Hell’s Angel: How the Return of ‘Daredevil’ Darkens Marvel’s Universe
Bring up the subject of superheroes to Steven S. DeKnight, and he will not regale you with tales of truth, justice and the American way, or how great power begets great responsibility. Instead, the former Spartacus showrunner will jump straight to a specific set of panels in a specific comic book, one that hit newsstands and specialty shops in April, 1982. “There was this issue of Daredevil, near the end of [writer-artist] Frank Miller’s run,” DeKnight says. “Our hero is fighting with a professional assassin named Bullseye, on a wire. The bad guy starts to fall; Daredevil catches him. He has him by the hand, high above the city.” There’s a pregnant pause on the other end of the phone line.
“And then he decides to let him go,” DeKnight continues. “Daredevil drops him to his death — or what he thinks is his death — because he doesn’t ever want this guy to kill again. I remember reading that when I was a kid and thinking, Oh my god. When we started working on our show, that scene from the comics kept coming up. We all thought, this is a hero who is one bad day away from permanently crossing a line.”
Morally conflicted caped crusaders have become a part of the pop cultural firmament in the same way that “difficult men” antiheroes are now permanent fixture on prestige-TV dramas. But Netflix‘s 13-episode series Daredevil, which will hit the streaming service en toto on April 10th, feels like more than just a sum-of-its-parts combination of the two concepts. By emphasizing the gritty, noirish feel of the Marvel comics’ adventures of Matt Murdock, blind lawyer by day and costumed crimefighter by night, this latest endeavor in superhero entertainment feels less like a small-screen summer blockbuster than a throwback to a whole different era of hardboiled storytelling. “The idea was to go for much more of a classic 1970s New York City feel,” DeKnight admits. “The template was Taxi Driver.”
Comic fans can recite the Silver Age superhero’s general evolution from generic do-gooder to tortured Travis Bickle-ish character by heart: Originally conceived by Stan Lee and artist Bill Everett during Marvel’s gold rush of iconic creations in the 1960s, Daredevil started as a typical hero, the son of a boxer who was blinded in an accident involving radioactive waste. With the help of a benignly Satanic costume, a billy club and highly developed sonar-like abilities, the character doled out after-hours justice in Hell’s Kitchen. It wasn’t until Frank Miller took over the title in the late Seventies, however, that the comic’s popularity started to spike; in addition to introducing a kinetic drawing style and ninjas into the mix, the writer-artist began exploring what putting on a disguise and fighting criminals does to a person’s psyche. Long before his revisionist interpretation of Batman would help usher in a new way of looking at men in tights, Miller was using his run on Daredevil to create what would eventually become the go-to mode for modern masked-men stories: the superhero as damaged goods.