An afternoon at the gallery.

Daredevil_i58_p02_Colan-Shores
Matt Murdock has just finished making his closing argument in a court case against one of the minions of the crime boss known as Crime Wave, his first job as special assistant to the district attorney. After the jury goes to deliberate the verdict, Matt reflects back to the events that led to this turn of events.Flashing back to the night he revealed his identity to Karen Page, he proposed to her and she accepted. Returning to New York, Matt revealed that he "survived" the plane crash that apparently took his life (making up a fake story for the press) and being appointed special assistant to the D.A.Matt promises to Karen that after making an appearance at the United Fund Parade, he would be retiring his identity of Daredevil for good so that Karen wouldn't fear for his safety. However, before DD can announce his retirement the parade is interrupted when it's attacked by the Stunt-Master – A washed up stunt motorcyclist who is hired by Crime Wave to take out Daredevil.After quickly defeating Stunt-Master, when asked what his special announcement was by Foggy, Daredevil says it was nothing, which upset Karen to the point that she walked away from the scene. Returning to the present the jury finds the crook working for Crime Wave guilty. Although it's a victory for Matt, Karen is still mad at him for not retiring his DD identity as he promised.

This page is the classic courtroom scene featuring Matt, Foogy, Karen and Willy. In the lower left panel there is a patch (the judge). A Romita fix?

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There are a lot of things comics fans take for granted these days. One of those things is how a single artist could be so strongly identified with a character. So much so that you really couldn’t think of that character without thinking of the artist.

Long before Frank Miller came along, Gene Colan was THE Daredevil guy. As a matter of fact as much as I liked the Frank Miller run at the time it came out, I find I like it a lot less as so many have come down the road since trying to be Frank Miller, taking the elements he introduced and bastardizing them to such an extent that it’s no longer fun to read Daredevil.

Back when Gene Colan was drawing DD, the book was more about Matt Murdock’s life as a lawyer in a law office with his pal Foggy Nelson and the beautiful, wistful secretary whose love he could never bring himself to acknowledge even though he felt as strongly for her as she for him.

In this instance, I remember buying this in a basement of all places!

There used to be these regular ‘comic events’ (I wouldn’t call them cons) held on a monthly basis in a church basement on the west side of Manhattan round about 57th and 9th.

Albert Moy was in attendance and he had the page for sale and I couldn’t resist. I’ve never been sorry for buying it and it made up a little for passing on another Gene Colan page I could have bought from the owner of St Marks Comics a bunch of years earlier.

The great thing about this page (which you can’t really see) is the patch.

Yep, there’s actually a part of the page where there is an art correction on one of the faces and my bet would be it was done by none other than Jazzy John Romita himself who at the time was the main person responsible for such fixes.

Also, there are great notes in the margin in non-repro blue regarding story elements. These are no doubt notes from Stan the Man himself!

So, the thing is a bit of a treasure. Who knows, maybe one day...