Secrets, lies -- and lawyers!

Naturally, there are all sorts of other superhero-comic devices keeping things lively, too: a sexy ex-Soviet spy called the Black Widow; a couple of cameo appearances by Spider-Man; the illegal drug Mutant Growth Hormone; a woman known as the Night Nurse whose clinic patches up injured heroes, no questions asked. It's melodramatic, pulp-fictional stuff, and what keeps it from getting soggy is Bendis and Maleev's shadowy, low-key delivery. Bendis' dialogue is crisp and fragmentary, often David Mamet-inflected; his favorite trick is to give the reader just enough information to get a sense of what's happening, letting crucial context slip out bit by bit, much later. His Matthew Murdock thinks and talks like a lawyer, convinced that he can make true the legal fiction that he's not Daredevil if he keeps repeating it, even as the story's gap between what's just and what's legal keeps widening. And the violence of Bendis' "Daredevil" isn't what usually gets called superhero-comic violence -- the glamorous, bloodless fight scenes he writes in "Ultimate Spider-Man" and "New Avengers." In "Daredevil," it's quick, confusing, horrible and resonant, and its victims are haunted or ruined by it.

Maleev isn't much for heroic poses, either. His artwork has the appearance of a newspaper photo that's been blown up and photocopied until it disintegrates into blotches and grains -- the backgrounds in his outdoor scenes appear to actually be degraded photographs, and his characters' body language and facial expressions are indicated more by jagged, scribbly flickers of ink and spackled folds of shadow than by clear, continuous lines. (Often, a blown-up detail from one panel becomes another.) Colorists Matt Hollingsworth and Dave Stewart reinforce his drawings with flat, subdued tones that allude to the look of hand-tinted black-and-white photographs.

The visual techniques Maleev and his colorists use change a little with the demands of each story line: In the "Golden Age" sequence, which deals with the history of the rulers of Hell's Kitchen, Maleev draws flashbacks to the early days of Daredevil's career as simpler line art, and they're colored with slightly off-register matrices of dots against an off-white background, to suggest the look of old four-color comics on yellowing newsprint. The one really jolting thing about reading the Bendis-Maleev "Daredevil" in sequence, actually, is that a couple of crucial segments are drawn by fill-in artists; they're all competent or better, but they're all normal cartoonists, and the contrast with Maleev's technique breaks the spell.

"Daredevil" will be continuing after Bendis and Maleev bow out, although Bendis has noted that his conclusion will make things awfully difficult for his successors. Next month, the series is being taken over by writer Ed Brubaker and artist Michael Lark, who've already collaborated on some impressive story lines for "Gotham Central" (a police procedural set in Batman's Gotham City). Brubaker has said that he wants to "piss all over the book and make it mine as soon as humanly possible." That's promising, even though it's going to take some doing -- but it didn't look like anybody could pull it off after Frank Miller, either.

Douglas Wolk's graphic novels column appears at the beginning of each month in Salon books.

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