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Stan Lee, Bill Everett, [John Romita, Frank Miller, Roger McKenzie, Archie Goodwin,] and Drew Goddard, 2015 Whoops—apparently if I wanted to follow strict release order, I should have stopped watching the S.H.I.E.L.D. series with season 2, episode 16, then watched this Daredevil show, then watched three more episodes of S.H.I.E.L.D., then watched the second Avengers movie, and then watched the last three episodes of S.H.I.E.L.D. before finally turning to the Ant‑Man movie. Instead, I watched this after finishing the Avengers movie and the S.H.I.E.L.D. season. The time is out of joint! (Though I guess that some would argue that being six years behind on this stuff is a bigger issue.) Daredevil was a late bloomer. He wasn’t the product of a thunderbolt of inspiration; in 1964, with the Silver Age in full swing, Stan Lee wanted to find some work for Bill Everett, who had created the Sub‑Mariner for Marvel Comics #1 back during the Golden Age. Never one shy to recycle a gimmick, Lee noted that some of Marvel’s hottest new characters were all handicapped in some way: Don Blake needed a cane when he wasn’t whirling his hammer around as Thor, Charles Xavier was confined to a wheelchair as he trained his X‑Men, Tony Stark’s heart condition left him dependent on his Iron Man armor, etc. A blind superhero was the logical extension of the concept. His other four senses would be superhumanly powerful to compensate for his lost sight, and he’d have an additional radar sense to show him the outlines of things. And in an era when most Marvel superheroes had to share the spotlight with other characters in repurposed books with titles like Journey into Mystery and Strange Tales, Daredevil got his own book right out of the gate. Every two months, readers could watch this exciting new character swinging around the skyscrapers of New York City on a retractable line, punching out bad guys like Electro and the Enforcers, and delivering wisecracks all the while. Again, Stan Lee was never one shy to recycle a gimmick. It took nearly a full generation for Daredevil to become something more than a second-rate Spider‑Man. He owed his rebirth to Frank Miller, who in 1979 was hired to pencil the Daredevil comic but who disliked Roger McKenzie’s scripts and by 1981 had pushed his way into the writer’s chair. The direction Miller took the book didn’t wildly differ from McKenzie’s, but it was under Miller’s tenure that key elements of the Daredevil mythos took shape. Miller positioned Daredevil as not just a generic New York superhero but rather the protector of one specific real-life neighborhood, the seedy “Hell’s Kitchen”, and gave him an appropriate arch-enemy by swiping the Kingpin, supreme boss of the New York underworld, from Spider‑Man’s rogues’ gallery. The tone got a lot darker, as Daredevil’s foes were frequently shown murdering several people on a single page, while Daredevil himself seemed to spend his evenings beating the pulp out of two‑bit hoods to get information. And while Daredevil’s fighting prowess had previously been ascribed to some quality time spent in the gym with a speed bag, Miller retconned in some ninja training. Miller left the book in 1983, but returned in 1986 for a story called “Born Again” that became an emblem of the comics industry’s “grim ’n’ gritty” era. Stan Lee had established that Daredevil was in civilian life a lawyer named Matt Murdock, who worked at a small firm with his chubby college roommate Foggy Nelson and their bland secretary Karen Page, whose role was to alternately worry about poor handicapped Matt and long for his affection. She was eventually written out of the book so that Daredevil could be paired up with the Black Widow. Miller brought her back as a heroin-addicted porn star. This is the tone reflected in the first season of the Daredevil TV show. It doesn’t actually use too much of Miller’s material: Elektra never appears and is given only an oblique mention, and Bullseye doesn’t even get that much. The central characters are Stan Lee’s trio of Matt Murdock, Foggy Nelson, and Karen Page, along with the reporter Ben Urich, a McKenzie creation. At least, those are the central characters on the good guys’ side; to a great extent, this season is a two-hander with nearly equal weight (no pun intended) given to the Kingpin, though in typical MCU fashion he doesn’t go by that name but rather by his civilian name, Wilson Fisk. We learn about his traumatic childhood, watch his courtship of his eventual wife Vanessa (for in the comics, the Kingpin’s Achilles heel is his uxoriousness), and watch his early moves in consolidating his criminal empire. But even though the content reflects developments from before Miller’s run, this is the Daredevil who prowls dark alleys, busting gangsters’ jaws while shouting things like, “Who do you work for?! Give me a name!!” It’s a surprisingly violent show—yes, this is Netflix rather than ABC, but still, ultimately this is a Disney property and I expected something more in tune with the movies. Of course, it has been observed that the movies themselves belong to different traditions—the Thor movies are swords & sorcery, the first Captain America movie is a WWII film, the second one is a ’70s-style paranoid thriller, etc.—and that this is actually one strength of the MCU. But this season of Daredevil resembles nothing so much as Taxi Driver. The second episode ends with a long fight sequence that seems like a pretty direct homage to the climax of that film, and the two works’ evocation of New York City and the outlooks of their protagonists more distantly but still perceptibly rhyme. Taxi Driver was my favorite movie back in college, so you might think that this would make Daredevil an instant favorite as well. But it’s been a long time since I was in college, and even back then, I found the violence in Taxi Driver more of a repellant than a draw. So the tone of this series, or at least of this season, is not a particularly good match for me. But the opportunity to get to know these characters over the course of a string of well-made hour-long episodes, rather than through a handful of short establishing scenes, means that I still rank this season well above most of the MCU movies.
Daredevil This was not an MCU movie; this was a movie made in the aftermath of the box office success of the first Spider‑Man movie. It looks like it did make a profit, but it’s been regarded as a flop. Still, I figured I’d check it out. It’s a warmed-over retelling of the Miller run, with Elektra’s backstory moved to the present day, Bullseye given a look more live-action-friendly than the supervillain spandex from the comics, and Ben Urich moved to the New York Post so Fox could get in a little cross-promotion. It combines the first Spider‑Man movie’s unconvincing CGI with the TV show’s emphasis on the way that Daredevil takes a beating on his nightly patrol and regularly comes home seriously injured. The result is not quite as bad as I had feared, but the comparison with the TV version shows the limitations of trying to jam a serial comic into a feature film. The movie version of the Kingpin has to get by on the presence of the Green Mile guy since there isn’t room to establish him as a character, and similarly, with only a few minutes available, the Daredevil/Electra connection is established through a ridiculous sequence involving a duet of playground acrobatics—dozens of cheering bystanders gather around and no one makes it publicly known that a blind guy was spotted doing backflips onto and off of a seesaw in broad daylight? The most jarring thing about the movie, though, had nothing to do with the fact that it was a movie: it was the way the screenwriter apparently thought it would be cute to name bit characters after prominent Daredevil writers and artists. So you end up with a rapist named after Joe Quesada, a corrupt cop named after Roger McKenzie, tomato-can boxers named after David Mack and Brian Bendis, etc., etc. Not only did it throw me out of the movie, but it seemed like an odd career move. “Hey, I got a deal to write and direct a movie based on a Marvel comic! Right on! Step one: have the hero murder a criminal named after Marvel’s editor-in-chief.”
The Trial of the Incredible Hulk Though in recent years Marvel has dominated the box office, it took quite a while for the company to catch up to chief competitor DC outside the comics shops. DC’s Superman movie from 1978 made $1.15 billion in today’s money, while DC’s Batman movie from 1989 made $1.18 billion, inflation-adjusted. Meanwhile, Marvel trotted out such gems as a Captain America movie filmed in Yugoslavia that made $675,000 (about $1.3 million today). Marvel’s biggest live-action success in this period was a TV series, The Incredible Hulk, that ran from 1977 to 1982. Kids these days may have imprinted on Mark Ruffalo and CGI, but to the kindergarteners of my generation, the Hulk was Lou Ferrigno in green body paint and his alter ego was Bill Bixby wandering a lonesome highway to the sad tinkle of a piano. When I was in high school, Marvel attempted to repeat at least this modicum of success through a series of Incredible Hulk TV movies that were meant to function as backdoor pilots for other properties. This was the Daredevil one. I actually saw it when it aired. It’s an amusingly low-budget trifle, notable chiefly for giving Daredevil a black outfit with an opaque mask covering the entire top half of his head, which looked bizarre to me at the time but which is almost identical to the look he sports in the first season of the modern TV series. What tickled me about it on this rewatch is that it starts by having characters warn David Banner about the perils of relocating to the big, scary, dangerous, corrupt city, which turns out to be… Vancouver! The Kingpin (with sunglasses and a beard in this version) operates out of the AXA Place skyscraper at 999 West Hastings! Watch out, evildoers: it’s Daredevil, the Man Without Fear, the Devil of Hell’s Kitsilano!
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