Nerding Out At The Mid-Ohio Comic Con (Or, An Ode To David Mack)

At the end of October, I was lucky enough to attend the Mid-Ohio Comic Con for ten bucks. (Thanks, Groupon!) It was the last big and fun thing I was able to do before the insanity of final projects -- and finals week -- ate up the rest of my quarter (read: the entirety of November). The experience helped me power through my schooling in a major way and actually helped me out a lot as an artist, which is basically why I'm not writing about it until now, during the middle of my winter break.

Overall, this post may be more about me gushing over the awesome thing that happened while I was there, more than it might be about the social pressures that give comics their gas. But I think there might be some good in plugging some of the work and at least one artist I saw there -- to show how a reader can draw a new perspective from a book and mix it into her own life in a positive way. So, here we go.

Thanks to my pal Mark and his scouring through Columbus Groupons, I was alerted to this comics convention about three weeks before it happened. I'm not so much of a nerd that I've been to one of these events before, so I immediately bought a ticket and then logged onto the Facebook to beg everyone I knew (in ALL CAPS) to go with me. Luckily, my Wonder Woman-loving gal-pal Megan was already going to the con in order to advertise the awesome work Pendant Productions does with their downloadable podcasts (http://pendantaudio.com; check out her neato episodes on The Princess of Power). So I had a friend to guide me around.

I signed on for this event largely to wander around the Columbus Convention, stare at adult dress-up and buy obscure Superman trades. All of these things were accomplished, but after I scanned through the guest artists list on the Ohio con website, I had a new primary goal (outside of snapping discrete photos of the wilder cosplay -- all Transformers-based). David Mack was going to sign autographs all weekend. DAVID MACK (see below).

I've always loved this guy's work, and if you look to my Daredevil "The Man Without" post from waaaay back in March, I examine exactly why. All I'll say now is the man gets the way people working with disabilities or different brain chemistry see the world, and he marks it out on the page beautifully (see examples of his page layouts and story content here: http://paipicks.blogspot.com/2011/07/daredevilecho-vision-quest.html). I've never encountered another comics artist who examines how disability frames one's experience so succinctly, concretely and creatively. His books are also a delight because he consistently showcases how disability is not a disadvantage, but a large part of the tapestry that makes up one's identity.

This is something I've believed for years, thanks to support from teachers, family and friends -- but it's something you have to learn in this society; it's not an endemic outlook to believe a loss is a gain. Of course, every time I read Mack's books, a disadvantaged underdog is shown to be the true hero of the day, which is pretty comforting for a girl who lives with hearing issues every minute of her life. And perhaps my love of Mack's work is largely based on a "preaching to the choir" aesthetic, where I already buy what he's selling because I am myself disadvantaged to most people's reckoning. But on a deeper level, I find his stories to be profound explorations about how people deal with the world around them by clinging to the way they experience it. And I recognize myself in that struggle. So I was pumped to meet Mr. Mack and tell him how valuable his work is to me.

Upon arriving at the convention, I was hit in the face by the sight of the Batmobile. Well, a replica Batmobile from the campy 1960s show. On stepping to one side so everyone and their brother could snap discrete pics of it with their phones, I noticed that sitting behind the Batmobile were Adam West and Burt Ward -- not replicas. I'd never stood that close to celebrities before, and frankly, those guys are probably the two who ushered me into loving Batman as a little kid -- but I had bigger fish to fry. I located my friend Megan and we hit the floor, buying stickers and cute cartoons and chatting with web comics creators and eventually stopping in front of David Mack's table.

I saw a ton of people lined up to meet Batman and Robin when I came in, so I was surprised all the artists' booths at the back were relatively uncrowded. The pleasant curse of the Sunday at the comics con, as I understand it now. Most of the people who go on the last day are moms and dads with children who are more interested in buying stuff or running around and tagging costumes. That makes perfect sense to me, but it also left me with, like, zero prep time for what I wanted to say to David Mack. (Especially since I'd already wasted precious minutes on the floor bending Megan's ear about how my own thesis play's comic book fantasies were close to me and seemed to be registering as reductive or immature to others.) I didn't want to be crazy and tell him my life story; I just wanted to tell him I liked his books and why. And I'd assumed I would have a line to walk through to work out my words. Instead I spewed things out to Megan while the two dudes in front of us got him to sign something; memorable bon mots probably included:

"Ohmanohmanohmanohmanwhatdoisay?Youreawesomeyoureawesomeyoureawesome."
"UhIreallylikeyourworkandIdon'tknowIbetyouhearthatalot."
"IloveEchoalotlikealotalotsheisthegreatestcharacterMarvelevercreatedever!"

And so on. Luckily, I didn't have time to start having a hyperventiliating fit, so every cloud has a silver lining. When the two guys moved off, I plucked out my copy of Daredevil/Echo: Vison Quest and approached Mack.

"Hi," I started.

"Hey, how's it going?" he responded, in maybe the most relaxed manner ever for a comics genius. I looked him up and down, a genial-looking dude in a ball cap and a zip-up sweater, and I immediately relaxed, too.

"Good, good. How are you?"

"I'm good."

I don't really remember what happened next, other than to say I probably talked about how not-overwhelming the convention was, all full of parents and kids, etc. Then I dove in, trying to avoid being the biggest fangirl in the world. I lifted up my book and probably mentioned how nervous I was at least three times.

"I just want to let you know," I sputtered, "that Echo is one of my all-time favorite characters. And I really loved your work on Daredevil and his relationship with this woman who's deaf."

"Well, thank you," he grinned.

"Yeah," I said, gaining a little momentum. "It has kind of a specific resonance for me, because I'm actually hearing-impaired--"

"Oh, wow."

"So there's not a whole lot of books out there that feature women who have disabilities, or that specific disability. And there's a lot of stuff going on in Vision Quest that -- it just -- reminds me a lot of my experience of the world, growing up."

It's about this time I notice what an active listener Mack is. He keeps maybe the steadiest eye contact of anyone I've ever met, and everything about his body language is open, as he leans forward on his elbows to express interest. I immediately feel that whatever I say can't be an over-share or freak him out too much. So I open my book and flip through, looking for a specific page.

"Like, in this part of the book, you have her saying when she's playing the piano, 'It's the silence between the notes that's important.' That the silence is where she lives, as a non-hearing person. Well, that's exactly what I feel like, that everybody else can hear everything around them, but I'm designed to work through those silences. I'm constantly trying to understand or put pieces together. Does that make sense?"

And he said maybe the best thing one person can to another:

"I think I know what you're talking about."

Relief immediately flooded through me. The troubles I'd been working through in my own work about comics and pop culture and childhood fantasies and disability -- they were troubles I could surmount because there was someone out there tapping into the same struggles I was working on. I told Mack how I was taking the idea of gutters (the white space between panels in a comic book) and using them to express something similar to what he wrote in Vision Quest about varying points of view. He shook his head excitedly and began rooting around on his table.

Mack picked out some volumes of his other main series, Kabuki (actually his school thesis -- he got an A on it). "Have you ever read any of my other work?" he asked. "There's some other stuff here that I think will give you an idea of where I'm coming from, too." He gave me two issues of Dream Logic, a collage-like examination of his artistic process and signed them. And then he handed me a copy of Kabuki: The Alchemy, his latest volume of Kabuki. "This has the widest range of what I do on the page, and it's kind of in the middle of things, story-wise--"

"I don't mind that. I like being thrown into the middle of things."

"Well, I'd love to have you read that, and track me down on Facebook or Twitter or email, and tell me what you think of it," he replied.

I flipped through the book, which was, uh, beautiful, and I immediately decided to buy it. He signed the two books he gave me for free and then signed The Alchemy (which I would highly recommend as a metaphysical and plain-meta polemic about artistic achievement and the value of turning life's messes into their triumphs), and asked if I wanted Vision Quest signed, too. I handed it over and Megan and I talked to him about where we go to school and what we both do, and as we're talking to him, I realize he's been drawing my book the entire time, barely taking his eyes off of us as we're chatting. And when he hands back my book, it has the coolest caligraphy-penned freehand drawing of Echo ever. Amazing.

At this point, we decided to wander off, because now there was a line behind us. But the entire rest of my day is colored by the lovely conversation, even after Megan left for the day and I was cornered by a yelling and excitable comics vendor named Crazy Ed, who felt it necessary to share his love of Superman with me (and the fact that he'd had a Bells' palsy attack the night before), to the point where I had to buy three books from him, because he did such a good job selling them after spending the night in the hospital.

All in all, my first comic con was a super-duper positive experience, and one I found creeping into the risks I took in my own work for the rest of the quarter. For the majority of my life, I've been cool with my hearing issues, but I've also been alone with it, and I didn't know how to express what was going on with me to people who weren't me. But talking to Mack made me see the value in digging deeper into telling those stories through a comic booky vein. After all, if what he wrote and drew resonated with me, wasn't it possible something I had to say about my experience might have value for others? Needless to say, I reworked a bunch of stuff in my own thesis, and my early worries about my work being immature vanished. And I'm set to finish a strong thesis this spring.

Back to Mack's eye contact thing. A week or so later, when I interrupted my busy schedule to read "Dream Logic," I learned where it came from. Mack spends two pages in one of those issues describing how growing up, his dad never made eye contact with anybody. Later on in life, he was criticized for displaying the same behavior, and eventually he was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, a disorder that is apparent in stiffened social interactions and trouble with conversation. I had no problems interacting with Mack at the con, but it is pretty easy to see how he uses what many would see as a defect and internally-blocking disorder to create dreamy and creative stories that appeal to all kinds of people (while he works extra-hard on his eye contact). After reading this, I decided to really spend some time exploring disability in my own work, since there's not a dearth of stories about disability on the scene and maybe there's a way to get other people to understand what I'm going through, even if it's not what they're going through.
All this to say, I can only state that David Mack, Crazy Ed and my friend Megan are a part of a larger community that has space, form and heart for those stories. As silly as comics are, they give people the base to express themselves to an extent that I don't think I understand until after I got home that Sunday night.

Till WHAT Do You Part?

Okay, so all this talk about dismantling Clark and Kent and Lois Lane's marriage, only twelve years old, has had me thinking a lot lately.

About wedding bells.

About marriage vows.

About power couples who travel across dimensions and somehow still have time to work on their relationship, like these happy people:

Basically, I've spent a lot of time thinking about marriage in comics and what it means, overall. Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Woman seem to have it figured out (despite the world's worst, least feminist-friendly superhero names). How is it their marriage remains relatively un-messed with by writers and editors alike, while Clark and Lois will be hitting the reset button on their antagonist rival reporter relationship come this fall. I'm telling you now, look forward to plenty of old school Siegel style banter:

Wow, tell us how you really feel, Lois. Don't you know your nerdy co-worker is sensitive? Exhibit A, from a later Lois Lane comic:

All in all, I feel like marriage is taken for granted as a chance for character growth within mainstream superhero comics. It's just something that happens, and it's something that ends as easily. Often, marriage is dismantled with nary a thought to the impact it has on the characters within hero books. I suppose this shouldn't surprise me, given that I can think of maybe three writers in past DC stables (Greg Rucka, Mark Waid and Kurt Busiek) who were able to drum up marital conflict without resorting to soap operatic misunderstandings, cliches about somebody being in danger while hubby's out on patrol, or running themes of miscommunication until somebody ends up in a mental hospital (thanks, Daredevil--you're great with the ladies, but once you're in an actual relationship, women don't fare well in your book).

Side note: Is it any wonder the writers I mentioned above no longer work at DC full-time? They're too realistic (actually, they all have personal side projects to work on, but many of those projects probe into the superhero as an allegory for American life in amazing ways)! In his run on Superman, Rucka had Clark and Lois grow apart simply because Superman was having a lousy time at work and Lois was assigned to follow a war in another country. Realistic, everyday things like time and distance separated them, and the sadness they both feel at their limited communication is palpable. Check out this short series of panels, in which Lois heads out for her assignment. I defy you to find a better depiction of two people who want to say a lot but can only manage to say a little under the circumstances:

DC's competition fares no better at allowing married couples to act as married couples do, I fear. Hell, Joe Quesada over at Marvel made one of the least popular editorial decisions in that company's history by breaking up Peter Parker and Mary Jane's marriage. How he do this? He had the couple make a deal with the devil. Seriously. Mephisto vows to save his Spidey's older aunt, who's lived a long, long life in exchange for the following thing:

Diabolical. What he does with their love is anyone's guess. At least when DC's version of the devil, Neron, stole Wally West and Linda Park's love, he ended up cuddling and comforting all the minions he'd been torturing only hours before. Still ridiculous. Then again, Mark Waid also had Wally race into a Vahalla for speedsters, only to come back because Linda's love was his beacon back to Earth. Corny, I know. But still believable, in its fairy tale way. Perhaps more astonishingly, Waid took Wally from being this guy--

--To being this guy:

Articulate, a leader of heroes, and just plain adorable in his marriage proposal. (Of course, Waid had help from Mark Millar and Grant Morrison here. Good on ya, guys!)

But this rather picture-happy rambling forces me to come to a point. What's a more mature, courageous decision than dedicating your life to the support, love and protection of another human being? (You might even call it heroic.) In comics, marriages should be taken at least as seriously as they are in real life, given that character actions in comics often stand as huge metaphors, slipping into allegories, about the everyday heroism displayed and required by real people. What do writers have to say about marriage? How can they make understand the state of the union in a contemporary context through a pulpy, pop culture medium? Could they surprise us? Often, they don't.

Like when, say, Black Canary has to murder her husband on their honeymoon, but it turns out that he's an impostor, so no consequential blow-back happens -- despite having harbored the impression that somebody killed the man they loved for more than a few moments. I gotta think that such plots rob the exploration of marriage any validity or meaning beyond spinning the wheels of a character's lifespan. Rather than showing what a major and somewhat terrifying commitment marriage is, to prove our hero an even greater hero, writers sometimes pull the rug out from under a reader and create false drama.

Not only can violent conflicts be upended using the impostor angle, not only can marriages be stolen by the devil rather than allowed to run a natural course into lovelessness and exhaustion (based on compelling character mistakes), they can be thrown into the jaws of death and THEN snatched right back, as if nothing bad ever happened in the first place. It's okay. Green Arrow and Black Canary are still together today, those crazy kids.

Ultimately, I think it's the impermanence of the marriage institution that drives me a little crazy. Maybe I'm revealing myself to be a prude here, believing in marriage as an institution when half of marriage fail nowadays. But let me be clear: I don't think divorce should be kept out of comics, I don't think everyone should be married, and watching superheroes come to that conclusion would be FASCINATING. An emotional landscape they can't conquer is rare to find; why not explore something more complicated?

But the marketing departments at DC and Marvel seems to think the readers of comic books can't handle a sticky situation involving one's spouse. Rather than go for the heart, they go for the entrails and the easier solution--death, mistaken identities, curses, etc.--rather than explore real conflict between two people. We're already dependent on technology to connect for us; avoiding actual human interaction in our art, substituting it with gore and sophomoric horror and compromises--what does that say about us about an American culture?

I imagine this avoidance mindset grew out of the male-created romance comics from the 1940s and 1950s, where women were either temptresses or pure as snow, and fulfilled their boyfriend's every wish because that was what was expected of them. These comics were written for young girls to bask in sudsy, forbidden predicaments, true, but they also reinforced both the fantasies and nightmares believed of women by nerdy male writers, which led to things like this:

Liking girls, or having any kind of sexual or emotional dependence on anyone--regardless of gender in few cases--leads to compromise, and I'm sometimes told, a lack of action in superhero books. In other words, when heroes get married, they're a snorefest. Well, that's only true if a woman's either a Madonna or a whore. Making her a character in her own right is a step in the right direction for creating good stories and making honest statements about marriage in a surprising context. What makes Mr. Fantastic and Sue Storm work probably has a lot to do with the fact that they star in a book dedicated to showcasing the weird families we make for ourselves, just as The Fantastic Four does after being irradiated into being superheroes. Because of their choice to stick together as a family, strong characters are formed, and marriage features easily in the book, and will always be a permanent feature in it.

I'd love to see more of this. I'd love to see more characters working through the regular stress of a relationship within heightened, universe-shattering circumstances; that's drama on a goofy, adventure-sized level. It could be meaningless, but the right writer could pack it with significance, showing us why we love the characters we're reading in the first place, and how they can prove to us us when we need to suck it up and get on with our lives.

But you don't get that attitude often. More often, you end up with dead ghost detectives, or worse, rebooted lives with a strange new set of circumstances to tangle with--not deep issues, just plot-driven ones. (Check out the Superman 2000 proposal, later cannibalized by several writers involved in the rejected project, for an example of an O. Henry-esque sacrifice to effectively reboot Clark and Lois' relationship, as their marriage is wiped out of everyone's minds: http://superman.nu/theages/History/2000/SUPERMAN2000.php.)

Marriage can be active, it can be as nail-biting as any villain's deathtrap; Aquaman and Mera (they're basically eco-terrorists now), Reed and Sue (um, they travel through dimensions and have kids), and Clark and Lois (balancing work with his constant absence) have proved this on and off--overcoming obstacles that make their feelings for one another even more epic. Getting hitched allows characters to face a new type of conflict and react in ways that makes them even more likeable, complex and adventurous. In that light, de-institutionalizing the concept of marriage, or making characters' choice of it insignificant via rebooted circumstances is a travesty of wasted opportunities. I hope the writers at DC remember this when they decide to have Clark pop the question again years from now.

The Man Without

When Daredevil was unleashed upon the world in 1964, he was intended to be one of many street-level heroes defending New York City. The cover to his first issue even draws parallels with Marvel's flagship street fighter, Spider-man, as shown here:

But notice that even as the cover creates a direct parallel between Daredevil and Spiderman (both swing around to bop bad guys, both are destined for popularity, both cart around guilty consciences the size of their barrel chests), it challenges you to guess what makes Daredevil different from every other superhero. If there are clues on this cover for an uninitiated reader, I can't find them. The closest to a red flag I can find is that our hero wears sunglasses in his secret identity--though Matt Murdock's not introduced as Daredevil until you turn the issue's pages, so you wouldn't find that indicator suspicious or indicative. You wouldn't even know he's Daredevil from looking at this cover, and that's an important spike for me.

Because Matt Murdock is blind. Daredevil is not, so far as the public knows. So what makes him truly remarkable as a superhero is a secret, a well-guarded one, which gives the whole comic a passing narrative that leaves a lot to be desired, in my opinion.

But let me back up. During the 1960s and 1970s, Marvel rose to prominence by tempering fantastic superheroics with readers' real-life concerns. Hence, Spiderman's struggle to make ends meet and save his aunt's house after the death of his bread-winning uncle; or, Peter Banner's struggle to control his temper in order to live up to the responsibilities thrust on him by work and his girlfriend, both of which keep him from "Hulking out;" or the Fantastic Four's efforts to keep it together as a family when pushed into the public arena because of their adventures. Stan Lee's comics were meant to engage teenage readers who felt alienated by the adult world, while being too grown up to take comfort in the thought that a man can fly. Lee had basically been handed the creative control of Marvel in the 1950s, after DC had reinvented the superhero for the Atomic Age. He followed suit by addressing darker issues and grabbing an older audience for his books in the turbulent sixties. Daredevil was the result of this experiment, as were the alcoholic Iron Man and the ever-persecuted X-Men.

Created by writer-editor Lee, artist Bill Everett and designed in part by Jack Kirby, Daredevil's hook seems to be his protectorship of gritty Hell's Kitchen as well as his deeply rooted Catholicism. Cops walk rough beats, they're dedicated to their neighborhoods. Daredevil's specific placement makes him feel like a cop to me; he's a man with a mission for his people, and he'll be brutal if need be, holding tight to the righteousness of his blue-collar Irish religion meanwhile. Add that to the fact that he didn't exclusively fight costumed supervillains, but also dealt with poverty and other social problems, and you can understand how Daredevil fits into Marvel's "real world" mode.

But none of this character motivation nitty-gritty and realistic setting stuff makes Daredevil inherently special. What makes him special is that he's differently-abled. Lee announces as much on the cover by asking you to guess what makes him different from his cohorts. Bringing a blind superhero into the Marvel stable must have been an unique thing to do in the 1960s, when the rights of disabled individuals were not general concerns, as they have been (moreso, anyway) since the creation of the American With Disabilities Act in the 1990s. But what does it mean to make a blind man a superhero? How exactly will his stories be different?

In the first issue of Daredevil, we learn his origin. As a child, he rescues an old blind man from being hit by a truck. But no good deed goes unpunished, right? That explains why a canister of some radioactive substance falls from the truck and blinds Matt for life. How that works, I can't even begin to guess--what I can say, because the writers say it, is that Matt gains superpowers due to this radioactive exposure. (Because that happened a lot after the A-bomb got dropped.) His hearing, sight and touch all become more sensitive, and allow him to develop a radar of sorts -- a radar that makes it possible for him to fight crime through feats of acrobatic daring-do.

I'll get to how that works in a moment. But think about this situation in another way. People often claim that when one of your senses is impaired, the others become stronger. Because he's blinded, Matt's other senses become heightened. Regardless of how irradiated his eyes become, if he hadn't been blinded, he wouldn't have become super-sensitive. You need the tragedy in order to explain the powers. Without his blindness, Daredevil would not have superpowers. His blindness fuels his superpowers. In effect, his disability IS his superpower.

Now maybe I'm thinking this way because I've been hard of hearing since birth, and a large part of my identity is defined by the positives surrounding a lack of something in my life. But I think the Daredevil comic invites these musings by the way Lee asks you to guess his specialness. Certainly, the hero's remarkable abilities are tied distinctly to his lack of something, and at his creation, that must have created a dynamic and new point of view for readers. Maybe it even alleviated some assumptions about what the disabled are capable of. Still I would argue Daredevil is not a very good spokesman/role model for the disabled. Largely because no one in his world thinks a blind man can be a crazy devil acrobat, so assumptions remain about blind people and actually HELP Matt Murdock continue his nighttime activities and mask his special disability.

But I feel Daredevil also misses out on a positive opportunity for another, maybe more fixable reason. Check out what Daredevil's radar looks like, as displayed in an earlier issue of Daredevil:

After Daredevil enters a room, we learn through narration that being in the dark is an advantage to him, since he lives in darkness. Instead of peepers, he uses radar. And in the final panel of these three, we see what Daredevil's radar looks like. Which bothers me. We SEE his foes as clear BODIES. Now if you've studied radar at all, you know it was originally fueled by the return of electromagnetic waves to a transmitter, usually radio waves. These days, it's used by air traffic controllers and weather forecasters; in special circumstances, lidar -- or radar fueled by visible light -- can be used, so I guess the image is clearer that way. The point I want to make by being technical is this: Radar is NOT sight, the way it's drawn here. It's something else. Radar isn't precise; beam range/beam path can be affected, and noise interference can occur. It's not a pretty little picture. And radar's fueled by things that are not necessarily internalized in the human body. Bats, sure. Humans--huh?

Of course, stretching credibility is something comics always do. I mean, Peter Parker gets bit by a radioactive spider, and THAT gives him superpowers -- meanwhile the FDA's warned against importing milk from Japan after its nuclear disaster. I don't mean to be a fuddy-duddy taking issue with fantasy powers, but Marvel's missing out by making Daredevil's radar something discernible, something understandable to the human eye. They don't let us into a blind man's world that way, they impose our seeing world on him, and force Matt Murdock into a passing narrative not of his own making (his acting as a sighted superhero aside), where it's good he hides the benefits of his blindness, where being blind means you're not capable of accomplishing great feats or experiencing the world in your own unique way. Which would be great fodder for drama (I'm thinking about how it affects Matt's every day life as a blind man), but in all the Brian Michael Bendis, David Mack and Kevin Smith trade paperbacks I've read, this conflict is never addressed! Matt seems to have no problem being judged for his disability, nor does he have any problem crafting dual "abled" and disabled identities. For a man who's been blind most of his life, he never seems to think about how it affects him, or how it gave him a weird special sight.

And sadly, Daredevil's radar hasn't changed from conventional sight in Daredevil's modern age. In fact, once Frank Miller reinvented the character during the 1980s, Daredevil's senses became heightened almost to the level of Superman's. He can hear sounds blocks away, he can gauge the time a person left a room based on the dispersion of their perfume. Sure, his radar can be messed with, but the strength of his senses allows him to touch-read the imprints of a pen on paper. So now the blind man doesn't even need braille -- effectively, he's no longer a blind man, if he can "see" enough to read a paper in the first place.

And artists have run with these heightened radar sensations. Alex Maleev, arguably the greatest contemporary Daredevil artist working today, completes an entirely silent issue in Daredevil volume 2, issue 28. Mostly he uses Matt's radar for detective work. But Matt's senses are so sharp, the radar has no defect. It is sight -- only sight -- like our sight. You can see his radar sense highlighted in one panel, outlined pink in the second scan here:

This issue tells a brilliant visual story. But how naive is it to assume a disabled character's senses work/look just like ours? Would sight look the same to a blind man as it does to us? Would images be interpreted in the same way? Do we need to understand that in order to get the story being told? And how big a violation of Lee's difference set-up has years of radar artwork been?

One thing I can tell you ... Our hero masks his disability, and so it's hidden in the artwork as well. So the youth Lee meant to reach out to, people hungry for different struggles, people who wanted a voice to be given to the disempowered -- well, they get the same old, same old with Daredevil everytime. He sees the world as we do, not as a blind man does. So excuse me, he's lost his cache. Because much as I love Daredevil as a keystone Marvel character, I can't get behind his lack of progression since the 1960s. His blindness seems to make no impact on his world, and that is not realistic, and makes me question the value of this different character.

(In fact, his blindness becomes a lame cover, a negative thing that proves how limited disabled people are -- writer Brian Michael Bendis uses the excuse of blindness to protect the outing of Daredevil's secret identity several times during his Out storyline. Maybe this is supposed to be ironic, because we know the truth and the public doesn't, but Bendis has it both ways, doesn't he? He reinforces assumptions while claiming to tear them down.)

For a better take on how artists demonstrate a disabled person's outlook, check out David Mack's Daredevil: Parts of the Hole. In that story, Daredevil falls in love with a deaf woman, and Mack uses playfulness of line and bizarre set-ups of dialogue to show us how the deaf piece together the sentences strung around and by their bodies. All in all, it creates a powerful statement about body language, its importance in a hearing-impaired culture, and how limiting it can be when you need to chase words coming across someone's lips or across a page:

What a pity more Daredevil artwork isn't like this -- isn't challenging our notions of what blindness "looks like," or showing what the impaired experience is to those who want to learn and understand.

Because frankly, in my mind, Daredevil is unremarkable. He becomes unremarkable when writers and artists don't engage with his disability head-on. That's sad, especially since Lee boldly challenged us to see Daredevil's difference in his first appearance.