NEAR-MYTHS: " PARTS OF THE HOLE," (DAREDEVIL V. 2, #9-15, 2011)

I only reread the introductory sequence for the Marvel character Echo because of the MCU teleseries, to re-familiarize myself with the template.

Back in the day I bought some odd issues of the original sequence, but wasn't exactly inspired to follow the whole story. Some of Joe Quesada's art was nice, but the concept-- principally executed by Quesada and KABUKI writer-artist David Mack, with some fill-in assists from two other raconteurs-- seemed too much like a superficial effort to introduce an "Elektra Lite." Echo, a deaf woman of Cheyenne ancestry, possesses what I guess is a mutant ability to instantly emulate any fighting-skill she sees, combining aspects of Marvel's villain Taskmaster and the autistic heroine "Zen" from the 2008 CHOCOLATE.

Mack and Quesada fill their seven-issue tale with lots of bizarre, Sienkiewicz-style imagery (probably inspired by the example of ELEKTRA ASSASSIN) and lots of decompression-style, pseudo-literary voyages into the heads of Matt "Daredevil" Murdock, Echo, and Kingpin, the nasty villain who sets a potential heroine against a real hero. It doesn't help Echo's reputation that Kingpin gulls the young woman-- to whom Kingpin's been something of a surrogate father-- by giving her doctored evidence that the Man of Fear killed her birth-parent. What, Echo just accepts one piece of evidence as to the hero's turpitude, and seems blithely unaware of Daredevil's numerous years of crimefighting? And, from what Mack and Quesada tell readers, she doesn't even need Kingpin to give her a compelling reason as to why a costumed hero would slay Echo's father-- though Kingpin himself was in partnership with said individual. For me, I downgrade this arc not just because Mack and Quesada indulge in this hoary "frame the hero" trope, but because they're so bad at it.

Echo's tragic past and her various musings are just as tedious and derivative as her motivation for fighting the hero, and her Native American heritage is tossed off in some jejune gibberish about learning "the devil's medicine." Given that Echo is a sexy femme fatale, she soon becomes another love-interest for the main character. However, unlike Elektra, Echo doesn't know Daredevil's civilian ID (though Kingpin does, and curiously neglects to tender that intelligence). So she ends up dating lawyer Matt, and they have some long "date-cute" interactions, though these too seem very dependent on a lot of "blind dating the deaf" tropes. Then, at first opportunity she dons a sexy outfit and gets into fights with the sightless crusader.

The fights are decent, though nothing that would ever make Frank Miller look over his shoulder. But in keeping with the fashionable decompression approach, any tension generated by the action is dispersed by loads and loads of banal wool-gathering in the heads of Murdock and Kingpin about their early years-- all of which had been done better by previous raconteurs on the title. "Hole" takes place shortly after Murdock's first great love Karen Page has died-- not sure if it was for the first time or not-- but the only good thing that comes of this touch is a weird but rather funny joke about how masturbation leads to blindness. And speaking of blindness, Echo does get the chance to take an ironic revenge upon her "bad father," so at least Mack and Quesada provided that much resolution before the character became absorbed into the Marvel continuum.

I also re-visited this introductory arc due to my interest in Native American figures in pop culture. I suspect, given the way the MCU distorts most of its adaptation-material, that reading the arc won't really yield much insight into the streaming show. But such are the sacrifices I make.