Title: Daredevil: the Man Without Fear
Issues: #1
Writer: Frank Miller
Illustrator: John Romita Jr.,
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Publication year: 1993
Language: English
Pages: 28
Rating: 3.5/5
First of all, I want to set the ground by explaining my experience with Daredevil. I haven’t watched Ben Affleck’s Daredevil movie. I haven’t watched Netflix’s Daredevil series, but I’m interested to do so. I know that Daredevil’s real name is Matt Murdock and that he’s blind. His signature weapon is a Billy club. I know about Elektra and that she somehow has a relationship with Matt. I know he wears a red costume with little devil horns and that’s about it. Now that it’s out of the way, let’s talk about the comic.
Daredevil: the Man without Fear is Daredevil’s origin story retold by Frank Miller. Comic superheroes tend to have many origin stories, but this one especially was suggested to me if I want to know the origin of Daredevil. This issue opens with Matt Murdock as a child living in Hell’s Kitchen. He’s a good boy, but on the other hand, he likes to prank people. In this issue, Matt was pranking an officer by stealing the officer’s club. It seems silly and harmless, but we’ll see that this scene would play a bigger role in a later scene. Then we meet Matt’s father, Jack Murdock. He’s a boxer who’s also moonlighting as a mob enforcer, a job that he hates but he has to do because he’s a single parent and responsible for Matt. In this issue we see the relationship between Matt and his father. We see how his father raised him to play by the rules, which shape Matt’s ethic. We also see the event that causes Matt’s blindness and the introduction of Stick, a character who taught martial arts to Matt. This issue ends with Matt’s father being murdered by the mob.
The first issue of Daredevil: the Man without Fear basically lay out Matt’s personalities and the defining moments of his childhood that shape him as Daredevil that we know. I explained before that I haven’t watched Netflix’s Daredevil show, but I’ve watched the trailer and I get the sense that Matt is having a moral conflict with himself with the confessional booth scene. Reading his scene with his father, it makes sense to me about his moral conflict. He’s taught to play by the rules while he’s acting as a vigilante by being Daredevil. It’s a great opening and drawn me toward the character. This issue definitely intrigues me to read more about Matt Murdock.
