Daredevil

When I was about seven years old, my dad would take me and my brother to the paper shop on a Saturday morning. We lived halfway along Eton Avenue in New Malden and the paper shop was just at the far end, across South Lane, on the corner of Green Lane.

My dad would give us 10p each as pocket money and we'd spend some of it on sweets but also 4p on a comic. Wol would always by 'The Amazing Spider-Man' and I would buy 'The Incredible Hulk'. Both of these weeklies were assembled by taking the American monthly comics and dividing them in four. One result of this was that sometimes the covers of our comics had a scene depicting part of the current story which we, in the UK, hadn't reached yet. (I suppose the older me would have been quite critical of the cheapskate sloppiness and lack of attention to detail but, back then, that was just another inexplicable facet of how life worked.)

Each comic contained three stories: the title plus two others. My comic always featured 'Daredevil' as its middle story and he was my favourite super-hero. The story ran that, as a boy, Matthew "Matt" Murdoch was struck across the eyes by a canister of radioactive material. (In the fifties and sixties, some sort of encounter with radioactivity was the easiest way to acquire super-powers.) Although Matt was blinded by the incident, his other senses were enhanced to an extraordinary degree and he also found he had a 'radar sense', which was actually a lot more useful than being able to see (apart from not being able to see colours).

As with so many of the classic heroes, Daredevil's story has taken on more depth over the years, as different writers have come and gone. Matt's dad - Battlin' Jack Murdoch - has taken on a much greater emphasis within the story, for example, as have his business partner, secretary and foes. (My brother has a neat theory, actually, about how the way these stories are told and re-told is a modern version of the oral history that made legends of characters like Robin Hood. We're seeing it in the films, too, with the re-boots of Spider-Man, Batman and Superman.)

I mention all this because, having finished season two of 'Arrow', Dan and I have been looking for a new series to watch together. Today, on Twitter, Gary Bainbridge - a man whose judgement I trust, especially around the topic of comics and super-heroes - was praising the Netflix series 'Daredevil', so Dan and I watched the first episode, this evening. It was brilliant. It strikes me how well Marvel have moved into film and TV, once again easily outclassing DC ('Arrow' got rather repetitive quite quickly). I think that's maybe because as a company, they've always been superior story tellers: Marvel heroes always had very real private lives, which lent a lot of depth to the comics.

So, anyway, thanks, Gary. I'm looking forward to catching up in the next ten episodes!