Gene Colan: High on Daredevil

I'm behind a personal deadline on THE INVINCIBLE GENE COLAN, which I'm editing for Marvel, but we're in the home stretch, and to get there I've posed some questions to Gene. His answers will be edited for the book, but readers of this blog get the unabridged version. Check back this week (or subscribe to this blog--it's free!) for Gene on Capt. America, on Sub-Mariner, on Iron Man, etc.

"I always wanted my own full length book and Daredevil was my first opportunity. I was thrilled to get my own character. I never thought that would come about because John Romita had it for a while. No one stuck with it and I just knew whatever book they gave me, if it was a full length book, I would stick with it.

"What made Daredevil special for me was he couldn't see and yet he could see better than people with sight. That intrigued me because that challenged me to show the reader how things might be without sight: How he sensed things a split second before they happened. It allowed me to be very dramatic with a different kind of artwork. One way was depicting reality; the other was by using effects to show how I thought a blind person might picture life--maybe through his other senses. Also, all the acrobatics he had to employ were challenging and exciting for me to choreograph in order to capture the audience's interest.

"Daredevil was also the first character I ever drew that fought injustice. And I liked that. I liked to portray how he would battle crime... I honed my craft on Daredevil for anything else that followed. I was high on the challenge of making and keeping this a successful book!"