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Daredevil and all related characters © Marvel Characters, Inc.
Murdock’s life is torn apart slowly by the Kingpin’s actions. This slow destruction is apparent via the splash pages which introduce each chapter (Figure 9.3). “A somewhat unusual use of storytelling as we think of it is something that I came up with to introduce each chapter. What we see in the course of several issues is Matt Murdock’s life falling apart, and I wanted to show this very clearly with the splash pages. I chose to do that by showing variations of the same overhead shot of him sleeping, or waking up, so you get to see what condition his life is in as you enter each chapter. In the first chapter, “Apocalypse,” you see that he is in his comfortable bed. He’s been tossing and turning, obviously, because the sheets are all knotted around him, but he’s got plenty of room, light is streaming into the bedroom, and on succeeding pages, we eventually get to see the whole house. In the second chapter, “Purgatory,” we’re looking down at him in bed again, but this time he’s in a very narrow, institutional looking bed which takes up about one half of the room in a very cheap hotel, because it’s the only place he can afford. So we see more of a cramped space, and (Matt is) fetal-looking because of his position. In the next chapter, “Pariah,” now we’re looking down into an alley where he’s in a total fetal position, sleeping with the bums among the trash. In the next chapter, “Born Again,” he’s now at a convent, or a mission, sleeping on a cot, along with other derelicts who have been picked off the street, and nuns are caring for them. The way I’ve designed this panel with the two windows in the upper left and right corners and the color of the floor and the beds around him, there’s this very nice white space that makes a big cross that Daredevil, Matt Murdock, is about in the middle of. We were playing with all kinds of Christian imagery in this story.” Designing action sequences can be a difficult proposition for an artist. An interesting example involves a reporter named Ben Urich, who is interviewing a nurse ready to implicate the Kingpin in a crime. “Ben is going into the prison to interview that nurse who’s going to spill the beans. The scene includes Ben, a woman who’s a photographer with the paper, a cop that’s protecting him and a shifty-looking detective. The four of them come to the cell where a uniformed guard lets them in. In this scene, I’m thinking that Urich is the center of everything, so I tried to design all the action and compositions in terms of getting you to feel what
Figure 9.3: The splash pages for the first four stories of the Born Again series.
he’s feeling, even though there are five other players involved. We see an establishing shot 108