10 Worst Things Daredevil Has Ever Done

With cameos in “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law” and “Spider-Man: No Way Home” and the long-awaited revival series “Daredevil: Born Again” having finally hit Disney+, it’s safe to say that Matt Murdock is back in a big way. The Devil of Hell’s Kitchen has fully arrived in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, bringing one of the most popular characters in Marvel Comics history to a wider audience — but that audience might be in for a rude and bloody awakening when they realize just how daring this devil really is.

Many of these new fans will discover memorably grim moments in Daredevil’s history through classic runs from the likes of Frank Miller, Brian Michael Bendis, and Ed Brubaker, and will get to experience some of the best brutal stories Marvel has to offer for the first time. They may also encounter some of the stranger moments Marvel might want us to forget about. Either way, as threatening as Daredevil was in the beloved Netflix series starring Charlie Cox, the Man Without Fear doesn’t get much scarier than he does in these 10 moments from his Marvel Comics history.

These days, it should be well known that no superhero is worth dating. From Scott Summers to Peter Parker, the romantic partners of these characters are usually subjected to harsh treatment to push the hero’s story forward.

But while the aim of these storylines is usually to depict a good guy pushed to the edge by tragedy, Matt Murdock is almost always at the edge and rarely behaves like a “good” boyfriend. Everyone knows about his key relationships with legal administrator Karen Page (whom he at once romanced under the false identity of “Mike Murdock”) and deadly assassin Elektra Natchios, both of whom died gruesome deaths due to their mere proximity to him. There’s also Milla Donovan, a normal woman who is driven insane due to her relationship with Daredevil, and seemingly winds up permanently institutionalized as a result. And then there’s his on-and-off relationship with the Black Widow herself, Natasha Romanoff, which at one point during Tony Isabella’s run in the ’70s saw Matt essentially sexually harassing her.

The most disturbing and potentially abusive “Daredevil” relationship was between Matt and a powerful businesswoman named Heather Glenn, who eventually inherited the corrupt Glenn Industries from her father. To call their relationship volatile would be an understatement, and it eventually culminated in Matt using his position as a lawyer to essentially sue the company so hard Heather would have no choice but to abdicate her position and marry him. She relents but is driven to alcoholism by Matt’s coercive treatment and subsequent abandonment. When she tries to reach out to Matt for help months later, he ignores her. She dies by suicide as a result — and, because Marvel apparently wasn’t satisfied by the punishment thus far, her grave is defiled by the Vulture shortly thereafter.

If there’s anyone besides Heather Glenn and the women mentioned above who could easily sue Matt Murdock for emotional distress, it’s Mary Walker — the mutant supervillain better known as Typhoid Mary. Her origin story has been retconned multiple times over the years, but the most streamlined version for our purposes is that Mary, having already shown symptoms of the classic (read: deeply offensive) comic book/film and television version of dissociative identity disorder, encounters Daredevil for the first time as a sex worker. 

In here, Mary is employed by a criminal Daredevil had been trying to apprehend for some time, as are a few other sex workers who, somewhat surprisingly, try to defend the criminal against Daredevil’s assault. During the fight, Daredevil throws Mary half-naked through a plate-glass window. She falls at least a story into the street, where she vows vengeance against all men.

Mary soon gains mastery over her powers, which manifest when her “alter” identity emerges to protect her. For a time, while this protective alter is working as a top-tier enforcer in Kingpin’s ranks, Mary’s primary civilian personality dates Matt Murdock, because comics. Their relationship is complicated when Matt discovers her dual identity, which leads to several fights and, ultimately, to Matt doing something pretty unthinkable. After seducing the woman he knows is mentally vulnerable and presumably sleeping with her, Matt does the Daredevil-dash into the night while she’s unconscious — then sends the police to forcibly institutionalize her. 

The showrunners of the Netflix “Daredevil” series had plans to introduce Typhoid Mary in a hypothetical fourth season, and we expected her to be one of the Marvel characters introduced in Phase 5 of the MCU. As of writing, however, she has yet to appear outside the completely irrelevant “Iron Fist” series, and, given how unsettling her storyline is in the comics, it isn’t hard to see why Marvel Studios is so hesitant to use her.

If your only exposure to “Daredevil” lore has been through the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the various, dubiously canonical Netflix series the character has been featured in, you might remember the Hand as an overarching threat. (If you happened to watch the entirely unremarkable “Defenders” team-up miniseries, Sigourney Weaver’s character, Alexandra, was the leader of the organization.) In the comics, they’re a significantly more imposing force. They have a similar vibe to the League of Shadows/League of Assassins in DC Comics (Ra’s al Ghul’s super-secret ninja posse), being a vast, international, clandestine assassination force that employs skilled humans and superhumans alike.

Typhoid Mary has been a member of the Hand in the past, as have multiple X-Men, Iron Man’s archnemesis the Mandarin, the “Spider-Man” foe Hobgoblin, and, of course, Daredevil’s favorite frenemies Elektra Natchios and Wilson Fisk. For the most part, the Hand’s ranks are made up of countless faceless ninjas, a handful of whom could give a Marvel hero a fair bit of trouble, especially Daredevil. This made it all the more surprising when he himself took up the mantle of … head-Hand- Hand-head? The Head of the Hand?

In the 2010 event storyline “Shadowland,” Daredevil manages to become the league’s leader after being possessed by their sacred demon. Under its influence, he turned Hell’s Kitchen into the Shadowland — essentially a draconian prison and military base for him to exact even harsher forms of extralegal justice. Sure, readers can excuse all the death and destruction Matt causes as the Head-Handcho (nailed it) as being the actions of a man infested with demons (or, rather, more literal demons than usual). But taking over a murderous criminal organization with the intent to wield its power for himself isn’t exactly out of character for Daredevil.

Wilson Fisk is quietly one of the most iconic Marvel Comics villains of all time. His appearances in “Daredevil” and “Spider-Man” stories made him a classic antagonist, and his encounters with figures like the Punisher and Tony Stark are all the more satisfying because of his long history of influence over New York. He was further popularized by his inclusion in the ’90s “Spider-Man” animated series, various Marvel video games, and appearances in multiple live-action films, as well as in the critically acclaimed “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.”

Suffice it to say, across media, the Kingpin is a fearsome, imposing narrative force. When Brian Michael Bendis got to work on his seminal run of “Daredevil” in the late 2000s, it was only natural that the character be involved in a major capacity — but what Bendis ultimately did with him was not only brilliant, but totally brutal. Having been pushed to the edge yet again by Fisk’s constant assault on his life, Matt dons his Daredevil costume and attacks him with more ferocity than ever. 

As Daredevil pummels his enemy, he comes to the realization that Kingpin can’t be stopped by the law or simply scared away. He has to have his power — the respect he’s gained from New York’s underworld, with which he rules Hell’s Kitchen — forcibly taken from him. So, after beating Kingpin into a bloody pulp, Daredevil straps Kingpin to the hood of a car and drives him through the wall of Fisk’s headquarters. Daredevil then declares himself the new Kingpin of Hell’s Kitchen over Fisk’s half-dead body.

His reign is predictably short-lived, due to both Fisk’s ability to manipulate events from behind the scenes and Matt’s own moral and mental instability. Still, as far as endings for Kingpin go, Fisk got off lightly. When Bendis teamed up with writer David W. Mack in 2012 for a canonical, future-set spiritual successor to his run titled “Daredevil: End of Days,” they had an older Matt Murdock publicly execute Fisk after he had been “legally” freed by authorities once again.

Daredevil didn’t always exercise the same restraint he shows in modern comics (which, if you’ve been keeping track, is already distressing little). In earlier comics that also depict the character himself at an earlier stage in his superhero career, Matt is shown to be even quicker to rage, vengeance, and physical punishment. It’s during this period that Matt beats up those sex workers and throws Typhoid Mary out of a second-story window, and while this may be one of his most consequential acts, it’s far from the most unsettling.

In Frank Miller’s 1993 miniseries “Daredevil: The Man Without Fear,” Matt’s best friend, Foggy Nelson, is shown to be ruthlessly bullied in college by a freshman student named Brad. To be as fair as possible, the extent of the bullying is pretty severe. He constantly ridicules Foggy for his weight, chases him with his car, and implies that he’ll attack him on the walk home to his dorm — not quite to the level of the average Stephen King high schooler, but close enough to get Matt’s attention.

Matt goes vigilante and ambushes Brad. He presumably overpowers Brad, strips him of all his clothing, ties him up, gags him, and leaves him naked in the snowy streets of the city for his friends to find later. It feels way over the line, even for a young Matt Murdock, and if anything proves that the devil inside of him had always been a danger to others.

As TV shows like “24” were helping American audiences get real comfortable with their heroes torturing bad guys for intelligence (or really for whatever “justified” reasons the writers could concoct to inject a little violent thrill into the story), Ed Brubaker did his part in the comic book medium by having Daredevil do things that would make even Jack Bauer hesitate. Both Frank Miller and Brian Michael Bendis had Daredevil do his fair share of physical and psychological torture in their own preceding takes on the character, but it’s under Brubaker’s pen — the instrument of a prolific comic writer who was, incidentally, raised on the U.S. Naval base at Guantanamo Bay — where things get uncomfortably real.

Desperate for answers to save his loved ones and with his villain, the Ox, held captive in chains, Daredevil begins his enhanced interrogation in the expected way by beating him nearly senseless. When that fails, Daredevil takes a step back and retrieves a flamethrower from a table of ominous instruments, then tells the Ox that he’ll do “whatever it takes” to get the answers he needs. (It’s worth noting that Brubaker and artist Michael Lark render the scene with appropriate darkness — Daredevil doesn’t exactly look like a hero here.)

Violent interrogation and torture have become core to Daredevil’s characterization thanks to Bendis, Miller, and Brubaker, all of whom influenced his popular Netflix adaptation. In the series, Charlie Cox’s Daredevil tortured a man for information by surgically stabbing him in the eyeball. Poetic, given that Matt himself can’t see? Uh, sure … but, like most torture scenes where we’re supposed to side with the torturer, the implications are deeply unpleasant and arguably out of place in a superhero story.

Now, some readers may be eager to contradict the final point in the previous slide by saying that the whole idea behind Daredevil is that he’s not a perfectly moral superhero, and is something closer to an antihero. This logic holds up to some extent, but not quite anymore when you consider how many storylines are written to interrogate Matt Murdock’s supposedly complex morality, only to ultimately prove that he’s basically the sweet cinnamon roll who quips with Spider-Man and charms any courtroom he walks into. Only one writer has definitively committed to Daredevil’s inherent lack of heroism in a meaningful way — and, expectedly, it was infamous superhero-hater Garth Ennis.

Best known for writing the ridiculously graphic series “Preacher” and “The Boys,” Ennis has always been a unique — if occasionally exhausting — voice in comics due to his broad mistrust of those who wield extraordinary and extrajudicial power. This made him a natural voice for a “Punisher” series, during which he had Frank Castle confront Daredevil about the supposed difference in their moral codes. 

Daredevil claims to be above the Punisher morally because he doesn’t kill his enemies (heavy asterisk here, but we’ll get to that later), but Frank insists that Daredevil would be a killer too if it meant saving more lives. To prove his argument, Frank tapes a gun to Daredevil’s hand and tells him to pull the trigger if he wants to prevent the imminent assassination of a criminal. Daredevil folds and tries to kill Frank — only to discover the chamber is empty.

If this sounds familiar to MCU fans, that’s because the scene was faithfully recreated for Charlie Cox and Jon Bernthal’s characters in the second season of the former’s Netflix show. In the comics, Ennis and artist Steve Dillon portray it as a moral reckoning for Matt — though it’s a bit head-scratching now, given how many times Daredevil has straight-up murdered his enemies.

Back in 2003, 20th Century Fox released “Daredevil,” a classic bottom-of-the-barrel early-2000s superhero flick that probably should’ve scared Ben Affleck away from tights for good. Nostalgia has helped it age better than it deserves, with Netflix “Daredevil” star Charlie Cox singing some muted praises for Affleck’s take and fans daydreaming about Affleck’s scrapped return as the character in 2024’s “Deadpool & Wolverine.” Our overall opinions about the 2003 film aside, there is one scene in particular that still strikes us, albeit for the wrong reasons.

Early in the movie, Affleck’s Daredevil follows an armed criminal into a New York subway station. During their brief fight, he knocks the criminal onto the train tracks — not an unfamiliar scenario for Daredevil, perhaps even inspired by a scene from Frank Miller’s run in the ’80s in which Matt nearly leaves an enemy to die on the subway tracks. Instead of recusing his injured target so that he can face justice in a court of law (y’know, that place Matt works at, the moral principles of which he occasionally pretends to care about), Matt kneels down a taunts him that “the light at the end of the tunnel” isn’t heaven: “It’s the C train!”

Out of character for Daredevil? Not really. In contrast to Batman, Daredevil’s “no-kill rule” is more of a “no-kill guideline” that he’s at least accidentally broken as recently as 2019. He also once knocked a man into a body of water and watched him drown during Miller’s “Man Without Fear” miniseries.

Speaking of the 2003 “Daredevil” movie, readers surely remember Colin Farrell’s delightfully unhinged take on the character Bullseye. Though his “Matrix”-inspired costume is far from the spandex he normally wears in the comics, one element of his character design is so distinctive that it was borrowed by Brian Michael Bendis in disturbing fashion during his run on “Daredevil” — the bullseye scar.

Bullseye has long been one of Matt’s most deranged and personally motivated adversaries, often targeting and successfully killing his loved ones just to torment him. So when Matt finally has Bullseye dead to rights and pinned to the ground after an emotional, bloody, and brutal rematch between the two, the vigilante lets his devil out. Daredevil grabs a nearby chisel and — with Bullseye seemingly unable to even scream for mercy as he chokes on his own blood — carves a bullseye into his head. With such animosity brimming beneath the surface, it’s no wonder Matt took advantage of the demon possession in “Shadowland” to finally kill Bullseye for good (or until the comics brought him back to life, because comics).

“Matt Murdock: Baby-Murderer” might sound like a headline J. Jonah Jameson might publish in the Daily Bugle, but it very nearly became a reality in Kevin Smith’s “Daredevil” miniseries “Guardian Devil.” In the 1998-1999 story, Matt Murdock (unwittingly under the influence of an illusion created by Mysterio) becomes certain that a newborn baby is the Antichrist. Despite attempts from his former flame, Black Widow, to snap Matt back to his senses, Matt hurls the baby from a rooftop — twice. The child is saved both times, with Matt eventually realizing that maybe he shouldn’t be killing an infant on the orders of a “priest” he barely knows.

Matt is justifiably upset at having been taken advantage of in this way, and is soon able to deduce that Mysterio was behind the whole affair. When the two meet, however, Mysterio reveals that he’s been staving off a terminal cancer diagnosis the whole time — which inspires Daredevil to soberly urge Mysterio to take his own life. Disturbingly, Mysterio obliges. Smith’s “Guardian Devil” is a strange story, to say the least — but one that holds true to the consistently murky morals of Matt Murdock.