Daredevil #15.1 - Someone got tricked by a Waid/Samnee framing sequence into buying this. What we actually have here are a pair of continuity inserts.

The first is by Marc Guggenheim and Peter Krause. It takes place before Daredevil #1, which would have been helpful to inform us of in advance, because when i saw Matt Murdock working for a law firm that wasn't Nelson & Murdock i was pretty confused at first. The story also makes sure to rub the sliding timescale in our face by having DD (in the yellow and brown-red costume) using a burner cell phone. It also has him fighting a pair of thugs that have found a cache of super-villain equipment, which seems kind of wrong for the time period. Would Doctor Octopus have left a spare set of tentacles laying around circa 1964? And the Shocker? That's a character that doesn't debut until 1967, and while i guess there's nothing that says he couldn't have been operating much earlier than that, it still seems odd for some of his equipment to wind up in a warehouse with Doc Ock's arms (or for Daredevil to recognize it, for that matter). The point of the story is to attempt to address the friction between Daredevil as a vigilante and Matt Murdock as a lawyer, but fails to deliver anything meaningful (as Daredevil, he catches the wrong guy, and as Matt Murdock, he manages to get the guy acquitted, but that hardly addresses the problem).

The second story is by Chris Samnee (story and art, and with a style that is much darker than his regular work on this book), and at least it's more upfront about telling us when it takes place (after Daredevil #57, because Karen Page knows DD's secret ID). The premise here is that even lame super-villains can be a threat in the right circumstances. The villain of the story is Diablo, who is introduced in the Mark Waid framing sequence as "more punching bag than world-beater". The Samnee segment similarly says that he's been "little more than a thorn in the side of the Fantastic Four". I mean, geez. In the long run, Diablo may not have turned out to be a fan favorite (although he's been in some really cool stories, from the Lee/Kirby era through at least John Byrne), but in-universe, he's an immortal wizard. He created Dragon Man! People actually living in the Marvel universe should think he's a badass! The story also totally mischaracterizes Diablo as someone that would sell his wares to drug dealers, saying things like "Never has there been an operation with the potential for such a high profit margin." I don't get it.

I also have the problem that, by my placement, Diablo should be trapped in an alternate dimension by Dr. Doom at this point, but that may be something i can work around. Still, i am learning to hate continuity inserts more and more. They rarely add anything of value and they are just about guaranteed to screw something up.

Sounds like more ILLUMINATI-style bullshit to me. Just a lot of pissing in someone else's soup.