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09/07/2003: Daredevil #51 ramblings
On the new Daredevil #51 by David Mack: I won't bother with a cut-tag -- my comments aren't really spoilery, as (unfortunately) nothing really happens in this issue.
So this issue brings back Echo, from David Mack's previous Daredevil story, Parts of a Hole. I think if she was a fanfiction character (and maybe even now), a lot of people would consider Echo to be Mary Sue. And while I do think that the fanfic honed sensitivity to "Mary Sue signs" sometimes ruins the enjoyment of original characters and storylines -- characters and stories that one wouldn't have disliked if one had never been exposed to all the fanfic related discussion and examples of the Mary Sue phenomenon -- Echo has quite a lot of the qualities of a classic Mary Sue. I mean, she has a tortured past, with a murdered parent (but OTOH that's pretty much the norm for every other character in superhero comic books), she's deaf, but compensates that disability almost completely with her gift to emulate and learn any skill perfectly through visual observation (but OTOH it is a superhero comic, so superpowers aren't unexpected), and she ends up in a romantic relationship with Matt (but OTOH it's more exceptional when a female secondary character doesn't end up as a love interest for Matt). All that wouldn't bother me much, if not for the unfortunate tendency that she ends up as the focus of the story in the traditional Mary Sue fashion. That did happen to some extent when she last appeared, yet I actually still ended up liking the character last time.
However -- oddly enough -- I'd still like to see Daredevil appear in a Daredevil comic book. You know, the blind lawyer guy in a devil costume, with a lot of Catholic guilt issues? Remember him? Yeah, I thought so, with him being the the title character and all. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but Echo remembering kissing Matt once or twice in her internal rambling didn't cut it for me in a Daredevil book. Also, nothing happened in this issue. It's all Echo's internal monologue, recapping what happened previously, only as it is solely from her perspective it's without most of the Daredevil stuff. Now, I hope that this will change the next issue, and that this one was simply a really long "previously in" segment, and that this will sort of be "redeemed" as the exposition part in the larger picture.
I mean, I still liked the comic, simply because it has David Mack's art, and I enjoy looking at his pages ever since I first saw a couple of them at a convention. Back then I had never read anything by him, or even heard of this guy, but in this exhibition there were a couple of Kabuki pages displayed, and as soon as I left the exhibition room I started to buy any Kabuki issues I could find, and got in line at the next of his signings. Actually, when I look at the art from a "comic perspective" I don't even think it's the best suited to tell a story, and usually I tend to dislike self-indulgent or collage styles for comics. But of course there are exceptions to every general preference, and even though David Mack's pages are not the easiest to read as a comic, I simply enjoy looking at them. And that's true for Daredevil #51 as well, no matter that it's,IMO, not his best work.
However that has nothing to do with this comic as a Daredevil issue. I suspect if you don't enjoy looking at David Mack pages simply because they're David Mack pages, you won't get much out of this issue.
