"Why do people who call themselves good people—and everybody calls themselves a good person—do bad things?" asks former attorney and comics writer Charles Soule. He likes his comics to leave readers with such fundamental questions. “I’m thinking about good and evil and the choices that people make right now,” he says, “because we're in a world where our ability to be moral is muddied—because we're in a world that is being run by immoral forces.”
Ethical conundrums get ample play in his two forthcoming trade releases—Daredevil: Cold Day in Hell (Marvel, Feb.), in which the aging superhero ponders his legacy between punches; and The Lucky Devils (Image, July), in which devils rebel in hell by being good.
"There's always stories you can get out of people being put into a position where they need to choose between personal benefit and larger societal benefit,” Soule says, adding that society's elite eschew morality for “money, power, control. There's a larger game being played that doesn't have basic ethics as part of it." Superheroes and comics,” he says, provide a great lens to examine the devil in those details.
The Lucky Devils, written by Soule and drawn by Ryan Browne (God Hates Astronauts), takes place in a world where every human being has a devil assigned to their shoulder. Hell's society is powered by humanity's evil acts: The more evil a given human, the more comfortable their devil becomes.
Soule is the first to admit that the concept is "pretty on the nose," but The Lucky Devils really concerns itself with two low-ranking devils attempting to overthrow Hell by making humans better. Soule hopes it gives readers pause. "There are no shoulder devils in reality—the choices we're making are all our own,” he says. “Where does our responsibility for morality and ethics, good and evil, lie?"
Consequences of human foibles are also at the heart of Daredevil: Cold Day in Hell. Daredevil’s a bloody-knuckled vigilante and the alter ego of guilt-ridden Catholic—and lawyer—Matt Murdock. The new limited series, written by Soule and drawn by artist Steve McNiven (Old Man Logan), follows an elderly version of Murdock, blinded by the loss of his superpowers, who believes his crime-fighting life is behind him—until fate gives him powers back for just a few days.
In Cold Day in Hell, Soule says he wanted to present Daredevil at a late stage in life, pondering the question to end all questions. "I was looking at the way people think about the world when they're approaching the end of their time in it. Daredevil, because he's religious, is approaching what comes after him through a lens of faith and God. And he is trying to reassure himself that he has made choices that, on balance, make the world a better place as opposed to a worse place."
Studying contract law, Soule says, made him a student of human nature, and gaming out the future. "What are people likely to be upset about or want down the road that they're not necessarily thinking about today?"
Whether Daredevil's legacy or a devil revolution, Soule likes to create rules and then test them. And if that's his brand, he doesn’t mind it. "I mean, what a place to be as a writer,” he says, “the guy who comes up with cool premises and just spins them out into infinity."
