Good Art: Daredevil
The first deep-dive in my new review series is a character I've loved for decades and a mythology worth saving
If we’ve ever talked about comics or comic-book adaptations, then you know this: I love Daredevil. He is by far my favorite comic-book hero. I read and loved Marvel’s Daredevil comics in college, and I even liked the cringey Ben Affleck film adaptation from 2003.
I love Daredevil because he’s a gritty hero, a super-powered badass whose disability is a main piece of his story. Unlike DC heroes who are typically God-like, or fellow Marvel compatriots like Captain America and Thor, who seem to almost never have a bad day, Daredevil is plagued with too-strong baddies and human mistakes. Yes, he gets the villains eventually, but not before he gets his heart broken and body battered.
The Daredevil story is about Matt Murdock, a blind lawyer from Hell’s Kitchen, New York, whose loss of eyesight in a childhood accident gives him extraordinary powers of awareness. (I bought an overpriced glass of pét-nat in Hell’s Kitchen a couple of years ago. But when the comics were imagined by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the early 1960s, New York was a darker place.) What makes Daredevil especially interesting is the intertwining of his moral compass with his life experience, the subtle nuances of his character. Matt is raised by his boxer father, Battlin’ Jack Murdock, who is killed by the mob, at which point Matt moves to a Catholic orphanage. He’s the essential street-level hero: a scrappy New York orphan, forever impacted by the effects of corruption and crime in a free-wheeling American city. He knows that the difference between good and evil is more of a nuanced blur than a straight line, but it doesn’t stop him from trying to make the distinctions clearer. He’s informed by his faith but in conflict with it, believing and doubting and believing again, as we all do.
As an adult, Matt becomes a lawyer and goes into business with his best friend, Foggy Nelson. Foggy is the one person who sees good in Matt when Matt can’t see it in himself, and who isn’t intimidated or cowed by Matt’s stubbornness. Foggy is the moral compass and translator for the audience: while Matt is out making super friends or fighting villains or cleaning up the streets, Foggy is there to remind him what the point of all the fighting is for, to take him out of playing God and back into humanity.
Foggy forces Matt, and therefore the audience, to question: what is the point of saving a city you never inhabit? Where do the lines from justice to mercy converge? When is it OK to let something, or someone go?
Because of Foggy’s influence, we know Matt has a job and an apartment, he likes German beer and Thai take-out. Importantly, Matt is also blind - a serious disability which Foggy treats with equanimity. Before Foggy learns the secret of Matt’s powers, he often guides Matt with the crook of his elbow, or translates the nonverbal cues of others. After he learns about Matt’s abilities, he still provides cover for his secret, another example of his unwavering loyalty.
This detail is a powerful metaphor: Matt may not need literal guidance from Foggy, but Foggy’s clear-eyed, optimistic view of reality gives Matt a roadmap for his days. Where Foggy used to say, “watch out for the stairs”, now he says “watch out for your demons”.
A mythology which puts a non-familial, non-romantic friendship at the core is aspirational. This is a friendship so grounded and powerful it makes storylines about gangsters, ninjas, super baddies and evil corporations take a backseat to the loyalty and affection of two straight men.
Daredevil’s mythology wrestles with what justice is and how it’s served, with righteousness in mortal combat with evil. These are big questions, and worth asking. But, the mythology here gives us a paradox, one that we would be wise to hold on to. Matt spends his nights consumed with vengeance and justice, tortured by our broken reality and what it demands of humanity. Foggy, by contrast, simply and heroically lives out the second greatest commandment: love one another.
Of course I was excited about the newest iteration of Daredevil, especially when I heard rumors that the showrunners were retutning to a more traditional Daredevil storyline. The new Disney+ series, Daredevil Born Again, shares its name with the famous comic series from legendary Marvel artist Frank Miller.
However, unlike Miller’s run of comics, this iteration of Daredevil is not wrestling with the nuances of faith or justice or mercy.
In this edition, Matt’s not having good-better-best debates with Foggy, or asking his priest for guidance in the face of evil. While Miller went dark, delving into questions of morality and agency, this series simply goes dark with little pay-off, just blood and gore and a bleak sense of austere correctness.
I guess it’s fitting that the new version of Daredevil makes its debut in a golden era of surety. Everyone knows everything and has the stats to back it up. It’s a dizzying time to have a debate, which is why our cultural questions are often so profoundly dumb.
Unfortunately, the 2025 edition of Daredevil isn’t feeling his way through a complicated reality. No, he knows exactly who’s good and who’s not, who’s right and who’s wrong, and he’s happy to tell you so. Matt Murdock in any iteration can be smug, that’s why we need Foggy and Father Lantom and Sister Maggie and Karen and yes, even bartender Josie to bring him back to reality, to remind him that no, he’s not up for sainthood any time soon and maybe it’s OK to not know every answer. But unsmiling certainty is a virtue now, so Matt’s smug assuredness is a strength rather than a liability in this version. While the audience, using Matt’s community as proxy, used to worry about Matt’s literal and figurative blind spots, we’re now told he has none, even his actual blindness is practically written out of the story lest we see our hero as anything less than messianic.
While the comics and the Netflix show leaned into the paradox of good-on-good debates, our new version comes right out and declares winners and losers of every argument. No more do we wrestle with good people seeking good ends in differing ways - that’s a simplistic notion for a less intelligent time. Now, our new and improved Matt strides through the story with no doubts, no Foggy to debate with, no Sister Maggie to push on his assumptions, no lack of perspective. There are no questions in quiet naves for this hero, no priest to hear his secret doubts.
Matt no longer sits in church or confession to consider his sins. In a notable divergence from comic-book-lore, there’s a scene in Born Again in which Matt sits alone in a courtroom instead of a church, ostensibly to clear his mind. Of course, this also fits our 2025 moment. No matter what our political persuasion, the Powers that Be is our essential touchstone, the System our sacred text, social media our prophecy. Nowadays, we’ve lost touch with the idea that there might be a spiritual dimension above all this earthly clamor. In our time, we don’t doubt or pray, we just yell at each other to get it right, we know everything and take to our outlet of choice to shout the bad people down.
My seven-year-old son asked recently who the bad guys pray to. (We are a church-going comic-book-house, so God, bad guys and good guys are all common topics of discussion.) Any believer knows that this innocent question lies at the heart of faith. We may well have serious political and social disagreements with others who claim to love the same God we do. Sometimes those disagreements even turn deadly: ever heard of the Troubles or Sunni/Shiite violence?
To put it in 1900s Hell’s Kitchen terms, the Irish gangs and Italian mobsters all went to church, too.
This is the lived-in truth that old Daredevil versions understood. What made Daredevil compelling was not the batons or the super-hearing, not the epic battles with Kingpin or the intrigue with brooding assassin-girlfriend Elektra. We don’t love Daredevil because he’s always right, or because Kingpin is always wrong. What makes him tick is his conscience and his qualms. He attempts to mete out justice and fails, tries to live up to the tenets of his faith and falls short. He’s loyal to Foggy, riddled by guilt and carrying deep love for Hell’s Kitchen even as he helps tear it apart. In short, he’s human: flawed, unsure, beat-up, heroic.
He’s a character who does what mythology should do - help us make sense of our questions, those pesky complicated ones. We need stories to help us explore narratives of justice and mercy, hope and faith. We long for characters who wrestle with the same questions we do about helping and hurting, intentions and outcomes. We don’t want a voter’s guide for life, we want a storyline.
It’s too bad that the new version of Daredevil illustrates one of today’s unfortunate paradigms: we’d rather be right than good.
Like so many creators of our time, Disney and Marvel appear to have bought the lie that answers are what people want, that picking the “right” side is all that matters. Write out Foggy’s character because we can’t possibly imagine that two good men could see the world differently and love each other anyway.
Art is meant to stir us awake; mythology should illuminate questions we are too afraid to ask in real life. Daredevil Born Again, however, reveals our American narrative of 2025, one that knows everything and is always right.
Sooner or later, that mythology will come to the end of itself; and we will inevitably run up against our own frailty, as Matt so often does. When we do, I hope to return to a more honest, less confident meaning-making, one of dark questions, quiet loyalty and the attempt to live by faith, not by sight.
Good Art: Daredevil comics, especially the Frank Miller run, and the Daredevil series on Disney+ (The Defenders, also on Disney+, is essentially Daredevil season 2.5 and, while weak as a whole, does offer some nice moments, so it’s OK Art.)
Not Good Art: The 2003 film adaptation (sorry Ben) and Daredevil Born Again
Wow, things I didn’t know (not a comic book gal) but I feel educated and informed now. Thanks for your honest and intelligent take on this. As usual, you rock, Dani!