Daredevil #1: The Man Without Fear Begins
Daredevil #1, cover dated April 1964, introduced attorney Matt Murdock, blinded as a child and left with heightened remaining senses, as the hero Daredevil. Stan Lee wrote it and Bill Everett drew it, and VeVe's comic store carries officially licensed Marvel digital comics.
A boy pushes an old man out of the path of a truck carrying radioactive material and takes the exposure meant for the stranger instead. It blinds him permanently and, in the same accident, sharpens every other sense he has to a degree no ordinary person experiences. That origin, equal parts sacrifice and curse, opens Daredevil #1 and sets the tone for one of Marvel’s more unusual heroes.
What the issue establishes
Matt Murdock grows up blind, trained rigorously by his father, a struggling boxer named Jack Murdock, to compensate through discipline and study rather than pity. He becomes a lawyer. When his father is murdered by a crime boss after refusing to throw a fight, Murdock builds a costumed identity, Daredevil, to find justice the courtroom cannot reliably deliver. Stan Lee wrote the story, and artist Bill Everett, a veteran creator who had drawn Namor the Sub-Mariner back in 1939, drew the debut issue.
The premise gave Marvel a hero who could not simply overpower his way through problems. Daredevil’s abilities, heightened hearing, touch, smell, and a radar sense that maps his surroundings without vision, are compensations rather than superpowers in the traditional sense, and that framing kept the character grounded in a way few other 1964 Marvel launches attempted.
The costume problem
Daredevil’s original costume was yellow, black, and red, and it did not last. Everett ran badly late on the debut, and the book went through several artists in its first year. In issue #7, artist Wally Wood redesigned the character in the now-iconic all-red suit that has remained the character’s default look for six decades. Few major Marvel heroes changed their signature costume this quickly or this permanently, and the yellow suit’s brief run is now one of the most recognizable footnotes in the character’s history precisely because it looks so unlike what came after.
A lawyer as the secret identity, deliberately
Marvel had built plenty of heroes around scientists and reporters by 1964. Murdock’s identity as a practicing attorney gave the book a structural device none of the others had: a hero whose day job was fighting the same corruption his night job fought, through entirely different tools. That dual pursuit of justice, legal and otherwise, became the defining tension of the character across decades of subsequent writers, most notably during Frank Miller’s celebrated run in the early 1980s, which pushed the book into noir territory the 1964 debut only hinted at.
Collecting Daredevil #1
Daredevil #1 sits below Marvel’s true 1961 and 1962 foundational keys in collecting hierarchy but remains a significant Silver Age book in its own right, aided by a character whose screen and streaming presence has grown substantially since the 2000s. High-grade survivors are uncommon for the same reasons as any newsstand comic of the period: low preservation rates, non-archival paper, and a readership that treated the books as disposable entertainment.
Strong CGC-graded copies bring serious prices at major auction houses. The yellow costume on the cover draws some collectors on its own, since it belongs to a visual era of the character that lasted only a handful of issues.
Daredevil on VeVe today
VeVe’s comic store carries officially licensed Marvel digital comics, and checking there directly is the right way to see whether any Daredevil issues are currently available, rather than assuming based on this article. The Marvel franchise hub covers the wider catalogue, and what mint numbers mean explains how digital edition numbering works if the concept is new to you.
To look around the app before deciding anything, start a free VeVe account. New collectors get US$10 in credit toward a first piece, no card required, and the free credit page has the details.
The sense that never gets old
Daredevil’s radar sense is the kind of power concept that should have aged badly, a workaround dreamed up to solve a storytelling problem rather than a fully realized idea. Instead it became one of the most consistently well-used abilities in the entire Marvel roster, precisely because every writer since 1964 has had to keep reinventing what a blind man experiencing the world through sound and vibration actually looks like on a comic page.