Daredevil, Man without Fear of Wokeness

“When did superhero comics get so WOKE?”

“Why do comic book writers today have to make everything political?”

“I wish we could just go back to the kind of simple adventure stories I read as a kid.”

A loud, vocal contingent of modern comic book fandom insists that social and political commentary in superhero stories didn’t come along until 2016, when monthly comics turned overnight from epic Secret Wars-style slugfests to anti-Republican poetry slams drawn by CalArts dropouts in between Women’s Marches and Ani DiFranco concerts.

But to think that ignores literally the entire history of superhero comics. Action Comics #1, the very first superhero comic, introduces us to Superman, who fights for social justice by taking on gangsters and corrupt politicians both in costume and in his secret identity as crusading reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper. Just a few years later, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby made their politics clear when they created Captain America and introduced him to the world by drawing him punching Adolf Hitler in the face on the cover of Captain America Comics #1, published a whole NINE MONTHS before America declared war on Germany.

Fast forward 46 years to my childhood. Ronald Reagan was in the White House, keeping America safe from Russia and the imminent threat of nuclear war, Bill Cosby is America’s dad, everybody’s a capitalist and a Republican, and everybody thinks that Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA is an upbeat, optimistic, stadium sing-a-long anthem about how great America is. That’s as much as I understood about politics as a pre-teen growing up in smalltown Ohio, but to be fair, that’s as much as any American adult understood about politics in the mid-eighties.

My favorite TV show, toy line, and comic book by far was G.I. Joe, which fed into that whole capitalism/patriotism zeitgeist. Americans were good guys, Russians and terrorists were bad guys, but we had better guys and better toys and that meant we were always going to win because that’s just the way things should be.

By the fall of 1987, I was a diehard fan of G.I. Joe and Transformers comic books, but had started reading most of Marvel’s newsstand superhero titles, too. Spider-Man, Captain America, Avengers, Hulk, X-Men…and, finally, Daredevil, a character I knew only from a recent guest appearance in the “Gang War” storyline in Amazing Spider-Man, where DD berated and insulted Spider-Man while trying to explain to Spidey that they should stand by and let The Kingpin take control of New York City’s criminal operations again because hey, somebody’s got to do it, right?

Not the greatest first impression, but intriguing enough to check out Daredevil’s monthly comic…eventually.

The first issue of Daredevil that I picked up promised a battle between DD and a killer robot, plus a guest appearance from the X-Men’s Wolverine. And that story opened with Daredevil swinging through Hell’s Kitchen while contemplating his life as a former lawyer/full-time vigilante whose faith in the American judicial system has been thoroughly tested by his recent ordeals at the hands of the untouchable NYC crimelord Wilson Fisk, aka The Kingpin of Crime.

A chance encounter with a kid named Tyrone shortly before–like Murdock himself at that age–was blinded by sudden exposure to toxic chemicals offers writer Ann Nocenti (with artists Rick Leonardi and Al Williamson) he opportunity to touch upon the subjects of corporate greed, pollution, and the limits of an American legal system that prioritizes profit over protection.

Heavy stuff, but delivered without preaching and in such a straightforward way that any middle-school social studies student can follow along.

Over the next two years, Nocenti, Williamson, and regular series penciler John Romita Jr. tackled environmentalism, the American agricultural industry and the military industrial complex, ethics of modern scientific research, depression, infidelity, violence in the media, our nation’s state of perpetual war, and whether humankind by nature is inherently good or evil. It’s not like Marvel had shied away from socio-political commentary before, but on a spinner rack full of comics that generally upheld and looked favorably on the status quo, telling you that if you followed the rules and tried to do the right thing, you’d come out on top, Daredevil stood out. Things might not work out. Authority figures won’t always have all the answers. Sometimes your best efforts will be in vain against an uncaring and indifferent world.

And that’s okay.

We all have to learn that sometime, and I’m grateful that we had a kind and sympathetic guide like Ann Nocenti to walk us through it. 

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