Abraham Riesman on the street-level heroes Marvel has paraded out on Netflix:

[The Marvel/Netflix] players appear in front of sensory backdrops that distinguish themselves deftly from one another. Close your eyes after watching the three series and picture the color schemes: Daredevil’s is all moonlight blacks, bruised reds, and fluorescent greens; Jessica traffics in royal purple, textured and dark leather, and the cold sunlight of wintertime; Luke is the gold of nostalgia, the crimson of a velvet rope. Keep your eyes closed and hear the echoes of the music in your head: That of the first show is the electronic thump of a video game; the second is the jazz of neo-noir; the exquisitely soundtracked third is an ecstatic symphony of soul, hip-hop, and live performances from living paragons of black excellence. Played at once, they would be a cacophony; individually, they find harmony with their thematic goals.

I’m in total agreement with Riesman, ever since Daredevil debuted, I’ve anticipated the Netflix shows with much more excitement than the Marvel Cinema Universe films.

What Riesman leaves out, but I suspect that he might be in agreement with, is that the source material being used for the Netflix shows is tighter. This street-level universe seems grounded in the genre-flecked work of Brian Michael Bendis (Daredevil, Alias, New Avengers) – and soon probably Matt Fraction and Ed Brubaker’s Immortal Iron Fist which features a simpatico attitude and artistic palette. The MCU suffers from trying to distill 60-70 years of ideas sprung from a myriad of writers into a relative handful of films. It shouldn’t be surprising that the strongest MCU entry, Captain America: The Winter Soldier grew out of an Ed Brubaker story. The tone and art style of Brubaker’s Winter Soldier arc comfortably fits within the noir-ish parameters of street-level. A slew of this style can be found under Marvel’s “Marvel Knights” imprint; a somewhat experimental and perhaps desperate line of titles Marvel created in 1998 to help weather their own bankruptcy.

You might say, with great constraint comes great possibility.

For enjoyment purposes only, a partial reading list of Street-Level Marvel and perhaps a reason to sign-up for Marvel Unlimited:

• Daredevil (1998; Bendis/Maleev into Brubaker/Lark)
• Alias (2001; Bendis/Gaydos)
• The Immortal Iron Fist (2006; Fraction/Brubaker/Aja)
• Sentry (2000; Jenkins/Lee)¹
• NYX (2003; Quesada; 2005 Liu)
• Captain America, (2004; Brubaker/Epting), the Winter Soldier arc through Civil War
• Secret War (2004; Bendis/Dell’Otto)
• District X (2004; Hine/Various)²
• The Pulse (2004; Bendis/Various)
• New Avengers: Illuminati One-Shot (2006; Bendis/Maleev)³
• Spider-Woman (2009; Bendis/Maleev)
• Moon Knight (2011; Bendis/Maleev)

Much of Bendis’s New Avengers (2004) can probably be best read as taking The Avengers to street-level, but certainly the Luke Cage, and Luke and Jessica Jones, focused issues (like #22, #38, and #47) belong. There are more Marvel Knights books out there too – many of which I have yet to fully explore. But the above are all very good to great.⁴ The Fraction/Aja/Wu Hawkeye series would be at home here as well.

Anyways, my point besides touting Marvel Unlimited – see I was getting somewhere the whole time, I swear – is that Marvel has a truckload of stories which share the tone of the material used to make the Netflix series and I hope someone over there decides it’s better to make a Spider-Woman show or a Moon Knight show and not a stale-by-then for sure Daredevil Season 7.

So to conclude or at least wrap-up… I’ve been meaning to write this whole Marvel Street thing for a while and it should probably be written into a longer essay style blog post and not just undergrid a link list item, but let’s take a tip from Pop and Luke and move always forward and forward always, so no promises.