Collects all six issues of the Daredevil: Yellow mini-series.
Writer: Jeph Loeb
Artist: Tim Sale
Plot:
Having little desire to reveal the intricacies of this tightly knitted plot, I can reveal but a miniscule number of details. This collection tells of Daredevil's origins. How he came to be and why he fights the crime-infested streets of New York City. It also tells the story of why Matt Murdock, the man behind the Daredevil mask became a lawyer by day and of the tragedy that was involuntarily bestowed upon him in the events regarding his father and his first true love.
Comments:
I knew next to nothing about Daredevil before I decided to pick up this collection. All I did know was that he was a blind super hero with a heightened sense of awareness through his other senses. I found that strikingly interesting so I thought, with a collection like this retelling his origin and his motives for becoming a super hero would be the ideal choice to start me off if I ever wanted to read Daredevil.
The story suffers from the tightly knitted plot mentioned above. Secondary characters such as Matt Murdock's friend and law partner, Foggy Nelson and his first true love, Karen Page are underdeveloped and come off the page as little more than caricatures. Likewise, the villains that show up in Daredevil's early adventures are bland and the fight scenes are uninteresting as there is no emotion towards the continued existence of our hero. If this series perhaps would have been longer, there could have been an establishment of both secondary characters as well as a deeper exploration of who Daredevil is and what he represents, but more importantly why we should care about him.
There seems to be several stories to tell in this collection, but only one or two are covered in full with the rest leaving us hanging from the lack of character development that led to certain climactic character and story developments. Matt Murdock tells the main story through the use of narration in a letter to Karen Page after her passing revealing all about himself, his past, his motivations and his feelings towards his friends, to her and to becoming a superhero. This narration is well done but the dialogue and story telling through the art turns that all around and makes for a disjointed, unconvincing mess. The actions through the dialogue and art don't feel fully developed and isn't carried out in a way that compliments the narration. Rather it seems to turn it on its head as characters that are supposed to be full of personality and complexity in the narration come off as being complete opposites in the dialogue and art. I don't understand how something like that could have happened.
The writing is in the usual Loeb trademark style. Simple, straightforward storytelling through the use of narration and limited but, effective dialogue. There seemed to be a period influence in the dialogue as if the book was portraying a 1950s style of writing comics. Though being unrealistic to modern times, the dialogue does suit its period quite nicely. As always when working with frequent collaborator Tim Sale, Loeb leaves much of the storytelling up to the artist. This can be seen on other collaborations between the two as the panels are few and simple throughout the pages and frequently direct its attention towards the art side of the storytelling. This is an interesting approach that works well for these two collaborators.
The art didn't strike me as being anything special and it did not impress in the least. There were no surprises and no inventions that other Loeb/Sale collaborations had brought. Unlike Tim Sale's art for DC's Batman: The Long Halloween which featured a very detailed style, in this collection he utilized uninteresting angles and uninspired storytelling. It came off as being poorly done and not to the level that I had expected from an artist that I so greatly respected for his effective storytelling abilities. The colors by the infamous Matt Hollingsworth blend nicely into the pencils and set the mood and tone for the story quite nicely utilizing a lot of contrasts between shadows and bright colors.
Final Word:
Overall, not the great level of storytelling that I've come to expect from these two. There were too many faults to have overlooked this as a cohesive well-told story. It did however pique my interest enough to look at some of the Daredevil titles that have made the character famous. I hear the current run by Brian Michael Bendis is supposed to be well done as well as Frank Miller's revitalization of the character in the 1980s. Overall, this collection tells a simple, underdeveloped story that suffered from the lack of telling of a meaningful tale. There are probably other, much better Daredevil origin stories. All you gotta do is find them. If you'd like to comment about this review, please post on the message board or e-mail me directly by clicking the link above.
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