It's not just the several major similarities of the two characters—both of whom, it could be argued, are descended from 1930s pulp fiction character The Black Bat—that made them seem like kindred spirits. It was also their general presentation and the sorts of stories they tended to appear in.
These factors are likely due to the influence of Frank Miller, who had a pair of highly influential runs on Daredevil in the 1980s (including 1986's "Born Again") and similarly redefined Batman in a pair of stories, 1986's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and 1987 Batman arc "Batman: Year One".
Miller's shadow loomed (and continues to loom) large over both characters, and many (perhaps most?) stories featuring either character that followed his work on them seemed to either be in debt to Miller's take, or else a reaction to that take.
Let's here pause to remember that when DC and Marvel were putting together their first crossover, 1976's Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man, they took care to find a writer and artist who had experience working on both characters. Now imagine if that was still the case in the 1990s, when the crossovers became so much more frequent. Imagine a Frank Miller-written Batman/Daredevil story, drawn by one of Miller's collaborators who had worked with him on both characters, Klaus Janson or David Mazzucchelli...!
Instead, we got the 48-page "Eye for an Eye," by what the back cover said is "the creative team behind the best-selling Daredevil: Fall from Grace," which I, of course, had never read, neither by the time this was first released, nor in the years since ( It doesn't look like there is a trade collection of it available, either).
That team consisted of writer D. G. Chichester and pencil artist Scott McDaniel.
Chichester if the first writer or artist whose work appears in the DC Versus Marvel Omnibus whom I had never heard of at all. Looking him up on the Internet, it seems he was a Marvel editor turned writer whose career spanned the decade of the 1990s, and his longest comics-writing gig seemed to be a run on Daredevil.
McDaniel, on the other hand, is of course familiar to anyone who's read many Batman-related comics in the last few decades, or DC comics in general, having drawn substantial runs on Nightwing and Batman in the late-90s and early-00s, and drawing most of their related characters at one time or another, and then a huge swathe of the DC universe in the 2008 series Trinity.
By the time of this one-shot, though, most of his work was for Marvel, where he had drawn plenty of Spider-Man appearances and had a healthy run on Daredevil. Particularly germane to our discussions of these crossovers, the previous year he was the artist on the Amalgam comic Assassins, which featured the new characters "Dare" (an amalgamation of Daredevil and Deathstroke that also happens to be a woman for some reason) and "Catsai" (an amalgamation of Elektra and Catwoman).
Though I haven't seen his work in some time now, I've always liked McDaniel's art style, which is...well, I want to say "weird," but I think "peculiar" might be the more accurate word. I can't think of any other comics artists whose work resembles that of McDaniel's. I don't see the influence of any earlier artists in his style, I don't see any later artists whose art seem inspired by his, and I have a hard time even describing his work.
His figures may often be quite big, and they are usually well-muscled, but they always seem to be drawing themselves inward, looking somewhat compressed and coiled, even when they are drawn exploding outward physically, as they so often are.
There's also a sense of flatness and unreality about them, a very...well, a very, drawn look to them. McDaniel's art is very comic book-y, for a lack of a better word, as it doesn't look like art you would find in any place other than a comic book.
He is, of course, a perfect fit for both characters (although he was still in the process of proving himself as a Batman artist at the time this crossover originally shipped), and his presence gives this particular comic book a unique look, his dynamic figures and the charged atmosphere of his style making for a particularly action-packed read, even during the slower or down scenes.
A comic featuring these two particular characters probably doesn't need any villains—I mean, Batman and Daredevil could always just fight one another, given their particular natures and skills, right?—but the by now well-established formula of these inter-company crossovers demanded a villain from each hero's rogues gallery.
The most obvious villains would of course be their respective archenemies, The Joker and The Kingpin, but neither appear here. I'm not sure if it was Chichester's decision or that of the editors to not use those characters, but it was probably the right call...regarding The Joker, at least.
Perhaps it was feared readers were starting to tire of the character who had, after all, appeared in every single DC/Marvel crossover that Batman had appeared in so far, which meant he had been in four crossovers in just the last three years alone (Five, if you count DC Versus Marvel, in which he also, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, appears, sharing the opening scene of the series with Spider-Man).
So instead of The Joker, the Batman villain we get is Two-Face, and he is teamed with off-and-on Daredevil villain Mr. Hyde (who was first introduced as a Thor villain by Stan Lee and Don Heck in the early 1960s). Hyde would seem an unusual choice, but perhaps Chichester zeroed in on the character as one that represents a sort of duality akin to that of Two-Face...although, in this story, Hyde is always his more dangerous, super-powered self, with no apparent connection to his version of Dr. Jekyll, scientist Calvin Zabo.
(As for The Kingpin, he would be featured in two future crossovers; 1997's Batman & Spider-Man #1 and 2000's Batman/Daredevil: King of New York #1, the writers of which would both make pretty great use of him in Batman narratives.)
The inside front cover sees the return of origins of the starring characters, here presented in melodramatic prose paragraphs, next to black and white images of the heroes. These paragraphs, though colorfully written, don't really give readers the necessary facts of the heroes' origins and backgrounds, but then, I suppose that by 1997, everyone knew their whole deals...at least, those likely to pick up this particular book from a comic book shop would have known their deals.
Below these origins is the Elseworlds logo and spiel; as with the previous Batman & Captain America, DC Comics seems to want readers to know that this isn't a canonical crossover, but a one-off that occurs in a standalone world all its own (the previously mentioned later Batman/Daredevil crossover, King of New York, does not bear an Elseworlds logo anywhere on it though, despite the fact that it refers back to this crossover in a couple of places).
Anyway, we see here the various ways the two publishers handled crossovers after the fact that the Marvel and DC universes were established as different, parallel realities in Green Lantern/Silver Surfer and DC Versus Marvel and its sequels.
The first page of the story features a long strip of prose running down the left border of the page beneath a big bat-symbol, while McDaniel draws five panels of Batman (his first official drawing of Batman?) investigating a Waynetech crime scene, where the room has been split in half, one side pristine and clean, the other a mess...and full of bodies. A clue to Two-Face as the responsible party, of course.
Batman follows such clues to New York City, where a TV talking head reveals that a rash of "violent robberies have plagued over a dozen technology supply companies in the city." Some of these seem exceedingly low-rent for a villain of Two-Face's caliber, especially compared to what he stole from Waynetech (Which will only gradually be revealed throughout the story, but, to spoil you now, is a "neural net", a sort of advanced organic super-computer than can be grown in living human brain tissue...but with the side-effect that it kills its host.). These crimes include things like stripping and selling copper wire and stealing the quarters from arcade games.
In the sewers of New York, Batman sees Daredevil with the blood of a murder victim on his fingers, and leaps to attack him ("No external sensation warns Daredevil he's being stalked-- --The Dark Knight is that good--"). DD's radar sense warns him of Batman at the last moment, leading to a brief, not too terribly well-choreographed fight scene that lasts about three pages.
Neither character seems to gain the upper hand, so I'm afraid this comic can't tell us who would win in a fight, Batman or Daredevil. (It's a fan-ish question I'm actually curious about the answer to, having no solid answer of my own. Batman's training is wider and more diverse than Daredevil's, and he's got a utility belt full of weapons, but, on the other hand, maybe Daredevil's super-senses would give him the advantage? No comics professional seems to have ruled on this particular match-up, as the two didn't face off in DC Versus Marvel, and they won't have a conclusive battle in their next team-up either. And while earlier versions of the characters briefly meet in Unlimited Access, they don't come to blows there at all.)
I should here pause to note that I really like the way McDaniel, inker Derek Fisher and colorist Gregroy Wright depict Daredevil's radar vision. McDaniel draws a panel shaped like a big circle, like that of a radar screen, with smaller circles bubbling around its edges. That main circle is black, while white lines emanate from its center, these forming the very rough, sketchy shape of Batman reaching out towards Daredevil, whose eyes we are of course seeing through in this image.
We'll see a couple more examples of it throughout the story, including one where Daredevil sees the handful of Batagrangs Batman throws at him and then, later, when he sees the Batmobile parked in an alley ("You drove that from Gotham?").
After the allotted space for their fight ends, Daredevil finally says, "We're both sewer-diving for the same reason, am I right? Thieves...and murderers." He proposes a team-up, and soon the pair are running across city rooftops, an image that McDaniel would draw many different versions of on Nightwing, where his Dick Grayson moved across urban environments much like his Daredevil does here.
Batman is, as always, reluctant to work with another hero, and after the pair share some intel and have a disagreement about whether or not Two-Face Harvey Dent might be redeemable—and after Batman picks up on clues to determine that Daredevil is "visually impaired" and likely has sensory enhancements—Batman tries to ditch Daredevil.
This leads to a scene in which Daredevil leaps on the hood of the speeding Batmobile, and the pair ultimately play a game of chicken, Batman driving straight at Daredevil, who stands in his way. (The Man Without Fear wins that particular conflict.)
Meanwhile, Two-Face and Hyde are on a rampage of their oddly petty, but extremely violent, crimes, terminating in a hostage situation in an Internet cafe. As to what's really going on, you've probably guessed it from what I've already written, but Harvey is using Hyde to grow the neural net, egging him on with drugs and violent crime to help "cook" it faster.
A big fight at the end pits the two vigilantes against the super-strong Hyde—who, again, was a Thor villain, and is thus a little out of their weight-class—and sees Daredevil testing his theory that there's still a bit of good in Harvey Dent. The two went to law school together, you see, and so Matt Murdock knows Harvey...or at least knew him before his transformation. (I guess that might be part of the reason Chichester chose Two-Face as the villain, as he shares a legal background with Daredevil?).
The adventure over, there's a pretty fun three-page epilogue, in which Matt Murdock and Foggy Nelson run into Bruce Wayne at a Gotham fundraiser, and Murdock and Wayne seem to intimate to one another in a rather intense conversation that they each know who the other is, and Wayne doesn't seem too happy to see him, leading to a clever, almost punchline-like last word from Matt.
Despite my complete unfamiliarity with the writer, and the rather narrow focus and low stakes of the crossover, it was fun to finally see these two particular characters share a story. It does seem like there's a bigger, better Batman/Daredevil story yet to be told (I believe Brian Michael Bendis and Marvel had made some pretty public noises about trying to get DC to go along with doing one when Joe Quesada was still Editor-In-Chief at Marvel).
As I said, the two will meet again in a few years, in what will prove to be the last DC/Marvel crossover...at least until 2003's outlier crossover, JLA/Avengers.
But as for Batman, he would be back in another crossover almost immediately.
Next: 1997's Batman/Spider-Man #1
