Daredevil’s Greatest Superpower Is His Catholicism
It’s also his greatest enemy.
Charlie Cox stars in the Netflix series Marvel’s Daredevil. Photo by Barry Wetcher
April 10 2015 10:20 AM
By Charles Moss
Netflix’s latest series, Marvel’s Daredevil—all 13 episodes of which began streaming Friday—opens with the titular blind lawyer Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) in confession. As he babbles about the complicated state of his family, the priest interrupts him, suggesting it might be easier if he just confessed what he’s done. Murdock responds: “I’m not seeking forgiveness for what I’ve done, Father. I’m asking forgiveness for what I’m about to do.”
To really understand Daredevil—both the comic book and the new show—you need to understand his Catholicism.
Created by Stan Lee, Bill Everett, and Jack Kirby, Daredevil No. 1, which was published in 1964, told the story of Matt Murdock, a boy blinded by a radioactive chemical while saving an old man from being hit by a car. Though he lost his sight, Murdock’s other senses were heightened to superhuman standards, giving him a radarlike ability. After his mother left when he was a baby, his father, a down-and-out boxer who worked as an enforcer for the mob, raised him. His father was eventually murdered by that same mob, and Murdock grew up to become a lawyer by day and a rooftop-leaping vigilante by night—fighting for justice to avenge his father’s death. But the Netflix show takes a lot of cues from Frank Miller’s Man Without Fear comic book series, his retelling of the classic Daredevil origin story.
Miller—who’s known for 300, Sin City, and The Dark Knight Returns—worked on Daredevil in the 1980s and again briefly in the ’90s, redefining the character from a Spider-Man–like wise guy swinging from rooftops, quipping funnies, and beating up bad guys, to a dark, violent hero. By adding these elements as well as a spotlight on Murdock’s conflicted Catholicism—particularly in the 1986 Catholic-themed story arc Born Again—he turned a poorly selling comic series on the verge of cancellation into one of the top-selling Marvel titles of the ’80s. Miller wasn’t the first to claim Daredevil was Catholic. But he was the first to bring Murdock’s religion to the forefront, making it essential to his identity.
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2015/04/netflix_s_daredevil_show_understands_that_catholicism_is_the_superhero_s.html