Though Frank Miller's Elektra had a somewhat rocky beginning in the pages of DAREDEVIL, he and his collaborators produced two outstanding works centered upon her spiritual growth out of darkness, the RESURRECTION arc and ELEKTRA ASSASSIN. However, the story goes that someone at Marvel promised Miller that they wouldn't use the character without his permission, and that, when they reneged on that promise, Miller ceased to work for the company. And for a time it seemed like Marvel had reaped the consequences of this disagreement. None of Marvel's post-Miller features starring Elektra seems to have sold particularly well, despite her high level of recognizability, and neither of the live-action movies in which she appeared earned much approbation. But though the 2014 ELEKTRA was no more successful than other iterations, the BLOODLINES arc from the first five issues is at least in line with some of the symbolic discourse used in the Miller mythcomics.
To be sure, while writer W. Haden Blackman and artist Michael Del Mundo agree that Elektra came back from the dead as she did in the RESURRECTION arc, they ignore Miller's idea that Daredevil purged her of the spiritual pollution she'd suffered since the death of her father, and the activation of her eternally unsatisfied "Electra complex." This Elektra begins her story by focusing on her utter lack of identity, ticking off all the things she is not-- not dancer, nor artist, nor hero, but only "somebody's assassin." The dominant suggestion is that her lack of identity has allowed her to be molded into whatever shapes others wished her to take.
So for this arc, Blackman and Del Mundo gave Elektra two new adversaries-- and when I read their names on the back cover, I thought, "These guys have no talent for naming super-villains. 'Bloody Lips?' 'Cape Crow?' Even Bill Mantlo came up with better names, and he made up a character called Razorback." Well, Bloody Lips grew on me, but Cape Crow is still a lame name and not much better as a character. In fact, the part of the story involving Cape Crow and his son Kento is meant to play on Elektra's anomie about not having had a proper familial upbringing, and so bears a resemblance to the 2005 ELEKTRA film. Blackman's BLOODLINES script is not as stickily sentimental as the movie, but the resemblance does the writer no credit. Lest you wonder, he doesn't even try to come up with some justification for the guy to use the weird cognomen "Cape Crow."
Like Elektra, CC-- which abbreviation I'm adopting to avoid that awful name-- is a bounty hunter, but he's pissed off a whole guild devoted to the profession, and they've sent a passel of other hired guns after him. He kills or half-kills all of them, including Elektra's onetime murderer Bullseye. Elektra accepts the commission to seek out CC, but so does a metahuman assassin, "Bloody Lips."
Bloody Lips is not given a straight origin as such, but it's implied that he's an Australian aborigine who can absorb the memories and skills of adversaries after eating their flesh. Blackman and Del Mundo work in a lot of references and imagery suggestive of aboriginal religion (these are the "metaphysical myths" of the narrative), but Bloody Lips' main attraction is that he revels in the lack of identity that distresses Elektra. He doesn't care that his identity is compromised by absorbing the strengths and skills of other beings, just so long as he can kill people.
In a long sequence, both Bloody Lips and Elektra are plunged into mental psychodramas in which shadows of their pasts seek to task them with their foul deeds. Elektra feels but rejects her guilt. Bloody Lips, who slaughtered his family for whatever reasons, realizes that even if he hadn't done the deed in that way, he would have committed some other version of the crime. He's practically the incarnation of Nietzsche's eternal recurrence:
What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness, and say to you, "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence" ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine."
Elektra, however, remains haunted by the possibility that things might have been different, If Only. But her ninja training leads her to a conclusion similar to that of Bloody Lips, but without any false self-aggrandizement. When a psychic image of her mother tries to guilt her for the scores of deaths she's caused, Elektra rejects the notion of feeling guilt for her carnage. "You want me to see victims," she tells the false mother-image, "when all I see are murderers, terrorists, sadists, despots." She slays the image of the mother she never knew in life.
Later, Elektra later learns that all the psychic specters experienced by her and by Bloody Lips were conjured up by the mental powers of Kento, who wanted to protect his father against both bounty hunters. She doesn't know this when she saves Kento's life or when she battles CC, though her lust for battle is sufficient that it overrides any "rational" attempt to reason with the rival bounty hunter. She spares CC, only to figure out what Kento did to her. Yet because he did it for his father, she essentially forgives him that trespass.
But the CC battle is just a prelude to the heroic assassin's duel with her opposite number. All through the story, Bloody Lips has gone on and on about how much he likes incorporating the experiences of his victims as well as their skills, and he hungers to take in "everything you've felt, everything you've seen," to which Elektra responds, "See if you can survive being me."
There's nothing blazingly original about the villain who realizes he just can't measure up to the hero he wants to overwhelm, but it's an appropriate punishment, however temporary, for the omophagic evildoer. But once again, Elektra is tempted by the "If Only" lure of becoming someone other than who she is-- and again she rejects it, accepting eternal recurrence with far more self-awareness than her erstwhile opponent.
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