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ELEKTRA LIVES AGAIN

Script/Art: Frank Miller
Inks: Lynne Varley
Letters: Chris Eliopoulos and Jim Novak

Original Graphic Novel
74 pages + cover • 1990

Matt Murdock wakes up with Elektra on his mind and, once again, he can't shake her memory. It haunts him all the way to his confessional with his priest, where he unburdens himself with the reality that he's made himself a "slave to the pain" of his life, starting with the death of his father and continuing all the way to his obsession with Elektra Natchios. He tells the priest of his dream where Elektra is climbing a snow-peaked mountain, trying desperately to shake herself of the life she seems doomed to live, but finding that her hands are in a perpetual state of bloodiness.

After leaving confession, he goes home and sleeps, with the dream returning, but continuing on past the point where he stopped telling the priest it ended. Elektra, with her bloody hands, is chased by the zombie bodies of all those who she killed in the past. They tackle her and do all kinds of awful things to her in revenge- and then Matt awakens. After a time, he falls asleep again, and this time, his dreams are overtaken by ritual drumming and strange ninja ceremonies involving snakes. He resolves to stay awake from this point on. He goes downstairs to play his piano and finds himself overtaken by the same weird dreamstate, in which he is told by a demon that in order to to find Elektra, he must find the one who killed her. That means Bullseye. Matt realizes perhaps he's going batty, and he tries to go back to sleep.

The next day, he tries to reconnect with Karen Page by telephone, but she brushes him off. He works out in his gymnasium and later takes orchids to Elektra's grave site. The following day, Matt meets with his client in a divorce case and winds up taking her home and sleeping with her. It does nothing to help stimulate him emotionally, and his thoughts drift inevitably back to Elektra. He seems to be in a dream when he makes his way back to Elektra's grave site and is attacked by a cadre of the Hand, all looking for Elektra. He fights them off, but is about to be overcome by their numbers when Elektra shows up. She fights her way through them, killing them all, and then stares down Matt. She throws a poisoned star at him and it hits him in the hand, causing him to pass out.

He awakens the next morning. There seems to be damage to his hand, but he cannot be sure if it was a dream or reality. He settles into a bath and ponders these questions while suffering through seeming sleep deprivation. He realizes that if Elektra really is alive, or coming back to life like the Kirigi, that Bullseye has a role in it as the one who killed her, based on the demonic premonitions he had before. He receives a phone call from Foggy. They are to represent the man who has just killed Bullseye in prison, who stabbed him in the back of the head with a ball-point pen. Matt visits the body at the morgue and identifies it as Bullseye, as he recalls the time when Bullseye killed Elektra.

While at the city morgue, Matt can sense the Hand are returning to reclaim the body of Bullseye. The police haul off Bullseye's killer, a Japanese man muttering about how Elektra is coming back to life. In fact, Elektra is roaming the halls of the police precinct, trying to get at Bullseye's body herself. She finds it, but is attacked by a couple zombie bodies come to life. As Matt tries to find a way to get past Foggy and the rest of the police to change into Daredevil, she is attacked by dozens more bodies come to life. Finally, Matt gets to share a private moment with his client, an agent of the Hand who tries to attack Matt with psychic powers. Matt surprises the Hand agent by fighting him off with mental training he received from Stick, and the mental battle ends, with both men slumped over in their chairs.

Matt is later revived, but his opponent is dead from a hemorrhage. The corpses that Elektra fought with are discovered, and the whole situation has a strange aura around it, and Matt slips in and out of visions of Elektra haunting his every moment. He turns to punching his heavy bag in his gym, and after losing himself in the sound sensations of the city, he notes the sound of steps creeping into his home. Suddenly, a ninja is upon him, firing an arrow from across the room. Matt deflects it and then the two tussle until another ninja outside shoots an arrow in, hitting the ninja fighting Matt in the face. Matt chases after the other ninja, across the rooftops and towards a nearby church wherein a gathering of demonic acolytes are giving their life to restore that of Bullseye.

Elektra has been inside the church, leaping down from the vaulted ceiling to try and stop this rising of Bullseye's soul, but she is mortally wounded in the battle. As soon as Matt enters, Bullseye is completely revived and grabs a sword. The two fight, and Matt is sliced up pretty good, but as Bullseye prepares for the final blow, Elektra uses her last strength to drive her sword through his neck, killing him. As she says goodbye once more to Matt, she dies in his arms.

After receiving medical treatment, he returns to Elektra's body, torching it in a funeral pyre, reflecting on the priest's advice that it wasn't Elektra that was haunting him, he was haunting Elektra, unable to let her go. Now, finally, he has. And in some far distant reality, Elektra stands free, looking into the bright sky of a distant horizon....