the Fixer<\/strong>, who is emphatically not going to be Daredevil’s arch enemy.<\/p>\nThe original version goes like this. Little Matt Murdock wants to follow in the footsteps of his boxer father Battlin’ Jack. But Jack insists that Matt ignore sports and manly pursuits in favour of study, so that he can break out of poverty and “amount to something” – a promise that Jack made to Matt’s late mother. All the other kids think Matt’s a loser and nickname him Daredevil, which is thoughtful of them. But Matt trains in secret, while also getting straight As. Desperate to pay for Matt to go to college, Jack agrees to be managed by the disreputable Fixer. Meanwhile, Matt randomly loses his sight and gains super powers when he shoves a blind man out of the way of a runaway radioactive waste truck. Matt still goes to college, while Jack goes on an implausible middle-aged winning streak under the Fixer’s management. The Fixer tells Jack to take a dive in the first round of a key fight, but Jack refuses to disappoint his watching son, and wins by knockout. The Fixer has Jack shot dead in retaliation.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Matt comes up with the Daredevil identity as a hair-splittingly legalistic way to honour his promise that Matt Murdock will be a thinker rather than a fighter – it’s not Matt<\/em> who’s fighting, you see, it’s Daredevil<\/em>. Uh-huh. In his first outing, Daredevil tracks down the Fixer, who makes a break for it, but then dies of a heart attack when cornered. And that’s the end of the Fixer. He never gets brought back.<\/p>\nNor should he, because he’s not that kind of character. The Fixer is to Daredevil what the burglar is to Spider-Man and Joe Chill is to Batman. It’s the dead dad that matters, not the specific guy who killed him. (Or, in the Fixer’s case, had him killed – the actual killer is a henchman called Slade, but he never shows up again either.) These characters actively benefit from being generic, because they’re supposed to motivate a wider agenda for the hero. The Fixer is there to be an icon of criminality in general, and corruption in particular, which plays into both sides of Daredevil’s dual identity as lawyer and vigilante.<\/p>\n
I’m not normally going to read very far ahead for these posts, but for obvious reasons Daredevil<\/em> #1 has been retold numerous times. Unusually, it tends to be done in ways that are either out of continuity or at least dubiously canonical. The 1993 miniseries Daredevil: The Man Without Fear<\/em> by Frank Miller and John Romita Jr is comprehensively non-canon (even though some elements of it have been imported into continuity) because it has Jack dying, and Matt defeating the Fixer, all before<\/em> Matt goes to university and becomes Daredevil. It does that because it’s not especially interested in the Fixer, and wants that bit of the story out of the way as soon as possible. It’s a Frank Miller story and it wants to talk about Stick.<\/p>\n2001’s\u00a0Daredevil: Yellow<\/em>, by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale, is a much closer retelling of the first few issues of Daredevil<\/em>, but with quite a bit of artistic licence. So it still deviates enough to make it doubtfully canonical. As far as the origin story is concerned, Yellow<\/em>‘s main addition is a sequence where Matt tries to take down the Fixer through legal channels first, but the Fixer buys off the judge. I think that’s an improvement – it gives Matt a stronger motivation to break his promise to his father.<\/p>\nDaredevil: Battlin’ Jack Murdock<\/em>, by Carmine Di Giandomenico and Zeb Wells (both have co-writing credits), is a 2007 miniseries which retells the story from Jack’s point of view, although for obvious reasons it ends with when he dies. It has a couple of minor canon problems too – it seems to think that Matt was conceived out of wedlock, and that his mother only returned from the nuns to leave the baby with Jack, while other stories show baby Matt with both parents – but it’s relatively faithful to the original plot beats. By this point other flashbacks had re-cast Jack as an alcoholic loser, rather than the blue collar saint that Stan Lee intended, and that’s very much the approach that BJM<\/em> takes.<\/p>\nIt’s a clever interpretation, though, which sees Jack as a badly flawed and overprotective father, filled with self-loathing because he knows he isn’t up to the job, and sporadically abusive because he’s drinking so much. In this reading, it’s Jack’s need to protect his poor defenceless son that drives him into underworld dealings. A masked Matt saves Jack from underworld thugs shortly before the fight. During the fight, Jack figures out that it was Matt, and realises that Matt can look after himself. That frees Jack to defy the Fixer in full knowledge of what’s going to happen to him, and he dies with honour on his own terms. This isn’t what any of the narration or thought balloons in Daredevil<\/em> #1 say, but it’s a better version.<\/p>\nNone of these stories, though, see the Fixer as anything more than a generic crime boss for Jack to bounce off. The striking thing about Daredevil<\/em> #1, with hindsight, is that it’s setting the series up as a street level crime book. That’s absolutely not the comic that Stan Lee is going to deliver. Yet ironically it’s a lot closer to the version of Daredevil<\/em> that will eventually succeed in the 1980s. Stan Lee had the right idea to start with, but in the end he went for a more conventional superhero book instead. We’ll see in future instalments how that worked out for him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"So, I thought we’d do something different. Quick: Name ten\u00a0Daredevil\u00a0villains. Come on, the book’s been a mainstay of Marvel’s line since 1964, it can’t be that hard. There’s the Kingpin, the Hand, Bullseye, um, Typhoid… um… does Elektra count…? Admittedly, this is not really my area. But I googled a few lists of top Daredevil […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daredevil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9373"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9373\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9384,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9373\/revisions\/9384"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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<\/a>DAREDEVIL #1 (April 1964)<\/strong>