Review by Woodrow Phoenix

Chris Samnee’s time on Daredevil with writer Mark Waid produced one of the definitive and most Eisner-winning runs on that title. This Artist’s Edition presents the original art for six consecutive issues of Daredevil from 23 to 27, pencilled and inked by Chris Samnee, photographically scanned in colour at very high resolution and reproduced actual size, on heavyweight paper. It’s a clever process producing the sensation of looking at original drawings exactly as created by the artist with all the pencil marks, corrections, different pens and ink marks, production notes, trimmed page edges and other artefacts visible.

The Chris Samnee Daredevil Artist Edition features two books in a slipcase. The first is the usual 36cm x 51cm volume featuring the art pages. These are all wordless. Because this artwork was lettered digitally, there are no balloons or captions on any pages. Sound effects and in-panel signage are present, obviously done by the artist himself. This book is purely pencils and inks, and the art looks so complete it isn’t necessarily obvious where the dialogue might be placed, which is interesting in itself. Each issue is presented with the cover art first, then the story pages, followed by the crisply pencilled layouts for that issue arranged four to a page.

The second volume is a landscape format softcover collection of all Mark Waid’s scripts for Daredevil 23 to 27. Samnee did all his thumbnail breakdowns directly onto these pages, so you can compare the breakdowns here with the layouts and final inked pages in the other volume. As a bonus for anyone disappointed by the lack of balloons, if you have the patience you can read Waid’s dialogue side-by-side with Samnee’s art for the complete story.

Bonus features are scarce, just a two-page introduction from Waid and a one page biography of Samnee. A companion volume supplies the same treatment for Waid and Samnee’s work on Black Widow.