DAREDEVIL 135
the corpulent, bald-headed Kingpin, created by Lee and Romita as a Spider-Man
villain, and made him Daredevil’s arch-nemesis. Formerly a crimelord who used his
massive proportions to trounce his enemies, the Kingpin was now a brutal, Machia-
vellian schemer, perfectly at home in the hard-boiled fi lm noir setting Miller had
been shaping the series into; and Murdock himself was established as a Catholic by
Miller.
Miller’s infl uences at the time included the work of his predecessor Jim Shooter
and fi lmmakers Orson Welles and Fritz Lang, but also comics pioneer Will Eisner.
As interviewer Peter Sanderson put it in a question to Miller in 1981, “[A]part from
darkness, shadows, a big city with a lot of crime and seaminess, rain, sewers, torn
pieces of paper, a good-humored optimistic hero who often fi nds himself in funny
situations, a former girlfriend who is now on the outside of law, and an arch villain
who controls all crime in the city, are there any similarities between your Daredevil
and Th e Spirit?”
Whereas most superhero comics at the time were fi lled with caption boxes
narrating the action, Miller’s stories applied a much more visual, “cinematic” approach
to storytelling. His and Janson’s work became increasingly expressionist, refl ecting
the characters’ interior in their surroundings. Miller left Daredevil in 1982, after
three commercially successful and critically acclaimed years. He has since returned
to the character for select projects, notably for the “Born Again” storyline, illustrated
by David Mazzucchelli, that ran through issues #227 through #233 in 1986. In it,
the Kingpin learns Daredevil’s secret identity, given up for drug money by Murdock’s
former girlfriend Page, whom Miller re-introduced as a porn actress and heroin
addict. Th e Kingpin sets out to tear down Murdock’s life, piece by piece, while Miller,
in turn, deconstructs the hero, stripping away all the surplus elements and boiling the
character down to his essence.
Between 1986 and 1991, Ann Nocenti wrote the series. Her stories, most of which
were illustrated by John Romita Jr., continued to be more psychologically slanted than
the usual superhero fare of the time. Later writers replicated the surface qualities of
Miller’s work, but not its spirit. From 1996 through 1998, there was an eff ort to return
the character to his swashbuckling roots, but sales continued to decline even after this
reversion to a less grim version.
In 1998, Daredevil was relaunched with a new issue #1 by editors Joe Quesada
and Jimmy Palmiotti. “Guardian Devil,” an eight-part storyline written by acclaimed
independent fi lmmaker Kevin Smith and drawn by Quesada, was, in many ways, a
sequel to “Born Again.” It picked up themes and threads introduced by Miller and
successfully recaptured the spirit and urgency of the Miller stories. For the fi rst time
in years, Daredevil returned to being one of Marvel’s best-selling series. Between
2002 and 2009, the title was written fi rst by Brian Michael Bendis (with artist
Alex Maleev), and later by Ed Brubaker (with artist Michael Lark), and both peri-
ods remained fi rmly rooted in the work Miller and Mazzucchelli had done in “Born
Again.”
