It’s hard to remember, when the much-anticipated Daredevil: Born Again is airing on Disney+, that there was a time when the Daredevil comic book was on the brink of cancellation.
In May 1979, a young artist named Frank Miller took over pencilling chores on the Daredevil comic book with issue #158, replacing the legendary Gil Kane (still one of the most prolific DD artists of all time, having pencilled 90 issues between 1966 and 1979). The book was only being released bimonthly, and in those days, that was often a sign that it was on the chopping block. So when writer Roger McKenzie quit the title after issue #166 in September 1980, editor Denny O’Neil—figuring he had nothing to lose on a failing series—let Miller take over the writing chores. Miller had already been credited as a co-plotter with McKenzie on a couple of issues.
This proved to be the character’s salvation. In his very first issue, #168, Miller created the character of Elektra, retconned as a college sweetheart of Matt Murdock’s with whom he is reunited in the present when he’s Daredevil and she’s an assassin. This issue was a massive hit, and Elektra has gone on to become a major character in the Marvel Universe.
And then in issue #170, Miller brought the Kingpin of Crime into the storyline. By issue #171 sales had improved to the point that Marvel made the book monthly again, and sales continued to climb as Miller took this second-rate Spider-Man villain and turned him into a major force to be reckoned with. Downplaying the Kingpin’s use of gadgets and highlighting his great physical presence and strength—more of a threat, rather than something he used often—Miller emphasized the gangster aspect more than the super-villain aspect, and it worked.
Daredevil had often come across as a second-rate Spider-Man. Miller moved him away from that, made him more of a street-level superhero fighting gangsters and assassins, giving him his own vibe that was less superhero-y, but still fitting the pulp mindset of the superhero comic.
Miller left after issue #191 in February 1983, but returned in 1986 for the Born Again storyline, paired with artist David Mazzucchelli, an up-and-coming artist who’d taken over art chores on Daredevil in 1984. Mazzucchelli’s art had been quite good up to this point, but there was a noticeable stylistic change when he was joined by Miller, no doubt due in part to his now inking his own work rather than having it finished by others. The art had more detail, but at the same time, it was more stylized. Always good with body language, that tendency improved tremendously in Born Again. Mazzucchelli has always been a master of perfect striking single-panel visuals while maintaining the kineticism necessary for sequential art, and he does some of his best work here.1
It’s impossible to overstate how influential this storyline was. Upon learning that Daredevil and Matt Murdock are one and the same, the Kingpin dismantles Murdock’s life bit by bit, rendering him broke, homeless, and disbarred. Having lost everything, Murdock builds himself back up, eventually taking on the Kingpin, who is frustrated by the fact that Murdock refuses to be defeated. In the end, he is the protector of Hell’s Kitchen, an aspect of Daredevil’s MO that has remained definitive (if not always consistent) in the four decades since the Born Again story.
While the new TV series takes its title from Born Again, it is adapting more from the run on Daredevil by writer Charles Soule that started in January 2018 with issue #595, in which the Kingpin has been elected mayor of New York. In truth, the third season of Netflix’s Daredevil series already was an adaptation of Born Again, but the very title has become so important to the history of this character that its use in the new series is almost a gimme.
Looking back at the story forty years later is an interesting look at such an influential storyline, and it’s fun to see what still works—which is a surprisingly large amount of it—and what doesn’t.
Sadly, one of the things that really really doesn’t work is the very beginning of it, to wit, the character assassination of Karen Page. Page was created in DD’s premiere comic in 1964 as the secretary at the law firm of Nelson and Murdock. Her and Murdock’s relationship was of a type Stan Lee was fond of writing in the 1960s, where the couple can’t consummate their attraction due to various circumstances. Cyclops fears expressing his feeling for Jean Grey because of his uncontrollable powers, Peter Parker has trouble maintaining relationships because of his dual life as Spider-Man, and both Don Blake (Thor’s human identity) and Murdock see their disability as a stumbling block to a relationship.
Eventually, because Murdock and Page were unable to make their relationship work (she learned he was Daredevil and couldn’t handle him being in danger all the time), she quit the law firm and moved to Los Angeles to become an actor. She was last seen in issue #138 by Marv Wolfman and John Byrne, a 1976 crossover with the Ghost Rider comic, in which she seemed to be pootling along nicely in her career.
So it was rather a shock to open up issue #227 in 1986 and see Page’s first appearance in a decade, and she’s a junkie, her acting career having been in porn films, and she sells Daredevil’s secret identity for a fix.
It wasn’t obvious in 1986, but in the years since then, it’s become a rather unfortunate pattern with Miller: he keeps defaulting to women characters who are sex workers of some kind, including retconning existing ones into it. He did it again a year later in Batman: Year One, giving Catwoman a past as a prostitute, and again in the Sin City miniseries, where every female character is either a sex worker or sexualized into the ground.
Things improve tremendously after that. Miller was the first writer to show how psychologically damaged Murdock is, particularly emphasized after Elektra was murdered by Bullseye in issue #181 and Murdock struggles to deal with it. This is cranked up to eleven in Born Again. Kingpin’s dismantling of Murdock’s life is devastating. (And also delightfully dated: notices in the mail, cancelled checks, calls made on corded phones attached to the wall, not a personal computer or mobile phone in sight…) The effect on Murdock is profound.
One of the absolute best moments in the storyline comes at the end of the very first chapter. Murdock has been disbarred, he’s broke, his life is a shambles, his ex-girlfriend is dating his best friend, and everything sucks.
Then his house blows up.
This is a major turning point, because up until this point, Murdock has just assumed that he’s the world’s worst victim of Murphy’s Law. The idea of it being a conspiracy to bring him down never occurs to him until his home is destroyed. In that moment, he realizes that the Kingpin knows who he is and is responsible for his misery. “I never would have connected it to you,” Murdock says as he holds the tattered remains of his Daredevil costume. “Nothing about it said gangster—until this. It was a nice piece of work, Kingpin. You shouldn’t have signed it.”
Murdock might have given in to despair at that point, but now he had a focal point for his anger and frustration.
The theme of the storyline is that a true hero remains a hero even when everything is taken away. Murdock loses everything. In the end, all he has is Page. Everyone connected to the revelation of Daredevil’s identity is ordered to be killed by the Kingpin, but Page has main character armor (and also has been through some stuff, as we’ve seen her threatened and kidnapped by super-villains throughout her tenure as a Marvel character), and she manages to make her way back to the Big Apple courtesy of one of the gangsters whom she encountered while making porn. At the end of the story, he doesn’t have his law practice or his friends anymore, he just has Page and a new life in Hell’s Kitchen.
Not that he does it all alone. Reporter Ben Urich—who figured out that DD and Murdock are one and the same in an earlier subplot, written by McKenzie in issues #153-164—is a key player in the plot as well. Miller always wrote Urich well—he was also the artist for most of the issues where Urich figured out who’s under the DD mask—and he’s particularly good here. Urich attempts to find the truth, is briefly scared off by the Kingpin’s goons, and eventually writes an exposé called “The Kingpin of Crime” that runs in the Daily Bugle and severely damages Kingpin’s criminal empire.
Kingpin’s own hubris plays a role here, too. Not just in blowing up Murdock’s home, but also his later insistence on making use of a crazed super-soldier named Nuke to take down Daredevil. That proves his undoing, as Nuke’s insanity results in Hell’s Kitchen being very badly damaged in a very public way, one that brings in the Avengers. Captain America in particular is a useful ally here, as he stands for the American ideal while Nuke is a government operative that is endemic of America at its worst.2
It’s to Miller and Mazzucchelli’s credit that the story could still probably work today. There are some details that make it clear that it’s 1986, but most of those are minor and would only require a bit of tweaking. Besides the things mentioned above, there’s also Page being able to travel effortlessly from Mexico to the U.S.—something that has been more complicated since 2001—and the influence of newspapers. Oh, and Urich making a big deal about a front page of the Daily Bugle having a bit in color, which was difficult and expensive in 1986 and an everyday occurrence now.
One thing that really dates it—and has been an issue in both comics and screen adaptations—is the neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen. Within a decade of Born Again’s publication, the neighborhood had gentrified into the Clinton neighborhood, and these days is also the home of Hudson Yards. The days of the neighborhood being the home of tough working-class folks is long gone. Though, to its credit, the first season of Netflix’s Daredevil series came up with a brilliant workaround, by having the neighborhood suffer back into poverty and such after the Chitauri attack on central Manhattan in the 2012 Avengers movie.
One of the best things Born Again did was set up the status quo for one of the strongest, and most underrated runs on Daredevil, to wit, the issues written by Ann Nocenti, eventually joined by John Romita Jr. and Al Williamson on art chores, a run that lasted until issue #291 in 1991.
There have been plenty of DD-Kingpin confrontations over the years since Born Again. Nocenti and Romita Jr. did one in their run, there was DD beating Kingpin nearly to death in issue #300 by D.G. Chichester and Lee Weeks, another contretemps that also saw the creation of the character of Echo in a run by David Mack in 2003, Murdock representing Kingpin in court in a 2007 issue by Ed Brubaker and Michael Lark, and, of course, the Mayor Fisk storyline that started in the aforementioned issue #595 and which concluded in the 2022 Devil’s Reign miniseries by Chip Zdarsky and Marco Checchetto. But none have had quite the staying power and influence of Born Again.
