The Black Wide & Daredevil tandem, was it very entertaining? Also in terms of relationships, did Matt Murdock have any other women around this time while he was in a relationship with Black Widow, and was there closure to their relationship ?

I like all the early stuff before the Miller run - in fact DD was always a favourite character of mine when I was a kid, much more than Spider-Man, for example. The Wood and then the Colan artwork is fantastic and I also like Romita's short run - the Ka-Zar story made a big impression on me when I read it in a Giant-Size reprint around 1970, I believe.

I think the artwork was really the biggest problem during the period between Colan's departure and Miller's arrival. Very inconsistent and even when they found a steady artist like Bob Brown, the results were pretty mediocre, to my eyes (no disrespect to Brown, from whom I've seen much better work elsewhere).

Ann Nocenti wasn't she the editor of New Mutants? What did you think of her run? Are her stories full of commentaries on society's ills of the time when she was writing Daredevil?

Somewhat. They played their relationship as dysfunctional for the most part. The made a great partnership but both were extremely stubborn, temperamental and prone to arguing and flying off the handle emotionally. Which made for a fiery roller-coaster of soap opera moments and eventually lead to their separation.  Considering the comings and goings and flirtations of Matt with Moondragon and Natasha with Hawkeye and their constant break-ups I was surprised they actually managed to stay together for very long. The closure was Natasha choosing to walk away from Matt for fear of being considered nothing more than a "sidekick" and not a full partner and she accepted Avengers membership rather than remain DD's partner.

Gene Colan had a real sense of humor. So, from the moment he took over from John Romita, the book essentially became a SITCOM. Really crazy, stupd stuff like "The Hop-Frog", and "Mike Murdock", actually work better if you look at that entire run that way.

What's crazy, is that when Gene took over from Romita, it was announced as being "temporary", while Romita worked on the ASM ANNUAL #3 (which Don Heck wound up doing the pencils for anyway, over Romita's layouts).

When Roy Thomas got on the book... well... HE actually wanted to write. And you can see the massive change in tone right there. All the humor went right out the window, since Roy was supplying the plots, instead of Gene.

By the way... check out the short comedy back-up in DD ANNUAL #1, in which we see an alleged late-night "plotting session" between Gene & his editor. What most fans never realized was... the portrayal of their working relationship in that story... was FAR MORE ACCURATE than it seemed.

Now, when Gerry Conway took over... let's just say he didn't have Roy Thomas' sense of humor. (Yes, I'm making a joke. At Thomas' expense. Heh.)

I suppose the best thing about Conway's run was that after going thru multiple inkers, some better or worse than others, Gene was finally re-treamed with Tom Palmer, with whom he first worked on DR. STRANGE. They remain one of the best penciller-inker teams in comics history, I feel.

Steve Gerber, I understand, said in an interview, that when he started writing at Marvel, he had (his words) "NO IDEA" what he was doing. I came to love Gerber's work... but, BOY, you can see him grow as a writer over the course of time.

Bob Brown-- unfortunately-- like far too many artists who worked at Marvel-- tended to get WAY better inkers when he was at DC. So, YEAH, his stuff did look better elsewhere. My own personal favorite inkers for him at Marvel include Sal Buscema (who did DD #107, the one that guest-starred Captain Mar-Vell), Paul Gulacy (who did #108-- funny enough, the first DD issue I bought off the rack at my local drug store), and Dave Cockrum (AVENGERS #126, the issue with Klaw & Solarr, I think).

A funny bit of trivia I noticed a few years ago. BOTH Daredevil and The Black Widow FIRST got their "cable" devices with which they could swing over the city, in the SAME month-- DD in his own book, BW in TALES OF SUSPENSE with Iron Man & Hawkeye. Isn't that wild, considering they later became professional partners and romantic lovers?

By the way... I've long felt that Steve Gerber was the ONLY writer at Marvel, other than Jim Starlin, who ever-- EVER-- wrote Moondragon sympathetically. As I said, I came in with DD #108, the issue where Matt went back to NYC, Natasha stayed behind, and en route, Heather gave Matt the brush-off. That issue, incidentally, has always struck me as the very first "BACK TO BASICS" move of any long-running Marvel series that had grown far from its roots, and a writer decided to take things back to the way they were. MANY other books followed this path over the years (famously John Byrne's F.F. run), but I can't recall anyone doing it before Gerber on DD.

I guess I'll always consider DD #108-up as "my" run on the book, as those where the ones I bought as they came out. I could say a lot more-- especially about Marv Wolfman's run... maybe later.

What I continue to find ironic... A couple months after "Born Again", I got totally and forever FED up with DAREDEVIL. It felt like, I cold put up with Miller tearing long-running characters to pieces before my eyes... but not anybody else. So I just said to HELL with it, stopped reading, and have never looked back since.

Quite some years later, when the 1st DD Materworks book came out... it became one of my favorite Masterworks books ever, and I read it cover-to-cover 3 times. Bill Everett's lone issue REMAINS a real classic. And Wally Wood's short run became one of my FAVORITES, ever, of the series. (Joe Orlando's 3 disastrous issues I rank among the worst comics Marvel published in all of the 1960s. Good grief.) It's just crazy that I never read most of these until long after I quit reading the series in general.

Quite a few years later... when I got the 2nd DD Masterworks book... good lord. I've never been so disappointed in a short run in my life... especially considering how much I'd loved John Romita's stuff since the late 60s on. He always seems to say he would have preferred staying on DAREDEVIL instead of switching over to SPIDER-MAN... but I rank his DD run as the WORST stuff I have ever seen from him. Especially his first 3 issues. Over at one of my blogs, I did a 4-page article detailing the early history of the series, and when I got to "origin of Ka-Zar" story, I concluded that it was the sad result of a relay-race kind of situation, where one person had an idea, another one made some suggestions, another one expanded on it, another one made drastic changes, and then another one came in and put the final kibosh on it. I counted no less than 5 different writers involved.

Romita's DD run got way better once Matt returned to New York.

The Essentials are the black and white reprints, right? I prefer them over the badly coloured Masterworks but would still prefer something in colour - just done better, i.e. closer to the original look, than the Masterworks.