Posted By Dan Greenfield on May 18, 2025 | 6 comments

The celebrated Mr. K pays a birthday tribute…

By PAUL KUPPERBERG

My choice for best introductory/origin story of a Silver Age Marvel Comics character?

Hands down and no question, Daredevil #1 (April 1964).

That’s not to say the origins of his predecessor heroes — Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four, both of which get callouts on the cover of Daredevil #1 — aren’t classics, Spidey’s in particular; his realization that “with great power comes great responsibility” has entered the vernacular. And even if the FF’s back story is an echo of Jack Kirby’s earlier origin of the Challengers of the Unknown for DC Comics, it still stands.

All you have to do to see just how much input the early Marvel artists had into the shaping of those stories is to compare Fantastic Four #1 (November 1951) by Stan Lee and Kirby, Amazing Fantasy #15 (August 1962) by Lee and Steve Ditko, and Daredevil #1 by Lee and Bill Everett.

The artists’ creative fingerprints are all over the storytelling. The FF is as blunt and direct as Kirby himself. Peter Parker reflects Ditko’s reserved nature and philosophical beliefs. And Daredevil brings Everett’s flair for tragedy and pulp romanticism to life, a blend of Catholic guilt and personal sacrifice that writers like Denny O’Neil and Frank Miller would later exploit.

I don’t know who it was who decided to make the next Marvel hero a blind lawyer with super-enhanced senses or which of the origin details was contributed by which creator, but it’s hard to imagine what another artist would have brought to the book. What if… Jack Kirby had co-created Daredevil? What if… Steve Ditko? Even with Stan as the common denominator, those would have been radically different characters.

Marvel Mystery Comics #7

Bill Everett (May 18, 1917–February 27, 1973) was a pioneering comic book artist and writer best known for creating Prince Namor the Sub-Mariner and helping to define the early Marvel — the Timely Comics — universe. Namor (introduced in 1939’s Marvel Comics #1) was different from the other comic book heroes of the time. Half-human, half-Atlantean, the young prince was torn between his two worlds and natures, a brooding, complex, and morally ambiguous antihero who didn’t fit the standard “superhero” model. Namor had depth, and not just of the undersea variety.

Everett drew hundreds of stories, most of them for Timely/Marvel, but he would also create Amazing Man for Centaur (1939-42), Hydroman for Eastern Color (1940-45), scores of 1950s horror, war, and romance tales, and with DD #1 and later work, mostly inking and writing, a part of the new Marvel Age of Comics.

He died tragically young at the age of 55 in 1973. His legacy as an innovator and creative force in comics is secure — he was posthumously inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2000 — but imagine what he might have done with another two or three or maybe more decades at the keyboard and drawing board?

Here then, MY 13 FAVORITE THINGS ABOUT BILL EVERETT’s DAREDEVIL #1:

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1. The cover. At first glance, it looks sort of a mess. Spider-Man! The Fantastic Four! Who are those people on the lower right? And who’s the guy in the acrobat get-up? And, no, I can’t guess why Daredevil — that must be the guy in the acrobat get-up — is different from all other crime-fighters, so just tell me already! I was 9 years old when I saw this on the newsstands and while I didn’t buy it (my resources were limited and reserved for my first love, DC Comics), I did sneak read my older brother’s copy the first chance I got.

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2. The gimmick. The hero is blind… but his other senses have become so acute he can create a picture of what he can’t see through hearing, smell, taste, and echolocation. Thank you, improperly handled radioactive waste!

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3. That costume. Nowadays, when superhero costumes are all Kevlar and circuitry, their original influences and inspirations are an anachronism. Younger fans scoff, “Why does Superman wear his underwear on the outside?” but don’t know that his costume was based on the traditional circus strongman get-up of the day. (Check out his first appearance: He’s even wearing sandals tied up his calves.)

Likewise, Daredevil’s original costume was based on the traditional wrestling singlet, a tight fitting one-piece garment, represented by the scarlet portion of the costume. Add the bright yellow body suit, the little devil horns, and red eyes and you had a hero who wasn’t afraid to stand out.

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4. Matt Murdoch was a redhead. My favorite aunt and cousins were redheads, and you didn’t see many gingers headlining their own titles.

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5. It felt like an old Warner Brothers noir film. Daredevil #1 reeked of the old Warner backlot, complete with grungy gymnasiums and the character actors inhabiting them, an atmospheric story about the morally conflicted boxer, and a good murder mystery.

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6. Story! Story! Story! Daredevil #1 is also structured like a good old Warner Brothers crime movie, taking time to set up each new character and weave them into a cohesive narrative. I’ve always felt without the comic book elements — the costume and radioactive goop gimmick — the story could have played just as well as a straight film.

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7. “Battling” Murdoch is a good dad. Everybody in Daredevil #1 gets a chance to tell their stories, and unlike Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben, who was sacrificed after appearing in only five panels of the Spider-Man origin, speaking in only two, Matt’s dad had an actual arc in the issue. Readers felt his death not based just on a kindly face and some avuncular kidding around but because we saw what Murdoch sacrificed for his son.

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8. Talking the talk. Maybe Everett had a hand in writing the dialogue or maybe Stan was inspired by the art he’d been handed to work from, but I always thought this was one of the better written Marvels of the period. There’s a variety of speech patterns in play, and while it’s still very much a product of its time, the dialogue is considerably less corny and cliched than what Stan was doing elsewhere.

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9. Foggy Nelson. Every hero needs a best friend, and it was obvious from the start that Foggy would always have Matt’s back.

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10. Karen Page. She started out as an innocent young lady with a hair-helmet, and like every superhero love interest, was doomed to a life of misunderstandings, abductions and near death experiences.

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11. The Fixer. The gloriously pig-faced wretch of a human being who ordered Battling Murdoch’s murder, the “beefy, overweight, fear-filled figure” you can’t help cheer when he’s felled by a heart attack in the subway while being chased by Daredevil.

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12. Daredevil’s billy club. His famous weapon started out as a modified cane, hinged in the middle with a flexible handle that allowed him to convert it from the walking stick that was part of his blind man’s disguise into a versatile weapon.

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13. The art of Bill Everett. Bill Everett’s style was his own. There was no looking at one of his jobs and questioning the artist. His work was dynamic and clearly told and his characters were unique, right down to the background figures and passersby. I loved his bold, expressive brushwork, whether on his own pencils or those of others; his brief run inking Kirby on Thor #170-75 in 1969 remains some of my favorite art of the decade.

Everett would only do the first issue of Daredevil before his day job and personal and deadline problems forced him to leave the book. Rereading that story to write this column, it makes me regret he was unable to do more. “The Origin of Daredevil” was one of the richest, most complex debuts of the first Marvel Age and it would have been fascinating to see what he had in mind to follow it up.

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MORE

— A Wild and Wet Time With Bill Everett’s SUB-MARINER. Click here.

— In Defense of DAREDEVIL’s Yellow Costume. Click here.

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PAUL KUPPERBERG was a Silver Age fan who grew up to become a Bronze Age comic book creator, writer of Superman, the Doom Patrol, and Green Lantern, creator of Arion Lord of Atlantis, Checkmate, and Takion, and slayer of Aquababy, Archie, and Vigilante. He is the Harvey and Eisner Award nominated writer of Archie Comics’ Life with Archie, and his YA novel Kevin was nominated for a GLAAD media award and won a Scribe Award from the IAMTW. He also wrote an essay for DC’s Aquaman: 80 Years of the King of the Seven Seas. Check out his new memoir, Panel by Panel: My Comic Book Life. 

Website: https://www.paulkupperberg.net/

Shop: https://www.paulkupperberg.net/shop-1