By [ad_1]
Today, we look at the classic issue of Daredevil that won an Eisner Award for Best Single Issue for its tale of Daredevil making his way though a snowstorm with a group of blind kids after a bus crash in the Catskills.
This is “Look Back,” where every four weeks of a month, I will spotlight a single issue of a comic book that came out in the past and talk about that issue (often in terms of a larger scale, like the series overall, etc.). Each spotlight will be a look at a comic book from a different year that came out the same month X amount of years ago. The first spotlight of the month looks at a book that came out this month ten years ago. The second spotlight looks at a book that came out this month 25 years ago. The third spotlight looks at a book that came out this month 50 years ago. The fourth spotlight looks at a book that came out this month 75 years ago. The occasional fifth week (we look at weeks broadly, so if a month has either five Sundays or five Saturdays, it counts as having a fifth week) looks at books from 20/30/40/60/70/80 years ago.
Before we go back to December 2011, I wanted to let y’all in on a little secret. I initially missed the June, July and August Look Backs. However, I then did features on each one of the comics that I was GOING to originally do as Look Backs, about 12 comics in total, but they were labeled as other features. For each one that was ORIGINALLY a Look Back, I bolded the month and year that the comic book was released and just now, I added “Look Back” tags for them all. So if you wanted a complete Look Back collection, you now have it! Just in time for the end of the year! So you can just click on “Look Back” to see them al!
Okay, on to December 2011 for the award-winning Daredevil #7, by Mark Waid, Paolo Rivera, Joe Rivera and Javier Rodriguez, which won the Eisner Award for Best Single Issue.
First off, a quick aside. This Daredevil run initially had a faux Daily Bugle newspaper at the start of the comic that worked as a credits for the comic and a recap, but as a result, the stories weren’t titled.
When Mark Waid launched this Daredevil series in 2011, the artists on the book initially alternated between Marcos Martin and Paulo Rivera (working as a penciler, with his father, Joe, inking him). The comics were GORGEOUS. Waid had an idea to try to make the depiction of Daredevil’s Radar Sense a bigger part of the comic and Martin and Rivera both answered the call with stunning artwork.
In any event, in this comic book, Matt Murdock is escorting a group of blind kids on a trip to Upstate New York for the holidays when their bus crashes after hitting a deer. The bus driver is killed in the crash and now Matt has to guide a group of blind kids in a snowstorm in the Catskills to safety. Check out the stunning artwork and use of the snow here, as Matt decides he might as well wear his costume for the extra protection it gives him (it has gloves, at least) and since the kids are blind, they can’t blow his secret identity (not that he is thinking of his secret identity at this point in time)…
However, navigating through the snow is easier said than done. One of the hardships, as beautifully depicted in the artwork, is that the snow hampers Daredevil’s Radar Sense…
Besides the fact that he is fairly well injured himself, one of the problems that Matt has is that these are specifically the kids from the school for the blind that are the MOST anxious about leaving the school and going into the “real” world and Matt is having a terrible time handling their anxieties, especially since he’s, again, badly injured…
When he hears a truck nearby, he instinctively wants to run for it, but at the same time, the chaos sends the kids all running in different directions and he has worried that he has led the kids to their doom. However, as he falls to the ground due to his injuries, he is shocked when the kids actually pull together to save HIM….
What an amazing sequence, right?
Luckily, as it turned out, the truck being there naturally meant that there was a farmhouse nearby and so Matt broke in and called someone to come get them, while seeing to his injuries…
This was an excellent time for the Daredevil comic book series and each issue, Waid seemed to be hitting new heights for clever approaches to the longtime superhero and man, the art was fantastic. Amazingly enough, after losing BOTH Martin and Rivera, Waid ended up being paired with the brilliant Chris Samnee and the book went to even greater heights with Waid and Samnee working for a long time together on the book, as the book built on that consistency.
If you folks have any suggestions for January (or any other later months) 2012, 1997, 1972 and 1947 comic books for me to spotlight, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com! Here is the guide, though, for the cover dates of books so that you can make suggestions for books that actually came out in the correct month. Generally speaking, the traditional amount of time between the cover date and the release date of a comic book throughout most of comic history has been two months (it was three months at times, but not during the times we’re discussing here). So the comic books will have a cover date that is two months ahead of the actual release date (so October for a book that came out in August). Obviously, it is easier to tell when a book from 10 years ago was released, since there was internet coverage of books back then.
About The Author
[ad_2]
