The surprise bonus in this book is the half dozen vellum inserts. The effect is even stronger where streaks of white paint simulate the driving snow fall. He just blanks out the space it occupies and let's the surrounding art and the reader's imagination do the rest. It adds width or depth to the place where Daredevil is running by blocking out a thin line of the background to show how there's more there in the foreground. It's not just negative space for its own sake. It's a trick that shouldn't make any sense, yet it does, even in (relatively speaking) black and white. Specifically, Mazzucchelli uses either White-Out or some kind of white paint/correction fluid across the tops of those wire lines to mimic the snow.
As a small panel inside the story, it's a nifty little image, but seen at full size and in black and white, your eye starts picking out the details to see how it's done and to find things you just never noticed before. It starts on the inside front cover, with an image spread across the two pages of Daredevil stepping on some snowy wires, his weight bending them out towards the reader. There's not a page in this collection that you won't stop to stare and marvel at. It's not possible to just flip through the pages, scan the caption boxes and word balloons, and keep moving.
I think I said this in my last review of an Artist's Edition (let's go with "AE," for brevity's sake), but it bears repeating: If you're looking for a fast read, this is not the format you want. "Born Again" is 200 pages measuring 12 by 17 inches. Perhaps I'm overselling it, but these books are just that impressive. Like any "Absolute" edition, you need to sit at a table and open this puppy up like you're examining a classic manuscript that someone at the city library you're visiting had to dig out of a back room using white gloves.
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