Across the more than sixty years of comic books starring Marvel’s man without fear, Daredevil has blazed a remarkable trail. Though he sometimes shares panels with the Avengers, Spider-Man, or the Fantastic Four, the blind guardian of Hell’s Kitchen has been a pretty unique hero compared to many of the others who populate Marvel’s New York City. There are plenty of remarkable stories featuring Daredevil that have been published, but the reality of it is that few of them would exist if it weren’t for a stretch from 1979 to 1983, when Frank Miller began his work on the character and started to push the hero into new places.
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Speaking with ComicBook about his new memoir, Push the Wall: My Life, Writing, Drawing, and the Art of Storytelling, we had the chance to speak to Miller about his entire career, including his time with Daredevil. We asked Miller if his original time with the character was ever guided by knowing that readers wanted something a little darker, or if it was his own instincts. The answer is that both are true
“I was definitely following my instincts,” Miller teased. “I was lucky in that the audience had grown older, and there was a hunger for more varied material and for comics that pushed things a little further. And I always loved old crime movies and crime novels and such, and Daredevil was an awfully good vehicle to tell crime stories.”
As comic readers, now, though, Daredevil was just one of several comic book characters that Miller put his stamp on over the years, even <a href="https://comicvibe.com/sailor-moon-is-officially-returning-to-the-big-screen-on-august-1/” title=”Sailor Moon Is Officially Returning to the Big Screen on August 1″>returning to him more than once to continue expanding on the character for Marvel and making his footprint even bigger. Miller revealed that getting into the headspace for these characters was never a tough thing for him, noting that an “inner pain” within all of them was something he could relate to. He went on to call Superman, citing the man of steel’s inner pain as making it easy to latch onto him as a character
“I realized that, of all the characters I’d done who have this tremendous sense of loss, nobody could match (Superman),” Miller said. “He lost a planet; he lost a species. And he’s the one who’s really trying to make sense of things. So there’s always a connection that presents itself. Of course, with the characters that I make up myself, sometimes I don’t even know where they come from, but they’re clearly answering things within me.”
Among those original characters created by Miller, as fans know, is Elektra, Daredevil’s on-again, off-again love interest who came from a specific place for Miller
“I wanted Daredevil to have a figure in his life that was almost like a doppelganger of him, a character who is a mirror image, but an opposite at the same time. And so I pulled upon the Greek mythology to extract the character of Elektra and made her an old girlfriend, and one thing led to another.”
The rest, as they say, is history
Miller’s book, Push the Wall: My Life, Writing, Drawing, and the Art of Storytelling, is now available
