 | The story covered in this volume of Daredevil invloves Matt Murdock meeting his opposite number, Maya Lopez. Maya Lopez is a Native American girl who was born without a sense of hearing, her visual instincts more than make up for it though. She was able to master speech, art, dance, and musicianship from nothing but sight. Her father was murdered when she was young and her benefactor Wilson Fisk (the kingpin) is trying to convince her that he was murdered by Daredevil.
This is a collected volume of a Daredevil story from a few years back. It marks the first work on the series by Writer/Cover artist David Mack. Illustrator (and current marvel Editor in chief) Joe Quesada does an exceptional job of taking Mack's art direction. David Mack's art style on his own work is a complex mixed media display that totally subordinates itself to the narrative, it often involves use of raw pencils, colored pencil, ink, water color, found objects and even typewriting. In the case of this work, he is using his art philosophy to dictate to a traditional artist.
The best examples of this are sections in the beginning of the story where Matt sees the only place that he can (in his dreams) the visual world of his dreams is an open world of abstracts. The whole world you experience in these scenes leaves you hearing beautiful music in the background, wonderful smells and flavors, but your sight seems to be totally failing you. The world around you seems to be nothing but floating abstracts that you cannot quite bring yourself to grasp.
Then conversely there are sections in which you explore Maya's world through her eyes and her words. The sights are beautiful and feel entirely real to you but you become frighteningly aware that you're reading words on a page and that there is no actual sound to hear as you are reading it. Nowhere is this overall approach more evident than Maya's feeling of helplessness as Matt uses his best trick to save his life (takes her into a totally dark room) because no matter how hard he tries, he cannot communicate to her that there is no way he could have killed her father.
Mack has you under his total control from the moment you pick the book up until you finish it, everything you see is what he wants you to see, everything you feel is what he wants you to feel, as you follow the love and loss and triumph and betrayal this story never lets you go.
---Landon
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Daredevil: Parts of a Hole by David Mack
