So my last article on "The Best Villain Ever" (
http://forums.deadgod.net/showthread.php?t=1776) has prompted me to look into best super-heroes, characters, and any fictional (and sometimes non-fictional) creations.
I'm going to attempt to do a 'review' a week on a character and it will be by no means 'front page material' as it falls more under 'to whom it may concern' rather than 'hey, this is rather neat'.
My reasoning and justification for finding these individuals intriguing may be hard to explain at times, as the people and times that made them add a lot to the 'reality lore' and isn't easy to explain unless you know what was going on in society at the times.
But ANYWAYS,
I think I'll throw in: The Man Without Fear, DareDevil (Marvel Comics)
Real Name: Matthew Michael "Matt" Murdock, his background has been written and rewritten many times and there is multiple versions of the characters finer details. How he went blind (as a child) usually involves a truck-load of hazmat that spills into his eyes while he is helping a helping a blind-man avoid getting run over by said truck.
He was raised by a single father (a boxer named Jack (the devil) Murdock) who later became a washed up alcoholic who was murdered.
He starts a career path as a lawyer in Hell's Kitchen, also known as Clinton and Midtown West; a neighborhood of Manhattan. At this time, he is in college and his blindness and the chemicals that caused it have started to effect his mental stability and physical attributes. He notices increased senses and a type of 'echo-location' along with Olympic athlete strength and agility. However the strength and agility are often said to be a result of years of training.
He is able to detect lying by using his heightened hearing to detect changes in breathing, heart-rate and speech patterns. As a lawyer, he thought it would be an advantage. He would later slowly go insane while criminal after criminal walked off the stands a free man. He dressed himself in a costume that payed tribute to his dad's boxing title and searched out the villains that justice let slip away and brutally murdered them in the streets.
Any love interest he came across ended up dieing from collateral damage, target assassination, or medical oddities. His first love is believed to have died from the AIDS virus that would later to be found out that she gave to him. Only adding to the vast amounts of medication Matt Murdock takes daily. Due to being a blind brawler, he comes home littered with broken bones, accidental injury, stab wounds, concusions, missing teeth, dislocated limbs, and he loads himself full of anti-biotics, pain-killers, and sleeping pills until he can drift off long enough to look half-decent for court the next day.
Despite the semi-terrible movie, he isn't nearly as graceful and aware of his surroundings as they depict. Often overwhelmed by noise and sensory data, he has been known to shatter his hand on missed punches landing on walls, walking into knife points, and even unable to be certain of a landing when jumping from roof to roof. He was given the title 'the man without fear' by a former love and ran with it.
His body is covered in scars and the feeling of them often haunts him to the point of blood-lust and revenge, thus resulting in more. He sits high above the traffic listening for an opportunity to inflict his skewed form of brutal justice on anyone remotely deserving of it. Pick picketers and muggers have been hung on light-posts for just being the unlucky target of the daredevil.
His identity doesn't take long to be discovered and eventually mob hits are put out on him and everyone he knows. It results in the loss of his job and everyone he knew. He ends up living in the depths of a church, living off of the items he steals from the pockets of his fallen targets.
I will cut it off here, as most the juicier details takes years of plot construction, situations, cliff-hangers, and stuff I couldn't do justice. Decent articles and pictures can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daredevil_(Marvel_Comics)
http://www.comicvine.com/daredevil/24694/
Justice is blind,
Ive always had a strange fascination with superhero characters myself, without any real ability to explain why. I rarely ever read any comics, the idea of them seemed great, but they seemed a bit shallow when actually reading them. My greatest interest came from trading cards when i was a kid, often letting the little pieces of trivia make up what i knew about em.
Couple that with some artwork, a few short stories here and there, a trivia book, a couple of cartoons when i was home sick from school, and random game-related encounters with em and ya have a nice melting pot of accurate an inaccurate details which were really just fun to ponder over. Recently ive decided that id be really interested in finding some books to read which could give much more depth to those characters i took interest in as a kid, ones which still interest me sometimes nowdays.
Seriously, you can stand behind a superhero that's a pee-sitter?
I am more in favor of all futuristic clothing being held together by snap-buttons, velcro and ingenius magnetry, merely to allow for such powerful displays of justice and initiative.
Also noted is the fact that they always have their little suits on underneath. It's sortof like wearing a corset underneath a hoodie, you can't HELP but feel pretty because of it. I assume people like this guy in their day jobs would be intriguing, and always a half step away from like, rescuing the folks in the IT department from their extensive workloads, or punching the face off the guy who mistakenly brewed decaf instead of Folger's.