasing Orestes and tormenting him, Euripides turns them into a psychological metaphor for guilt. Not that they weren’t before, but the Furies in this play are all in Orestes’ head, they have no physical manifestation. Apparently Euripides introduced into Greek theatre

a concern for the solitary inward self, for consciousness as a private content that might or might not match up with the outside appearance of a person, that might or might not make sense to an observer. He lived at a time when philosophers as well as artists were becoming intrigued by this difference between outside and inside, appearance and reality, and were advancing various theories about what truth is and where truth lies.

In Euripides’ story of Orestes, his sister Elektra and his best friend Pylades helped him kill Clytemnestra at the command of the god Apollo. Nonetheless, Orestes is still being tormented with the guilt of murdering his mother even though he did the right thing according to Apollo and according to custom that the son must avenge the murder of his father. But it gets complicated when the murderer is your mother and there is a law against matricide.

This then being a psychological situation with Orestes looking inward we get conversation like this:

MENELAOS: What’s wrong with you? What sickness wastes you away?

ORESTES: Conscience. I know what I have done.

MENELAOS: How do you mean?

ORESTES: Grief is killing me.

MENELAOS: She is a dread goddess. But curable.

ORESTES: And fits of madness. Mother madness. Mother blood.

It has only been six days since his mother’s burial. Though surprised by his grief and guilt, he is still expecting Apollo to come through for him and absolve him of his crime and madness.

The town has been holding the guilt-stricken Orestes and his co-conspirators captive trying to figure out what to do with them. Menelaus, Agamemnon’s brother arrives with his wife Helen and their daughter Hermione on the eve of the town taking a vote on whether or not Orestes and friends will be stoned to death. Orestes pleads with Menelaus to intercede for them but he pretty much claims he can’t do anything but that he will try anyway. Elektra, Orestes and Pylades start making a plan directed at the hateful Helen (“the weapon of mass destruction” she is called in the play by Pylades) who they see as being the one at fault for the mess they are in since she is the one who started the war and thus the whole chain of terrible events leading up to this moment in time.