Writer: Jeph Loeb
Artist: Tim Sale
Publisher: Marvel
Nostalgia merchants Loeb & Tale take blind lawyer and nocturnal superhero Daredevil back to his early years, when his costume was black and yellow. In an effort to come to terms with the loss of his on/off girlfriend, Karen Page, present-day Matt writes her a letter in which he talks about his relationship with his Father, shot while Matt was at college, for refusing to throw a boxing match he'd agreed to lose. He also relives his early years in law practice, with pudgey partner Foggy Nelson, when they hired a beautiful young woman both men instantly fell in love with. This of course, is Karen.
It's a similar treatment to their SUPERMAN FOR ALL SEASONS and SPIDER-MAN: BLUE (in fact it's exactly the same treatment as SPIDER-MAN: BLUE right down to lost parent figure and blonde girlfriend, both of whom were murdered in each case), with all the innocence and nostalgia of a by-gone era you've come to expect. Sale's art is bold yet delicate, his thin ink lines washed with watercolour, particularly effective on the old Brooklyn brickwork.
But his real coup, which I only spotted this morning on my re-read, is that although he does convincingly evoke the sense of period with mobster trilbies, drab offices and '60s hair-dos, it's all slight of hand, because there's a computer hidden in the background on Karen Page's desk. Why? Well, Jeff wants to evoke the era in which the original DAREDEVIL comics first came out... but knows that Marvel have only aged their characters ten years or so since they were first published, so it can't be more than ten years ago. So what Sale's done, the computer aside, is omit any modern settings or vehicles or newspaper references. Clever, eh?
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