Product Description

Introducing Daredevil, his memorable supporting cast, and his many famous foes: the Owl, Mr. Fear, and the deadly Eel.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #197457 in Books
• Published on: 2005-08-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 544 pages

Customer Reviews

My favourite early Marvel hero
My favourite character of all the Silver age Marvel creations.
Stan Lee creates a blind super-hero who happens to be a lawyer, a play on justice being blind.
Getting powers from a chemical spillage that heightens his senses Matt Murdock dons a nifty red & yellow outfit and takes on the guy who arranged to have his father killed.
The second issue shows that Lee means business when he pits Daredevil against Electro, fresh from his defeat by Spider-Man.
From hereon there's a gallery of great villains drawn by Bill Everett and Wally Wood, The Owl, Matador, Mr. Fear, Stilt-Man, The Organisers animal men, the Plunderer where Ka-zar and his sabre-tooth are introduced, the Ox, the Masked Marauder with the obligatory Spider-Man appearance, and my favourite of all the early villains the Gladiator with his whirling blades and a great story line where Foggy Nelson pretends to be Daredevil. The story ends with The Gladiator showing he only wants to win in a fair fight. Even The Sub-Mariner appears trying to use Matt's law firm to claim the Earth for Atlantis, it's in this story that the familiar all red costume first appears.
The last stories feature the brilliant work of Gene Colan, the Turner of the comic world with his dramatic use of shading. The next few Colan volumes have some dramatic story-lines and some suitably psychotic villains.
As with all Marvel stories the characters are shown warts and all including the expected love triangle with Matt, his partner Foggy Nelson and secretary Karen Page.
Re-reading these stories again, over twenty years since I last read some of them, is a real treat and well worth the money.

A Blast From The Past
Following on from the other Essential books (X-Men, Spiderman, Hulk) Marvel have released Essntial Daredevil. Collecting together several of DD's early adventures in black & white at a affordable price.

Although the villians during this period were slighty laughable (Stiltman, Gladitor (not the Shiar one)) it is still a great read and worth buying just to see how DD started off.

If you enjoy Marvel history or are a DD fan then you should own this book, fans of the recent DD movie may want to read it - but beware Bullseye and Elektra wont be around for another 100 issues after the ones published in this book!!

Pulp heroics abound in Daredevil's first collection
Daredevil isn't a superhero. Really. A blind lawyer with awesome hearing who hits people with a stick would have fitted in just fine with Doc Savage, but is a little out of place sharing a world with the likes of The Mighty Thor. Like Batman and Captain America, he's a pulp hero who's somehow survived into a super-heroic world - although, unlike them, he wasn't created back in the 1930s, the heyday of pulp heroics, but in the 1960s. Still, Daredevil's pulpy roots shine through in this collection, which reprints his very earliest adventures, in which he battles mobsters, aliens, mad scientists, deranged costume-shop owners, and Stilt-Man. (All together, now: 'So long as I wear these stilts, I am invincible!') It's great, pulpy, action-packed stuff, and the relative lack of super-powers on display means that the focus is usually more on acrobatic heroics than on the scissors-paper-stone dynamics of fire-guy and force-field-girl working out how best to use their powers to stop flying-energy-blast-man. My favourite part, hands down, is the Plunderer arc, where Daredevil tangles with pirates, dinosaurs, jungle savages, foreign spies, would-be world conquerors, and an imitation Tarzan in a story that should really have been set in the 1930s; but really most of these stories are good, some of them (like the Organiser arc) are even quite well plotted, and Colan's art is brilliant.

I've seen it protested that Daredevil's early adventures and adversaries are 'silly', but this really misses the point. They're no more inherently silly than modern, grim-and-gritty Daredevil fighting ninjas; they just come at the character from a different perspective, full of wide-eyed wonder and faith in the powers of heroism and Science! If they're taken on their own terms, rather than compared to a completely inappropriate set of criteria, they hold up brilliantly; so when you tire of grim modernity, turn to Daredevil, throw your cynicism aside, and enjoy the simple pleasures of seeing a costumed vigilante punching gangsters in the head. For justice!