But notice that even as the cover creates a direct parallel between Daredevil and Spiderman (both swing around to bop bad guys, both are destined for popularity, both cart around guilty consciences the size of their barrel chests), it challenges you to guess what makes Daredevil different from every other superhero. If there are clues on this cover for an uninitiated reader, I can't find them. The closest to a red flag I can find is that our hero wears sunglasses in his secret identity--though Matt Murdock's not introduced as Daredevil until you turn the issue's pages, so you wouldn't find that indicator suspicious or indicative. You wouldn't even know he's Daredevil from looking at this cover, and that's an important spike for me.
Because Matt Murdock is blind. Daredevil is not, so far as the public knows. So what makes him truly remarkable as a superhero is a secret, a well-guarded one, which gives the whole comic a passing narrative that leaves a lot to be desired, in my opinion.
But let me back up. During the 1960s and 1970s, Marvel rose to prominence by tempering fantastic superheroics with readers' real-life concerns. Hence, Spiderman's struggle to make ends meet and save his aunt's house after the death of his bread-winning uncle; or, Peter Banner's struggle to control his temper in order to live up to the responsibilities thrust on him by work and his girlfriend, both of which keep him from "Hulking out;" or the Fantastic Four's efforts to keep it together as a family when pushed into the public arena because of their adventures. Stan Lee's comics were meant to engage teenage readers who felt alienated by the adult world, while being too grown up to take comfort in the thought that a man can fly. Lee had basically been handed the creative control of Marvel in the 1950s, after DC had reinvented the superhero for the Atomic Age. He followed suit by addressing darker issues and grabbing an older audience for his books in the turbulent sixties. Daredevil was the result of this experiment, as were the alcoholic Iron Man and the ever-persecuted X-Men.
Created by writer-editor Lee, artist Bill Everett and designed in part by Jack Kirby, Daredevil's hook seems to be his protectorship of gritty Hell's Kitchen as well as his deeply rooted Catholicism. Cops walk rough beats, they're dedicated to their neighborhoods. Daredevil's specific placement makes him feel like a cop to me; he's a man with a mission for his people, and he'll be brutal if need be, holding tight to the righteousness of his blue-collar Irish religion meanwhile. Add that to the fact that he didn't exclusively fight costumed supervillains, but also dealt with poverty and other social problems, and you can understand how Daredevil fits into Marvel's "real world" mode.
But none of this character motivation nitty-gritty and realistic setting stuff makes Daredevil inherently special. What makes him special is that he's differently-abled. Lee announces as much on the cover by asking you to guess what makes him different from his cohorts. Bringing a blind superhero into the Marvel stable must have been an unique thing to do in the 1960s, when the rights of disabled individuals were not general concerns, as they have been (moreso, anyway) since the creation of the American With Disabilities Act in the 1990s. But what does it mean to make a blind man a superhero? How exactly will his stories be different?
In the first issue of Daredevil, we learn his origin. As a child, he rescues an old blind man from being hit by a truck. But no good deed goes unpunished, right? That explains why a canister of some radioactive substance falls from the truck and blinds Matt for life. How that works, I can't even begin to guess--what I can say, because the writers say it, is that Matt gains superpowers due to this radioactive exposure. (Because that happened a lot after the A-bomb got dropped.) His hearing, sight and touch all become more sensitive, and allow him to develop a radar of sorts -- a radar that makes it possible for him to fight crime through feats of acrobatic daring-do.
I'll get to how that works in a moment. But think about this situation in another way. People often claim that when one of your senses is impaired, the others become stronger. Because he's blinded, Matt's other senses become heightened. Regardless of how irradiated his eyes become, if he hadn't been blinded, he wouldn't have become super-sensitive. You need the tragedy in order to explain the powers. Without his blindness, Daredevil would not have superpowers. His blindness fuels his superpowers. In effect, his disability IS his superpower.
Now maybe I'm thinking this way because I've been hard of hearing since birth, and a large part of my identity is defined by the positives surrounding a lack of something in my life. But I think the Daredevil comic invites these musings by the way Lee asks you to guess his specialness. Certainly, the hero's remarkable abilities are tied distinctly to his lack of something, and at his creation, that must have created a dynamic and new point of view for readers. Maybe it even alleviated some assumptions about what the disabled are capable of. Still I would argue Daredevil is not a very good spokesman/role model for the disabled. Largely because no one in his world thinks a blind man can be a crazy devil acrobat, so assumptions remain about blind people and actually HELP Matt Murdock continue his nighttime activities and mask his special disability.
But I feel Daredevil also misses out on a positive opportunity for another, maybe more fixable reason. Check out what Daredevil's radar looks like, as displayed in an earlier issue of Daredevil:
After Daredevil enters a room, we learn through narration that being in the dark is an advantage to him, since he lives in darkness. Instead of peepers, he uses radar. And in the final panel of these three, we see what Daredevil's radar looks like. Which bothers me. We SEE his foes as clear BODIES. Now if you've studied radar at all, you know it was originally fueled by the return of electromagnetic waves to a transmitter, usually radio waves. These days, it's used by air traffic controllers and weather forecasters; in special circumstances, lidar -- or radar fueled by visible light -- can be used, so I guess the image is clearer that way. The point I want to make by being technical is this: Radar is NOT sight, the way it's drawn here. It's something else. Radar isn't precise; beam range/beam path can be affected, and noise interference can occur. It's not a pretty little picture. And radar's fueled by things that are not necessarily internalized in the human body. Bats, sure. Humans--huh?
Of course, stretching credibility is something comics always do. I mean, Peter Parker gets bit by a radioactive spider, and THAT gives him superpowers -- meanwhile the FDA's warned against importing milk from Japan after its nuclear disaster. I don't mean to be a fuddy-duddy taking issue with fantasy powers, but Marvel's missing out by making Daredevil's radar something discernible, something understandable to the human eye. They don't let us into a blind man's world that way, they impose our seeing world on him, and force Matt Murdock into a passing narrative not of his own making (his acting as a sighted superhero aside), where it's good he hides the benefits of his blindness, where being blind means you're not capable of accomplishing great feats or experiencing the world in your own unique way. Which would be great fodder for drama (I'm thinking about how it affects Matt's every day life as a blind man), but in all the Brian Michael Bendis, David Mack and Kevin Smith trade paperbacks I've read, this conflict is never addressed! Matt seems to have no problem being judged for his disability, nor does he have any problem crafting dual "abled" and disabled identities. For a man who's been blind most of his life, he never seems to think about how it affects him, or how it gave him a weird special sight.
And sadly, Daredevil's radar hasn't changed from conventional sight in Daredevil's modern age. In fact, once Frank Miller reinvented the character during the 1980s, Daredevil's senses became heightened almost to the level of Superman's. He can hear sounds blocks away, he can gauge the time a person left a room based on the dispersion of their perfume. Sure, his radar can be messed with, but the strength of his senses allows him to touch-read the imprints of a pen on paper. So now the blind man doesn't even need braille -- effectively, he's no longer a blind man, if he can "see" enough to read a paper in the first place.
And artists have run with these heightened radar sensations. Alex Maleev, arguably the greatest contemporary Daredevil artist working today, completes an entirely silent issue in Daredevil volume 2, issue 28. Mostly he uses Matt's radar for detective work. But Matt's senses are so sharp, the radar has no defect. It is sight -- only sight -- like our sight. You can see his radar sense highlighted in one panel, outlined pink in the second scan here:
This issue tells a brilliant visual story. But how naive is it to assume a disabled character's senses work/look just like ours? Would sight look the same to a blind man as it does to us? Would images be interpreted in the same way? Do we need to understand that in order to get the story being told? And how big a violation of Lee's difference set-up has years of radar artwork been?
One thing I can tell you ... Our hero masks his disability, and so it's hidden in the artwork as well. So the youth Lee meant to reach out to, people hungry for different struggles, people who wanted a voice to be given to the disempowered -- well, they get the same old, same old with Daredevil everytime. He sees the world as we do, not as a blind man does. So excuse me, he's lost his cache. Because much as I love Daredevil as a keystone Marvel character, I can't get behind his lack of progression since the 1960s. His blindness seems to make no impact on his world, and that is not realistic, and makes me question the value of this different character.
(In fact, his blindness becomes a lame cover, a negative thing that proves how limited disabled people are -- writer Brian Michael Bendis uses the excuse of blindness to protect the outing of Daredevil's secret identity several times during his Out storyline. Maybe this is supposed to be ironic, because we know the truth and the public doesn't, but Bendis has it both ways, doesn't he? He reinforces assumptions while claiming to tear them down.)
For a better take on how artists demonstrate a disabled person's outlook, check out David Mack's Daredevil: Parts of the Hole. In that story, Daredevil falls in love with a deaf woman, and Mack uses playfulness of line and bizarre set-ups of dialogue to show us how the deaf piece together the sentences strung around and by their bodies. All in all, it creates a powerful statement about body language, its importance in a hearing-impaired culture, and how limiting it can be when you need to chase words coming across someone's lips or across a page:
What a pity more Daredevil artwork isn't like this -- isn't challenging our notions of what blindness "looks like," or showing what the impaired experience is to those who want to learn and understand.
Because frankly, in my mind, Daredevil is unremarkable. He becomes unremarkable when writers and artists don't engage with his disability head-on. That's sad, especially since Lee boldly challenged us to see Daredevil's difference in his first appearance.
Because Matt Murdock is blind. Daredevil is not, so far as the public knows. So what makes him truly remarkable as a superhero is a secret, a well-guarded one, which gives the whole comic a passing narrative that leaves a lot to be desired, in my opinion.
But let me back up. During the 1960s and 1970s, Marvel rose to prominence by tempering fantastic superheroics with readers' real-life concerns. Hence, Spiderman's struggle to make ends meet and save his aunt's house after the death of his bread-winning uncle; or, Peter Banner's struggle to control his temper in order to live up to the responsibilities thrust on him by work and his girlfriend, both of which keep him from "Hulking out;" or the Fantastic Four's efforts to keep it together as a family when pushed into the public arena because of their adventures. Stan Lee's comics were meant to engage teenage readers who felt alienated by the adult world, while being too grown up to take comfort in the thought that a man can fly. Lee had basically been handed the creative control of Marvel in the 1950s, after DC had reinvented the superhero for the Atomic Age. He followed suit by addressing darker issues and grabbing an older audience for his books in the turbulent sixties. Daredevil was the result of this experiment, as were the alcoholic Iron Man and the ever-persecuted X-Men.
Created by writer-editor Lee, artist Bill Everett and designed in part by Jack Kirby, Daredevil's hook seems to be his protectorship of gritty Hell's Kitchen as well as his deeply rooted Catholicism. Cops walk rough beats, they're dedicated to their neighborhoods. Daredevil's specific placement makes him feel like a cop to me; he's a man with a mission for his people, and he'll be brutal if need be, holding tight to the righteousness of his blue-collar Irish religion meanwhile. Add that to the fact that he didn't exclusively fight costumed supervillains, but also dealt with poverty and other social problems, and you can understand how Daredevil fits into Marvel's "real world" mode.
But none of this character motivation nitty-gritty and realistic setting stuff makes Daredevil inherently special. What makes him special is that he's differently-abled. Lee announces as much on the cover by asking you to guess what makes him different from his cohorts. Bringing a blind superhero into the Marvel stable must have been an unique thing to do in the 1960s, when the rights of disabled individuals were not general concerns, as they have been (moreso, anyway) since the creation of the American With Disabilities Act in the 1990s. But what does it mean to make a blind man a superhero? How exactly will his stories be different?
In the first issue of Daredevil, we learn his origin. As a child, he rescues an old blind man from being hit by a truck. But no good deed goes unpunished, right? That explains why a canister of some radioactive substance falls from the truck and blinds Matt for life. How that works, I can't even begin to guess--what I can say, because the writers say it, is that Matt gains superpowers due to this radioactive exposure. (Because that happened a lot after the A-bomb got dropped.) His hearing, sight and touch all become more sensitive, and allow him to develop a radar of sorts -- a radar that makes it possible for him to fight crime through feats of acrobatic daring-do.
I'll get to how that works in a moment. But think about this situation in another way. People often claim that when one of your senses is impaired, the others become stronger. Because he's blinded, Matt's other senses become heightened. Regardless of how irradiated his eyes become, if he hadn't been blinded, he wouldn't have become super-sensitive. You need the tragedy in order to explain the powers. Without his blindness, Daredevil would not have superpowers. His blindness fuels his superpowers. In effect, his disability IS his superpower.
Now maybe I'm thinking this way because I've been hard of hearing since birth, and a large part of my identity is defined by the positives surrounding a lack of something in my life. But I think the Daredevil comic invites these musings by the way Lee asks you to guess his specialness. Certainly, the hero's remarkable abilities are tied distinctly to his lack of something, and at his creation, that must have created a dynamic and new point of view for readers. Maybe it even alleviated some assumptions about what the disabled are capable of. Still I would argue Daredevil is not a very good spokesman/role model for the disabled. Largely because no one in his world thinks a blind man can be a crazy devil acrobat, so assumptions remain about blind people and actually HELP Matt Murdock continue his nighttime activities and mask his special disability.
But I feel Daredevil also misses out on a positive opportunity for another, maybe more fixable reason. Check out what Daredevil's radar looks like, as displayed in an earlier issue of Daredevil:
After Daredevil enters a room, we learn through narration that being in the dark is an advantage to him, since he lives in darkness. Instead of peepers, he uses radar. And in the final panel of these three, we see what Daredevil's radar looks like. Which bothers me. We SEE his foes as clear BODIES. Now if you've studied radar at all, you know it was originally fueled by the return of electromagnetic waves to a transmitter, usually radio waves. These days, it's used by air traffic controllers and weather forecasters; in special circumstances, lidar -- or radar fueled by visible light -- can be used, so I guess the image is clearer that way. The point I want to make by being technical is this: Radar is NOT sight, the way it's drawn here. It's something else. Radar isn't precise; beam range/beam path can be affected, and noise interference can occur. It's not a pretty little picture. And radar's fueled by things that are not necessarily internalized in the human body. Bats, sure. Humans--huh?
Of course, stretching credibility is something comics always do. I mean, Peter Parker gets bit by a radioactive spider, and THAT gives him superpowers -- meanwhile the FDA's warned against importing milk from Japan after its nuclear disaster. I don't mean to be a fuddy-duddy taking issue with fantasy powers, but Marvel's missing out by making Daredevil's radar something discernible, something understandable to the human eye. They don't let us into a blind man's world that way, they impose our seeing world on him, and force Matt Murdock into a passing narrative not of his own making (his acting as a sighted superhero aside), where it's good he hides the benefits of his blindness, where being blind means you're not capable of accomplishing great feats or experiencing the world in your own unique way. Which would be great fodder for drama (I'm thinking about how it affects Matt's every day life as a blind man), but in all the Brian Michael Bendis, David Mack and Kevin Smith trade paperbacks I've read, this conflict is never addressed! Matt seems to have no problem being judged for his disability, nor does he have any problem crafting dual "abled" and disabled identities. For a man who's been blind most of his life, he never seems to think about how it affects him, or how it gave him a weird special sight.
And sadly, Daredevil's radar hasn't changed from conventional sight in Daredevil's modern age. In fact, once Frank Miller reinvented the character during the 1980s, Daredevil's senses became heightened almost to the level of Superman's. He can hear sounds blocks away, he can gauge the time a person left a room based on the dispersion of their perfume. Sure, his radar can be messed with, but the strength of his senses allows him to touch-read the imprints of a pen on paper. So now the blind man doesn't even need braille -- effectively, he's no longer a blind man, if he can "see" enough to read a paper in the first place.
And artists have run with these heightened radar sensations. Alex Maleev, arguably the greatest contemporary Daredevil artist working today, completes an entirely silent issue in Daredevil volume 2, issue 28. Mostly he uses Matt's radar for detective work. But Matt's senses are so sharp, the radar has no defect. It is sight -- only sight -- like our sight. You can see his radar sense highlighted in one panel, outlined pink in the second scan here:
This issue tells a brilliant visual story. But how naive is it to assume a disabled character's senses work/look just like ours? Would sight look the same to a blind man as it does to us? Would images be interpreted in the same way? Do we need to understand that in order to get the story being told? And how big a violation of Lee's difference set-up has years of radar artwork been?
One thing I can tell you ... Our hero masks his disability, and so it's hidden in the artwork as well. So the youth Lee meant to reach out to, people hungry for different struggles, people who wanted a voice to be given to the disempowered -- well, they get the same old, same old with Daredevil everytime. He sees the world as we do, not as a blind man does. So excuse me, he's lost his cache. Because much as I love Daredevil as a keystone Marvel character, I can't get behind his lack of progression since the 1960s. His blindness seems to make no impact on his world, and that is not realistic, and makes me question the value of this different character.
(In fact, his blindness becomes a lame cover, a negative thing that proves how limited disabled people are -- writer Brian Michael Bendis uses the excuse of blindness to protect the outing of Daredevil's secret identity several times during his Out storyline. Maybe this is supposed to be ironic, because we know the truth and the public doesn't, but Bendis has it both ways, doesn't he? He reinforces assumptions while claiming to tear them down.)
For a better take on how artists demonstrate a disabled person's outlook, check out David Mack's Daredevil: Parts of the Hole. In that story, Daredevil falls in love with a deaf woman, and Mack uses playfulness of line and bizarre set-ups of dialogue to show us how the deaf piece together the sentences strung around and by their bodies. All in all, it creates a powerful statement about body language, its importance in a hearing-impaired culture, and how limiting it can be when you need to chase words coming across someone's lips or across a page:
What a pity more Daredevil artwork isn't like this -- isn't challenging our notions of what blindness "looks like," or showing what the impaired experience is to those who want to learn and understand.
Because frankly, in my mind, Daredevil is unremarkable. He becomes unremarkable when writers and artists don't engage with his disability head-on. That's sad, especially since Lee boldly challenged us to see Daredevil's difference in his first appearance.
