Sienkiewicz, Bill - Elektra Assassin, issue 3, cover (Oct 1986)

For me, this one is big. I am, and always have been, an enormous Sienkiewicz fan - and this piece is from what I think may be his best work. Bill helped redefine what comic art could be with this series and I am humbled to have it in my gallery.

Written by Frank Miller and illustrated by Bill Sienkiewicz, Elektra: Assassin was an eight-issue limited series published by Epic Comics, an imprint of Marvel Comics, between August 1986 and March 1987.

Miller and Sienkiewicz were at the height of their popularity when this series was released shortly on the heels of Miller's hugely successful Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, and Miller & Sienkiewicz's Marvel graphic novel, Daredevil: Love and War. As with Daredevil: Love and War, Sienkiewicz illustrated Elektra: Assassin using watercolors as opposed to the traditional penciling/inking method. His exaggerated art was unique amongst mainstream comics of the time.

The story tells the tale of Elektra’s confrontation with the Beast, a demon long worshipped by the clandestine ninja organization known as The Hand (whose formation dates back to feudal Japan and whose membership once included a young Elektra – she was trained by them before departing to become the top freelance assassin in NYC for the Kingpin). The Beast's motives are unclear at first, but it is gradually revealed that it is attempting to bring about a nuclear war, primarily via launching the presidential campaign of Ken Wind (a Dan Quayle look-alike whose resemblance is a coincidence – at least according to Sienkiewicz – as it is a Sienkiewicz self-portrait). When Wind assumes the Presidency, he intends to launch a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, thereby initiating a global nuclear war and the end of the world.

The Beast does manage to get Wind elected president, but Elektra thwarts its’ endgame – but not before we are introduced to a crazy cast of characters that includes the alcoholic S.H.I.E.L.D agent Garrett (who Elektra blows up and who has his surviving head attached to a robotic body by S.H.I.E.L.D.’s experimental cybernetics division), his former partner, Perry (who is revealed to be a sociopath after Elektra kills him – he is also reconstructed into a cyborg by S.H.I.E.L.D. before becoming an agent of the Beast; S.H.I.E.L.D. is clearly a government operation) and the incomparable, by-the-book S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, Chastity McBryde. In the final confrontation, Elektra transfers the mind of Garrett into Ken Wind. The story ends with President Wind (Garrett) being debriefed by Chastity McBryde on the story’s events.

It is deliberately left vague whether the events in Elektra: Assassin take place prior to Elektra's initial appearances in Daredevil, or whether it details a subsequent resurrection. Former Marvel editor Mary Jo Duffy, in the introduction to the Elektra omnibus, claims that Frank Miller conceived the series as taking place before Elektra's Daredevil appearance. As a result, the series has been dismissed by many as non-canonical. However, during his run as Daredevil writer in the 1990s, D.G. Chichester used Garret as a character, thereby establishing the series as being part of the mainstream Daredevil continuity. Garrett also shows up in a cameo role in Miller and Lynn Varley's 1990 graphic novel, Elektra Lives Again.