"You think I do this [kill people] for money?! I've been gettin' paid for high-end jobs since... forever. Have you ever seen me spend any of it? Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if I have more money than you, at this point. No, Norman... I stopped doing this for money a long time ago. I do it because it's fun."
The Man Without Fear has, since 1964, been on a crusade against all types of criminals in both his civilian and superhero identities. As a result, he has fought several abhorrent monsters, but several have gone the extra mile.
- Examples from Marvel Knights Vol. 2 (Earth-616); Daredevil Noir; and the What If? series can be found here.
- The Netflix series can be found here.
- Examples from the 2003 film can be found here.
- Examples from GraphicAudio adaptations can be found here.
- Examples from unproduced scripts can be found here.
All spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned!
open/close all folders
Examples
- Recurring Villains:
- Bullseye is Daredevil's greatest Arch-Enemy after the Kingpin. One of the world's most talented, infamous, and feared assassins, Bullseye has revealed he rarely spends the money from his assassinations, preferring to kill because of the fun involved. Bullseye led a string of murders and assassinations that culminated in the death of his nemesis Daredevil's lover Elektra. Consumed with hatred after being defeated by Daredevil, Bullseye made it a mission to murder any of Daredevil's friends or loved ones, including his later girlfriend Karen Page. After Bullseye was killed by Daredevil and revived, he was rendered a paralyzed invalid in a metal case. In retaliation, Bullseye recruited several killers to his cause and began a systematic campaign to drive Matt insane by threatening the lives of his friends, lovers, ex-wife and anyone he held dear, proving that even being a cripple does nothing to stop his evil or his willingness and ability to destroy whatever Matt loves. When recruited by Norman Osborn, Bullseye took advantage of his position on the Dark Avengers to torment and kill innocents on a whim. Even when not on the job, Bullseye takes great glee in random acts of cruelty, from slaughtering an intersection of people—using mainly paper clips—to alleviate boredom, to starting a gang war that will lead to countless deaths just to bask in the suffering of others. Combining sadism with twisted narcissism and Lack of Empathy for anyone, Bullseye sets the standards of evil for hitmen in the Marvel-verse and serves as an inspiration to many of its killers and monsters.
- Lawrence "Larry" Cranston, who resents Matt Murdock for having done better in law school than he did, assumed the identity of Mister Fear after the deaths of the first two holders. Cranston, as Mister Fear III, then tries to ruin Matt's life, using fear gas to induce panic attacks in his victims. Cranston later triggered a prison riot with his fear gas and escaped, leaving numerous people dead. He also freed Charles Burroughs and supervillain Molten Man, and caused them to both go on rampages, while framing Karen Page, Matt's then-Love Interest, for murder to boot; he later executed Burroughs for "going off script". Cranston later provided Lily Lucca with a perfume that permanently altered her body chemistry, causing the men around her to go insane and kill each other, promising to fix her if she aided him, despite there being no cure. He then used his fear gas to drive reformed supervillain Melvin Potter/Gladiator into a psychotic break, leading to the deaths of dozens after a rampage through Chinatown. While all this is going on, Cranston takes the place of Milla Donovan—Matt's wife's psychiatrist—and drives her into a paranoid breakdown, leaving her institutionalized. Cranston discovered that he can use his fear gas, which he now secretes from his pores, to force women to sleep with him.
- Vol. 1:
- Issues #124-125 & Daredevil/Spider-Man: Copperhead started as Lawrence Chesney, who took the mantle of the Copperhead character and enacted his revenge. Copperhead began killing criminals and killed a cop who tried to stop him, but quickly establishes himself as a creepy killer who put pennies on the eyes of the victims he just killed. Copperhead went to Hell after he died and made a Deal with the Devil, returning to Earth as an undead lich. At this point, Copperhead, fueled by nothing more than a burning hatred of Daredevil, began a violent turf war with the Kingpin, which cost the lives of many people. Copperhead used those deaths as sacrifices to the Devil, gathering power from those deaths and using it to transform part of New York into a version of Hell. Copperhead plans to sacrifice Daredevil and Spider-Man to open a portal to Hell and cause the downfall of mankind.
- Issues #180 & #333-337: The self-proclaimed "King of the Sewers" is a hulking thug with a chokehold on the Manhattan sewer system. Amassing a following of dozens of glassy-eyed, haggard slaves, the King regularly cycles through "queens" to serve his vile pleasures, body and soul, killing them whenever he tires of them. The King has no respect for human life, even that of his own followers; he throws one of his own followers to a sewer monster on a whim, kills two more as they beg for mercy to offer their blood to a malign being known as the Devourer, and threatens to wipe out an entire community of underground-dwelling innocents on his way to killing Matt Murdock.
- Issues #205 & #216-217: Paddy O'Hanlon, better known as "the Gael", is a particularly sadistic Psycho for Hire who abandoned the IRA when he realized he loved killing more for its own sake than the politics. The Gael leaves a trail of bodies behind him in his attempt to kill not only an old associate of his who knows his identity, but the man's daughter as well. In his later appearances, attempting to avenge his earlier defeat at Murdock's hands, the Gael goes on to murder innocent guards, nurses, a bar full of people, and several of his old IRA contacts, always permitting them to scream and beg so he can find peace in murder.
- Issue #217—"The Sight Stealer": "The Cossack" is a former Russian intelligence agent who betrayed his masters and went freelance. He got his hands on an East German defector's weapon which causes blindness. After testing this weapon, he tries to kill Black Widow—who was blinded by the weapon—by tossing her out her window. She is saved by Daredevil, and tells him the Cossack's backstory. The Cossack demands $15 million in gems, and when the Mayor of New York refuses, the former plans to amplify the device, blinding airline pilots and air traffic control and causing "many crashes. Many deaths." He is about to activate the device before Daredevil manages to stop him.
- Issues #305-306 (featuring Spider-Man): Angeline Kutter, the "Surgeon General", is a Femme Fatale organ trafficker who uses her looks and wiles to select victims, leaving a dozen men for dead after taking their sweet stuff. Kutter's barely stopped from taking a thirteenth victim by Matt Murdock and makes her getaway by slicing up a crowd full of innocents in a nightclub as a crude diversion. With pressure put upon her by her buyers after one failed score too many, Kutter decides to just drug a restaurant full of people and butcher them all for the sake of making up for the lost profit.
- Daredevil vs. Vapora, written by Mindy Newell: Vapora is a sapient being made of gasoline vapor that relishes in setting innocent people on fire. Taking advantage of people who carelessly use gasoline to clean their homes, Vapora manipulates the fumes to open sources of heat so she can burn her victims alive. Preferring to target children and families, Vapora burns down an entire apartment building, giving a young girl third-degree burns and killing many of the tenants still trapped inside. She later sets a mother on fire in front of her own baby and attempts to burn down a garage containing two teenagers and a 4-year old girl. Taking sadistic glee in the pain and suffering of others, Vapora represents the very worst dangers that gasoline fumes can bring.
- The Man Without Fear issues #4-5, written by Frank Miller: Larks is one of the Kingpin's chief enforcers. A killer without conscience, Larks begins murdering his way through a chain of subordinates who have grown sloppy with Larks also being given oversight over what to do with a captive girl named Mickey. It is revealed Larks oversees a division dedicated to torturing, raping, and murdering children on camera which he delivers Mickey to, before carelessly executing a cab driver once Daredevil arrives.
- Vol. 3 issues #19-21: Coyote started off as a small-time unnamed criminal, who volunteered for an experiment that would duplicate the powers of the Spot. Coyote uses his new powers to become a professional criminal contractor. He assassinates a drug lord by teleporting the blood out of his body. Coyote is hired by a Middle Eastern warlord to open up a weapons supply route, killing several of the warlord's men in the process, just for kicks. Bullseye hires Coyote to mess with Daredevil, so Coyote plays mind games with Daredevil and tries to drive him insane. Coyote found a way to remove people's heads without killing them, leaving their bodies intact and able to perform tasks while in pain. Coyote kidnaps several people and removes their heads, sending out these headless bodies to be slaves. The male bodies are sent off to perform manual labor, while the female bodies are sent out to be sex slaves.
- Daredevil (Charles Soule)'s "Dark Art" & "Mayor Fisk" arcs: Muse is a deranged Serial Killer obsessed with sharing his "vision" of beauty with the whole world. First kidnapping over 100 innocent people, Muse exsanguinates them for days, leaving them near death, and uses said blood in his art. Later, after murdering close to a dozen Inhumans and posing their bodies, Muse kidnaps 4 people and plans to torture them to death, then captures Daredevil's sidekick, Blindspot, whose eyes he gouges out as a sick play on the young teen's name. Muse decorates his lair in the butchered corpses of his countless victims during his time as a serial killer, and when caught, tries to kill his 100 blood-drained captives. Escaping from prison and slaughtering a dozen guards in the process, Muse tries to kill two innocent woman who just wanted a picture with him, and then massacres a group of police officers to decorate one of his murals. When confronted by Blindspot—who Muse tries to mutilate once more, this time by ripping out his tongue—over his motives, Muse just brags that killing makes him better, stronger, and more powerful than everyone else, before committing suicide just because he felt he wasn't the "star" anymore.
Other Earth-616 Characters
- Bullseye, written by Ed Brisson: Teodor Zarco is a Columbian drug lord who lords over the Black Knife Cartel with a sadistic, iron fist. Teodor gained infamy when he captured a squad of federal agents investigating his activities and tortured to death everyone who has ever known them in front of the agents one by one. Planning to expand the Black Knife to America, Teodor is introduced torturing a man to death as slowly as he can, and later is seen getting ready to butcher dozens of his minions who were stealing some of his drugs, planning to cut them all up and ship them to their mothers in little baggies. Upon being investigated by more federal agents, Teodor captures them all and plans to feed them to his pet tiger, before betraying and trying to kill his American partner just for irritating him. Even in a comic featuring the world's greatest assassin Bullseye, Teodor stands out with his sadistically vile actions for a mere drug lord.
- Elektra: Assassin, written by Frank Miller: Arthur Perry is a brutal S.H.I.E.L.D. operative first introduced torturing and murdering a possible "subversive" on the flimsiest suspicion of the man being an assassin. Perry's history, which SHIELD deliberately covered up to keep him on as an agent, is far darker, including the murder of his entire family and episodes of rape and murder dating back to the time he was a kid. When he's brought back with an augmented cyborg body after a brush with Elektra, Perry promptly slaughters the man who brought him back and goes about brutally killing every SHIELD agent in his path. Perry's sociopathy attracts the attention of the demonic Beast, and Perry eagerly signs on with the Beast's plans of destroying all humanity in a nuclear apocalypse.
Other Continuities
- Earth-7642 ("Crossover Earth"):
- Batman/Daredevil: King of New York, written by Alan Grant: The Scarecrow has been running guns for The Kingpin, from Gotham City to New York, but has his own agenda in mind. He hires Catwoman to gather information on Kingpin, seeming making plans to usurp Kingpin's position as New York's reigning crime lord. Daredevil and Batman team up to stop one of Scarecrow's trucks that was supposed to be delivering guns, but find it is full of bombs instead, with Scarecrow intending to kill Batman and Daredevil, along with the men driving the van. Scarecrow arrives in New York and uses his fear gas to force some of Kingpin's men to work for him. Scarecrow then begins a reign of terror having his men shoot up a restaurant, blow up a jewelry store, set fire to a night club and murder people in gangland killings. However, Daredevil and Batman soon discover Scarecrow's real plan: From the Statue of Liberty, Scarecrow plans to spread his fear gas across New York, leading to untold death and suffering.
- Magdalena/Daredevil: The Devil in Longhand, written by Phil Hester: The unnamed demon is an ancient being who, after being captured and tortured by a group of monks, decided to make himself more powerful. Setting up a scheme to steal the innocence of children, he kidnapped a dozen of young descendants of the men who tortured him. Turning the children into statues, he made an armor for himself out of their souls and desired to bind them to himself for eternity. When Magdalena and Daredevil tracked him down he used children's souls as a Human Shield and orders his enslaved children to kill them.
