About two years ago, I decided on a project. A project of, to be honest, limited utility. I committed to reviewing every issue of Daredevil. All sixty years. And then I expanded it to every Daredevil comic. Not just the monthly series. A miniseries about Daredevil’s dad? Yes. A one-shot with Captain America apparently created for the European market. Check. Every single annual? You know it. (There have been thirteen Daredevil annuals. Seven of them have been numbered “1”, two of them have been number four. There is no 2, 3, or 5. Comics are weird.) All in all, it came to 702 issues of the main series (or miniseries that briefly replaced the main series, if you want to get technical.), 118 spinoffs, 13 annuals, two original graphic novels, five episodes of television (Echo), and a handful of crossovers and tie-ins to Daredevil-centric events. It was a lot of comics. All reviewed on my Instagram (ej_feddes).
I caught up to the present on Monday, so until a new issue is released, I don’t have any more Daredevil to read. Early on, I had the idea to try and turn this into a book – a book about Daredevil and about the experience of consuming all of Daredevil. So like an absolute sociopath, I’ve been keeping track of important dates in my life and what issue of Daredevil I read that day. And that’s dicey because you don’t know in the moment what’s going to be important. I’ve been keeping track of new people I met and matching them up to an issue but some of those people I haven’t seen since. But I have notes on what happened in Daredevil the day I went to a live Comedy Bang! Bang! show or the day my mom fell on the sidewalk and broke her face or the day that I was invited to participate in a three-way. It’s been a weird way to live.
One of the main reasons I did this, besides feeling depressed and needing something to hyper-focus on, is that I like Daredevil. He’s one of my main guys and he’s in the sweet spot where the amount of material is significant but manageable. Batman will always be my favorite, but there’s exponentially more Batman material out there. That’s not an achievable goal. But also, despite a reasonable familiarity with Silver Age Marvel, I hadn’t read any early Daredevil. It just wasn’t put in front of me the way, say, Spider-Man or the Fantastic Four were. I quickly discovered a possible reason for that, which is that those early issues weren’t very good. I’ll get into it more in the book (yes, I’m committed), but Daredevil spent most of his formative years as “worse Spider-Man”. Over the course of this project, I have read some of the best superhero comics I’ve read in my life, and also some absolute dog shit. I was thrilled to find out that things I loved decades ago absolutely hold up and horrified to realize that things that I, as a comic book store employee, recommended to people were absolutely dreadful. One of my favorite Batman writers turned out to be a terrible Daredevil writer, and a writer I largely missed delivered an issue that I wish teen EJ had read upon initial release because there’s a core idea that would have been immensely valuable to me during some tough years.
I haven’t run the numbers yet, but it feels like it’s been more good than bad. But maybe the good stuff is sticking more, or the older issues have taken on a new charm as future writers iterated upon them. I don’t know. Again, this is book talk. Today is just about dealing with the fact that this is the first day I haven’t written about Daredevil in almost two years.
I can’t tell if it’s because I’ve been up to my neck in Matt Murdock and friends for all this time, but at this moment, it feels to me like sixty years of Daredevil is much more cohesive than runs of other books. I haven’t read sixty years of anything else, but it feels like the weird gimmick in early issues of Matt pretending that he had a twin brother named Mike who was actually Daredevil eventually turned into the identity issues that would define the character in the 2000s. His secret identity was exposed but he denied it until he actually went public as Daredevil and then it ruined his life and some superpowered children wanted to do something nice for him and made the world forget. Most superheroes have had protracted identity reveal stories, at some point but it’s such a theme in Daredevil that it feels like some modern writers thought it was as weird as I did that sometimes DD would wear another costume over his Daredevil costume so you’d end up with Matt Murdock pretending to be Mike Murdock, who was Daredevil pretending to be Thor.
In this reading, I had a really powerful moment when I hit issue 158. It’s the first issue drawn by a young Frank Miller, who would soon take over the series and redefine Daredevil in a way that’s informed the character forever. It’s honestly a pretty normal issue revealing the identity of recurring villain Deathstalker and then killing him in a way that imprinted on me as a child. That issue, aside from its historic value, is the one Daredevil comic that my grandparents had in their basket of old comics. I read it a thousand times as a kid and probably not once since I was nine, and so many memories came back in reading it anew. I spent every Saturday with my grandparents for years and reading Daredevil 158 was such a wave of warm feelings. I wasn’t expecting that to happen, but that alone made this dumb project worthwhile.
And now I have a connection to Daredevil that I might never have with another fictional character. I’ve probably read more Batman than Daredevil, but I haven’t read all the Batman. Things happened that I don’t know about, like when your friends have other friends that you’ve never met. And yes, I’ve seen all of The Simpsons, but that’s been a thirty-plus year project. It wasn’t a compressed two-year experience of taking in everything. Daredevil is just my guy now. Unless he’s rebooted as a white nationalist or something, I’m kind of locked in to continuing to read every new Daredevil comic until one of us dies and stays dead. (Daredevil has some loopholes.) I’m going to miss getting up every morning and reading Daredevil first thing. It was a ritual that I enjoyed even during the absolute lowest stretches. Another issue about Micah Synn? The execrable black armor era? It wasn’t always pleasant, but I was happy to be doing it.
So now it’s time to start writing about Daredevil in earnest. Maybe I’ll learn something about myself, maybe not. But old Hornhead isn’t done with me just yet. I’m going to talk at length about Stilt-Man in a manuscript that I will try to sell and this maybe isn’t where I saw my life going, but also I don’t know that anybody would be surprised. It feels like I should be ready for a break from Matt and Foggy and Elektra and Kingpin and Bullseye, but in a couple of weeks when that 703rd issue comes out, I’m going to read it right away.
