Daredevil is one of Marvel’s most popular heroes, and one of my personal favorites. The Man Without Fear willingly charges through the abyss every day in order to protect Hell’s Kitchen and its people, and he has one of the most unique powersets out of any hero around. At his core, Matt Murdock is a very simple man with a very simple goal; he wants to do God’s will and help whoever he can in whatever way he can. And yet, his struggles to live up to his ideals are what make him so interesting. It’s a very simple struggle, a man fighting to be the person he knows he should be, but it is gloriously effective and resonate. However, just because Matthew Murdock is simple does not mean that everything about him is easy to understand, or even makes sense.
Comic books are, at the end of the day, a rather silly medium a good portion of the time. That is not to discredit them, or to say that comic books do not tell some of the most emotionally impactful stories of all time. They do and always will, but they tell them through the fun and freeing lens of people their underwear on the outside of their clothes and lifting semi-trucks over their heads. To tell the stories they want, be they emotional or purely entertaining, they often have to ignore how actual physics or common sense works in our world. It’s all for the betterment of the story, and I agree with it most of the time, but sometimes it simply goes way too far and just really takes you out of the story. So with all of that said, let’s take a look at three things about Daredevil that just really don’t make any sense.
1) Why His Name is Daredevil
I understand the reasoning behind naming himself Daredevil, and I am in no way petitioning for him to change his name, but I really don’t think Daredevil is the best name for the effect Matt wants to have on Hell’s Kitchen. I get that he wanted to include the devil theme, which is a must, and that as the Man Without Fear he is regularly performing death-defying stunts of sheer wonder. His acrobatic skills are without question in the top ten of the entire Marvel Universe, and that’s including superpowered characters like Spider-Man. But at the same time, when I hear Daredevil I don’t immediately associate that with the actual devil. I imagine more of a motorcycle-riding stuntman, which brings to my next point. As much as I love Ghost Rider’s name, he should definitely be the one called Daredevil, right? Johnny Blaze was literally a daredevil before he became the Rider. I love Daredevil, but I think the name fit his original Silver Age appearances more, and as he’s evolved it fits far more tangentially.
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2) How His Enhanced Senses Work
Matt Murdock’s enhanced senses obviously defy physics as we understand them in our world. Again, that is a necessary part of telling an entertaining comic book, because every writer can’t also be expected to have three PhDs in physics. However, while my suspension of disbelief for this stuff is rather high, there are some things that Matt can do that he simply has no business doing, powers or no. There are some examples of Matt doing things that definitely trip my bullcrap alarms a bit, such as him being able to decipher the words on a computer screen by feeling the different levels of heat, which indicate the color and shape of what the screen is showing. Honestly, I can get behind that explanation after a moment of thought. One I cannot agree with is Matt Murdock being able to hear someone’s heartbeat through a cellphone. That’s just not how cellphones work. They don’t pick up that kind of noise to replicate on the other end. Matt’s senses are absolutely baffling.
3) How Bad He is at Keeping His Secret Identity
It’s a bit of a meme that Daredevil’s identity is constantly at risk. While he’s only been outed to the general public once, there have been plenty of his dastardly villains, a couple unfortunate exes, and a way too many times that his identity was almost revealed. Nobody owns an “I’m Not Daredevil” Christmas sweater without cause to wear that more often than anyone should ever have to. He’s had to have both Iron Fist and Black Panther impersonate him in order to prove Matt Murdock was somewhere Daredevil wasn’t, and let’s not forget when Matt made up the worst alter ego of all time to keep Karen and Foggy from sussing him out. When Spider-Man sent Matt Murdock, a blind man, a letter at his place of work telling him that he knew Matt was Daredevil but that he wasn’t going to tell anyone, which of course was read by Karen and Foggy because someone has to read Matt’s mail to him, Matt pretends to have a secret twin brother named Mike Murdock. Mike can see and is a criminal, and Matt can’t see and Daredevil isn’t a criminal, so obviously Mike is completely unrelated to either of them, right? Gosh, the fact that anyone bought Mike Murdock’s existence is a testament to how utterly insane Matt’s good fortune is, because any normal person would connect those dots in a second.
Daredevil, despite having pretty simple motivations, is downright confusing at times. A lot of the stuff he is able to do or chooses to do just doesn’t make any sense. And while I will be forever confounded by all of these things, I will also never stop loving Daredevil as a character. We don’t need to completely understand everything about a character to love them, and sometimes turning your brain off and not caring about common sense when you’re reading a good comic is all you need. The Mike Murdock thing will always bother me though.
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