Characters / Marvel Comics: Matt Murdock

Daredevil / Matt Murdock

The Other Man Without Fear

^{Click here to see Matt Murdock, Attorney At Law} 

Alter Ego: Matthew Michael "Matt" Murdock

Editorial Names: Daredevil: The Man Without Fear

Notable Aliases: Man Without Fear, Jack Batlin, Mike Murdock, Scarlet Swashbuckler, God Without Fear

First Appearance: Daredevil #1 (February, 1964)

The son of a washed-up ex-prizefighter, Matt Murdock was blinded in an accident involving radioactive waste. Said accident, however, also heightened his remaining senses, allowing him to develop superhuman agility and combat skills based upon them. Initially wary of using his abilities publicly, Matt became a crimefighter after his father was killed for refusing to throw a fight, becoming the vigilante Daredevil.

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• 10-Minute Retirement: Matt had been contemplating retiring the Daredevil persona (assumed killed in a battle with Death-Stalker), as Foggy Nelson's running for district attorney provided a more conventional means to fight crime. One of Nelson's political rivals hired Jester to assassinate him (or at least harass him until he dropped out of the race), prompting Matt to suit up as Daredevil again to take him down.
• Accidental Murder: Given how viciously Matt fights against overwhelming odds, he is bound to send some of his enemies to the morgue. This hobbles his vigilante career in Frank Miller's Daredevil: The Man without Fear when he unintentionally kicks an attacker out of a window. He also kills a man by accident in Chip Zdarsky's run, which serves as the inciting incident for the main story.
• All Guys Want Bad Girls: He made a life out of having affairs with bad girls such as the Black Widow (though she wasn't a villain by this point), Elektra, or Typhoid Mary to the point he's been accused of Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places.
• Alliterative Name: Matthew Michael Murdock. Hell, Daredevil is an alliterative name — that's why he wears the interlinked "DD" on his front.
• Amoral Attorney: Averted. Matt refuses to represent anyone who is guilty and he can always tell if they are.
• Anti-Hero: Doing what's right despite the crap he's put through. He starts to Pay Evil unto Evil to borderline Nominal Hero levels during the Shadowland event.
• Appropriated Appellation: "Daredevil" was originally an Ironic Nickname given to Matt by the kids who bullied him at school.
• Arch-Enemy: Kingpin and Bullseye.
• Awesomeness by Analysis: Matt often uses his "radar sense" to figure out what he can't see and use it to his advantage. When he fought Bruiser, a villain who can change his center of gravity, he discovered that his body couldn't keep up with the changes and used a precise strike against a fracturing bone to take him down.
• Badass Bookworm: A variant in that he's not a scientific genius like most versions of this trope, but rather an expert lawyer. Although, apparently he crammed a master's degree in applied mechanical engineering in his spare time. Also, he's uncommonly knowledgeable in chemistry. Of course, that probably comes with the territory when you're able to identify different types of metals by scent.
• Bandage Wince: Apparently having hypersenses just makes iodine sting that much more.
• Being Good Sucks: His life as both a crime-fighter and lawyer have caused tragedy in his life. Being good sucks but it really, really sucks when you fight crime with both identities in "Hell's Kitchen".
• Beneath Suspicion: Basically, the whole reason Matt is able to get away with being Daredevil for so many years and passing Daredevil off as just an ally. Who would ever consider a blind man being a costumed crime-fighter?
• Berserk Button: Matt does not like the idea that the only way you can be a driven hero is to have suffered from some form of tragedy.
• Beware the Nice Ones: He's a very nice, noble guy most of the time, but when he loses his temper, it's best not to be a bad guy anywhere near NYC. Bullseye and Kingpin learned this the very hard way after trying to kill Milla.
• Blessed with Suck: Well, would you trade in your eyesight for improved touch (everything HURTS more!), taste, smell, hearing, and a nebulously-defined "radar sense"? While Stick taught Murdock to control his senses enough to function normally, The Movie has his senses seem to cause chronic pain, so he chomps painkillers like candy and he can only get to sleep in a sensory deprivation tank. Or next to a smoking hot babe. Guess natural dopamine still trumps artificial.
• Blind People Wear Sunglasses: Daredevil is blind and wears sunglasses as the civilian lawyer Matt Murdock. Most of the time, Matt's sunglasses are rendered as a pretty cool pair that happens to be red.
• Blind Weaponmaster: Daredevil himself, natch.
• Boxing Battler: Daredevil's fighting style is described by Danny Rand as "old-school jujutsu— with a little New York Irish Boxer thrown in for good measure." Makes sense, considering Daredevil's father was a professional boxer.
• Break the Cutie: Daredevil has had several nervous breakdowns; unfortunately for him, There Are No Therapists.
• Brooklyn Rage: Got this in spades, but keeps it mostly subdued until he can let loose as Daredevil.
• Brought to You by the Letter "S": Two interlocked "D"s. The original yellow costume just had one D.
• Building Swing: Via his billy club, which doubles as a walking stick.
• Byronic Hero: An intelligent, bookish young boy is blinded by a truck carrying illegal chemicals. He becomes a valedictorian at an Ivy League^note  actually two Ivy League schools. In the comics, he initially went to Columbia Law School to study law, but after his love affair with Elektra went away he and Foggy transfer to Harvard Law School. school. He eventually becomes a respectable lawyer in his own right. But due to his father's murder after refusing to throw a fight in order to gain his son's respect. He chooses to don the guise of a Devil and offers retribution to those who have wronged others inside and outside the law. Even though it causes him borderline depressive episodes, and the work he does in the dark, brings harm (and in worst cases, death) to his loved ones.
• Cane Fu: He sometimes does this with his cane when trouble arises in his civilian identity as Matt Murdoch. Before he got his fancy combat staff, he fought with a cane as the Daredevil as well. And of course his billy clubs are his cane in his civilian life.
• Cartwright Curse: Four of his major love interests have died, and a fair number have gone insane. The Black Widow was lucky to emerge relatively unscathed. Of course, she's a big enough character in the Marvel Universe to have some Plot Armor. In the fourth volume of Daredevil, it's revealed that Matt Murdock wasn't ready to take the next step with his now-girlfriend Kristen Mcduffie because he was aware of his bad luck with love interests, or to be more accurate, his love interests' bad luck.
• Cassandra Truth: It happens every time that he reveals his secret identity to someone. He gets accused of Obfuscating Disability, as people can hardly believe that he's blind and can fight so well. It's easier to believe that he was feigning to be blind the whole time.
• Charles Atlas Superpower: Matt's only true superpowers are his heightened senses of smell, hearing, taste and touch. He's also been shown lifting and turning over a limo, tossing a 400lbs bar across a room, kicking off car doors and defeating actual superhumans in fistfights. Miller's run explained these feats were due to abilities inherent to all humans, which Matt unlocked in himself through the chemicals that blinded him.
  • Add dodging bullets point blank, as well as knocking them back at the shooter with pin point accuracy.
  • And being able to handle getting stabbed, electrocuted, and knocked off buildings in rapid succession.
  • DD also tends to hit people hard enough to send them flying several meters, parallel to the ground. Although, how he does so without killing them is anybody's guess.
• Characterization Marches On: In his original '60s run, Matt was very much an Expy of Spider-Man in terms of powers and wisecracking. His name and costume also had no tie to his religion until Frank Miller revamped ol' horn head into the darker man of faith we know today.
• The Chessmaster: When pitting all of the criminal organizations against one another in Waid's run.
• Chick Magnet: He had a whole bunch of girlfriends over the years, from the "girl next door" variety to Dating Catwoman, and he's the most frequent flirting target in any social gathering he's at. He's only rivalled by Tony Stark in that department.
• Christianity is Catholic: Well, Daredevil himself is, at least. Oh, and his mother is a nun. Frank Miller added this to his character as a joke. "I figured Daredevil must be Catholic because only a Catholic could be both an attorney and a vigilante."
• Clark Kenting: Averted. His costume covers his whole body, and nobody suspects his Secret Identity of a blind lawyer — which does not stop loads of people from finding it out anyway, including some of his worst enemies. Spider-Man once jokingly said that Daredevil's true identity is "the worst-kept secret since Hannah Montana." This hit its nadir when his identity was discovered by a mid-level gangster and publicly exposed to the entire world in one of the most groundbreaking story arcs in superhero fiction. He eventually "proved" in court that he wasn't Daredevil, but for years all of his allies and enemies knew who he really was. Charles Soule's run had him finally put that particular genie back in the bottle with the help of a machine and the mind-control powers of the Purple Man's offspring.
• Clear My Name: As a defense lawyer, Matt Murdock often does this in his day job. He's also one of the few people who's done it to members of his own Rogues Gallery. When he was appointed as Mister Hyde's attorney, Matt made an effort to prove that Hyde was innocent of the crime he was accused of. And Hyde really was innocent this time, even though he's otherwise a sadistic monster who gets his jollies from beating up people who can't fight back.
• Combat Parkour: An integral part of DD's fighting style.
• Combat Pragmatist: Despite being an anti-hero of quite high moral standard, DD has no qualms about using creative measures in a fight... Whether it's going for low blows, sucker-punches, grabbing a gun in the midst of fisticuffs, pushing you into oncoming traffic, using ambush tactics, or holding a loved one captive as psychological leverage. Being a Badass Normal, he kinda has to be pragmatic if he wants to keep up with the likes of Wolverine and Spider-Man.
• Cool Shades: Almost always wears his sunglasses when not fighting crime.
• Cosmic Retcon: As of the 2020 annual, Matt now has a history with his formerly fake twin Mike, who retconned his history in-universe.
• Costume Copycat: In the 2019 run, pretty much half of Hell's Kitchen imitates his Daredevil persona. Matt even notes that some are pretty convincing.
• Cover-Blowing Superpower: He must be very careful to play a plausible blind man, lest he accidentally reveal that he can 'see' just fine.
• Covered with Scars: Due to years of crime fighting, he's covered in nasty looking scars.
• The Cowl: He's basically Marvel's Batman. Well, one of them.
• Crusading Lawyer: And he puts the rest to shame. Lots of fictional hero attorneys will bend the law or risk their lives for the sake of their innocent clients, but how many will kick the ass of crime lords, ninja zombies, or superhuman assassins in the process?
• Dating Catwoman: If the comics introduce a female antagonist, Matt will be in bed with her at some point.
• Dark Is Not Evil: He dresses up like the Devil and inspires tremendous fear in criminals due to his intense bravery and vicious fighting style but is a hero who stands up for the oppressed both as a hero and civilian and sacrifices himself for others on multiple occasions.
• Dark Shepherd: In his darkest moments, Matt becomes one of these. Especially during the time where he essentially ran Hell's Kitchen by beating Wilson Fisk to a pulp, crashing Fisk's body through a window in front of a crowd of crooks, claimed ownership of the criminal underworld and give them a final choice to change their ways, leave Hell's Kitchen forever, or be beaten into traction like Fisk was.
• David Versus Goliath: Daredevil runs up against much larger, much more powerful enemies with shocking regularity. Rarely does he face true giants, but the spirit remains the same.
  • Less literally, one of Daredevil's CMOA's was when he beat to death (with a stick) Ultron, a killer robot who regularly causes much more powerful heroes to fudge their undies.
  • An early CMOA had Daredevil go up against Namor back when Namor was enough to take on either the whole of The Avengers or the whole of the Fantastic Four. Daredevil doesn't win the fight per se, but Namor cancels his attack in respect to Daredevil's bravery and tenacity.
  • In Daredevil Vol 1 #163, Daredevil went up against the Hulk. He got in some good hits, but lost.
• Deadpan Snarker: He's usually very stoic and serious, but when he wants to, Matt can easily outsnark the likes of his good friend Spider-Man. He was always like this, but it was seen more in his early years and showed up more in Mark Waid's run.
  Matt: You must be real proud of yourselves, gents... With a little luck, you may actually defeat a blind man... if you work together!
• Demonic Possession: Possessed by the Beast, the demonic man behind the man of The Hand and the real Big Bad of the "Shadowlands" event.
• Dented Iron: Daredevil has survived many things that most normal people wouldn't have, but he is now covered in scars from previous battles.
• Determinator: In some respects, this is Daredevil's defining character trope. He's had to adjust to being blinded and having his senses dramatically enhanced, having his secret identity exposed and his girlfriends murdered, losing his law license and practice, being possessed by demons, and fighting villains and heroes who by all rights should be completely out of his league. But no matter what, Matt Murdock just Keeps. On. Going. Matt goes so far with this trope, it actually enabled him to save New York City when he ended up fighting Namor the Sub-Mariner. Although Daredevil lost the actual fight, Namor was so impressed with Daredevil's refusal to give up that he decided to spare the city. Did the same with the Hulk, lasting long enough for the green guy to calm down and end his rampage. DD went straight to the hospital, but it worked.
• Death by Origin Story: His dad, Jack.
• Disability Immunity: Various villains have been caught off-guard because their plans or abilities relied on Daredevil having normal vision, ranging from the Circus of Crime hypnotising everyone in their tent (including Peter Parker/Spider-Man) but Matt Murdock, Hawkeye attacking Daredevil with a flash-bang-grenade arrow in an early conflict, or villains who use weapons that induce blindness having no effect on him. Some sources have also stated that Daredevil’s blindness contributes to his ability to resist the Purple Man; since he only picks up on some of the signals the villain uses to control others, he’s better equipped to resist the signals he is receiving. One darkly amusing example had the Jester set up a dummy of Foggy staged to look like Foggy had killed himself, with a note pinned to the chest laced with cyanide, but since Matt could tell the dummy wasn’t real the whole effort failed before it could really start.
• Disability Superpower: He was hit in the face by a radioactive canister and went blind. His other senses became super-powerful, and he acquired a "radar sense" that let him "see" objects, much like echolocation. (Frank Miller's influential run took him closer to this trope, partially explaining the radar sense as a Charles Atlas Superpower resulting from training with his enhanced senses.) His touch is so sensitive, he can read normal print by feeling the ink. With gloves on. His hearing is so sharp, he's bothered by the Les Miserables production across town. Often considered the Ur-Example of this trope, though DC's Doctor Mid-Nite precedes him by over 20 years. Even so, he's certainly the most iconic example - right down to the dis in his ability; loud noises seriously disorient him, and he has trouble handling currency because it's stamped too flat for him to feel the impressions — the movie shows that he folds different denominations in different ways to distinguish them (Truth in Television, this is a standard technique of the blind for keeping their cash organized).
  • Though his powers tend to vary based on the writer, generally speaking, Daredevil can tell you're standing near him and wearing a tee shirt and jeans. He just can't tell what color the shirt is, or if it has anything written on it.
  • Interestingly, late in Miller's run, Daredevil's mentor tells him that EVERY human has the potential to experience sense the way he does, it's just an ability that's become dormant. The radiation didn't give him his powers, it just unlocked them. Sadly, Stick is killed soon afterward, and this plot point was never brought up again.
  • The one (perhaps only?) area in Daredevil's life where he legitimately is at a disadvantage is with modern multimedia technology. His heightened senses struggle with LCD screens so he does have to use accessibility technologies like voice commands and menus to use smartphones and computers.
• The Dreaded: To the criminals of Hell's Kitchen. Unlike Spider-Man, they genuinely fear him. They mention that Spider-Man will go easy on you if you laugh at his quips, but Daredevil will make you kiss the pavement.
• Evil Costume Switch: During the "Shadowland" storyline, Daredevil abandoned his iconic red suit in favor of a black suit with larger horns, a larger & more stylised DD chest insignia, and blades attached at the wrists.◊
• Expy: When Daredevil was first created and Stan Lee was writing him, Daredevil was little more than an Expy of Spider-Man. Both traveled by swinging around the city, both had an acrobatic fighting style, and both had some kind of enhanced senses that allowed them to spot danger. Daredevil's personality wasn't particularly distinctive either. Thankfully, future writers fleshed out the character. A lot.
• Fake Twin Gambit: To throw Foggy and Karen off early on, Matt would posed as his own twin, named "Mike", though it's end with Matt faking "Mike's" death. However, thanks to a Cosmic Retcon, Mike is now indeed a separate and living person.
• Fighting Irish: Matt is Irish-American and definitely one of Marvel's tougher heroes. Which is not to say he enjoys inflicting violence at all.
• Fights Like a Normal: Matt's has superhuman senses of hearing, smell, taste and touch compensate for his blindness. Other than that, he has not superpowers and by on with being a highly skilled martial artist and athlete. Given he has beaten the likes of Wolverine and The Punisher in one-on-one fights, this more than enough for him.
• Fire-Forged Friends: One of his closest (and probably only) friends is Spider-Man.
• First-Name Basis: He always calls his enemy The Punisher "Frank". Frank never seems to tell him not to.
  • Curiously averted with his longest-term girlfriend, whom he still thinks of by her full name, Karen Page.
• Forgot the Disability: Characters will frequently forget that Matt is blind, immediately apologizing afterwards for being insensitive. Matt will always casually brush it off while acting amused at the mistake.
• Friendly Enemy: The Punisher... sometimes. Matt thinks Frank is a psychopath whose methods are far too brutal to be justifiable, while Frank thinks that Matt is a self-righteous asshole who needs to mind his own business and stay out of his way. But they can be surprisingly civil with each other when they're NOT trading blows, with Spider-Man even comparing them to an old married couple during Greg Rucka's Omega Effect storyline. Famously, Frank allowed himself to get arrested so he could foil a plot to assassinate Matt while he was in prison.
• Genius Bruiser: Is an accomplished lawyer who can also hold his own in a fight against a good portion of the MU.
• Good Is Not Soft: He tries to avoid killing, but he can still deliver beat downs like no one's business
  Matt: Fortunately for me, I'm not a cop. So, I can break your face into a jigsaw puzzle if I want to...
• Good Lawyers, Good Clients: Most of Matt's clients are this, although there is the odd subversion where Matt ends up defending assorted scumbags because they still have the right to legal representation.
  • In a story arc Mr. Hyde will only accept having Matt as his lawyer. Hyde is adamant that, for all the other crimes he's committed over the years, he is innocent of the murder he's being accused of. Matt is skeptical, but takes the case anyway. He eventually clears Hyde's name by ferreting out the true murderer as Daredevil.
• Good Parents: Jack Murdock may have been a brutish, brawling loser of a boxer, but he at least did his best to raise Matt to apply himself intellectually and become a successful lawyer. Unfortunately, Jack's violent streak occasionally got the best of him and Matt did not completely escape that bad influence.
• Guile Hero: Mark Waid seems determined to make this his superpower. Not that it's exactly out of character.
• Heartbroken Badass: Four of his girlfriends were murdered. And that's just scratching the surface of all the tragedy he has endured.
• Handicapped Badass: Rendered blind after an accident in his youth, but was trained to utilize his hearing to make up for it.
• Heroic BSoD: Goes through one of these as he realizes he accidentally killed small-time robber, Leo Carraro.

• Honor Before Reason: Pretty much Matt's defining character trait. He believes everyone deserves equal treatment under the law and that killing is always wrong, even if the victim is a psychopathic monster.
• Hypocritical Humor: He once told Moon Knight that his secret identity as Marc Specter is the worst kept secret in the hero community.
• Immune to Mind Control: He is shown as immune to mind control, particularly that of the Purple Man. Explained as being blind means he literally can't look into someone eye's when they're trying to mind control him, and this allows him to focus completely on ignoring their commands.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: Although not on Bullseye's level, Matt still is able to return bullets to sender (courtesy of his billy clubs), shoot like Annie Oakley (despite never training with guns), and hit opponents with ricochet projectiles, thrown in manners that circle them around the target.
• Improbable Weapon User: His weapon of choice is a billy-club with a built-in grappling hook, that he disguises as a white-stick when out of costume.
  • ... as well as any weapon of opportunity he comes across. Although not as elaborate as Bullseye, Matt does tend to weaponize most stuff that isn't nailed down at one point or another. Whether it be trash cans, coins, traffic signs, government issue mailboxes, pool cues, couches, free weights or unfortunate opponents.
  • He's also quite nifty with pulling off the Robin Hood archery stunt of splitting several arrows in a bulls-eye.
• It's Not You, It's My Enemies: No, seriously. When Matt's enemies find out who he is, they make his life Hell. They don't destroy him, they make him destroy himself. This even extends to him turning down an invitation to join the New Avengers on two separate occasions, as he didn't want to put the rest of the team at risk by associating with him — he accepted the second invitation, however, when Luke Cage & Jessica Jones pointed out that he'd be an Avenger, so they'd have his back.
• Keeping the Handicap: In a number of plotlines, his eyesight is restored by some means or another, but Matt loses his enhancements and ends up incredibly disoriented and incapable of fighting. In one story, he outright begs the alien who returned his sight to him to take it back.
• Kick The Son Of A Bitch: His exceptionally violent and brutal murder of Bullseye was supposed to show he had gone off the deep end, but considering who Bullseye is, there isn't a person alive who can fault Matt for doing what he did. Most of the negative reactions from others fall less into "how is that action morally justifiable" and are more concerned with how out of character the action was.

• Knight in Sour Armor: You could probably count the number of times Matt's been happy on one hand. He could be written as a villain and you'd still be sympathetic to him. Despite this, he keeps on going. This trope could probably be renamed "Knight in sour red leather". Starting with Mark Waid's run, he starts subverting this because he felt like his attitude was a self-fulfilling prophecy, outright telling Foggy "I didn't want to be that guy anymore."
• Knight Templar: Became one briefly when he overthrew Fisk and took over Hell's Kitchen, brutally beating up anyone in his way and chastising other heroes who criticized him.
• Kung-Fu Clairvoyance: Courtesy of his Radar and other Super-Senses.
• Leeroy Jenkins: Befitting his epithet as the Man Without Fear, Matt has a bad tendency to take Fearless Fool levels of risk and act without thinking ahead, which often gets him or his loved ones into trouble. Lampshaded by many including Spider-Man during a team up where Matt decided to rush straight into enemy gunfire when he was supposed to be secretly rescuing hostages.
• Le Parkour: Matt has been a poster-boy for this trope since his debut in the 60s.
• Legacy Character:
  • Danny Rand/Iron Fist took his place briefly during the Civil War.
  • Black Panther briefly took over as the defender of Hell's Kitchen after the events of Shadowland.
  • There's also Darkdevil, who takes up the billyclub in Marvel Comics 2.
  • And Ray Connor, the second Daredevil in the Ultimate Marvel universe. He didn't last long.
• Lightning Bruiser: He's fast and agile enough to respond to bullets in mid-flight as well as possessing formidable strength and durability for a street-level character.
• Living Lie Detector: By listening, feeling and/or smelling, he can tell whether a person is lying by sweat, changes in body temperature and heartbeats (though he can be fooled by a pacemaker and those able to keep calm under pressure.)
• Logical Weakness: It's long been established that Daredevil can read ordinary print thanks to his super-sensitive touch. In the 21st century, though, more and more vital information appears on screens. Because it's not (currently) common knowledge that DD is blind, this has occasionally left him screwed, as when Elektra handed him a piece of plot-critical evidence on her smartphone.
• Missing Mom: His mother went completely unmentioned for over twenty years before finally showing up out of the blue; turns out that she abandoned her child to become a nun. Original Sin later revealed that she abandoned him because she was hit with a major case of Post-Natal Depression that drove her to nearly kill him.
• Mole in Charge: For a while, Daredevil ostensibly ran the evil ninja assassin cabal called the Hand.
• Multilayer Façade: For a while, Matt Murdock pretended to also be his non-blind twin brother Mike, who everyone suspected was secretly Daredevil.
• Nebulous Evil Organisation: Daredevil fights these now and then, but he has an intimate history with one in particular: Black Spectre.
• Nice Guy: In sharp contrast to his behavior as Daredevil, Matt is a very noble, kind-hearted and charming person who just wants to help his city.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Well, the universe has a habit of seeing several of Matt's good deeds comes back to bite him, starting with a fact he was blinded by a truck carrying toxic waste while saving a guy from said truck. The miniseries Father even added Backstory Horror to this by revealing the man Matt saved was molesting his own daughter, who grew up to become a serial killer targeting people Matt saved as revenge.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: He really tries to avoid killing, but if you piss him off, he won't hesitate to beat you within an inch of your life. Kingpin, Bullseye, Punisher, and the Owl have all found this out the hard way, but they're hardly the only ones who have been on the wrong end of a beating from him.
• Obfuscating Disability: Subverted. A running bit is that whenever someone finds out the truth of Daredevil's identity, they immediately jump to the conclusion he's faking being blind as a way to throw people off as it makes more sense than him having some sort of super-senses to make up for it.
• One-Man Army: Most famously shown when the Yakuza send 100 mooks to Matt's address, decked out with guns, swords and nearly half of them being hopped up on an imitation of the Super Soldier Serum. It does not end well... for the Mooks.
• Only Friend: Well, the closest thing for The Punisher. Daredevil desperately wants to stop Frank Castle from continuing his crusade, and both hates and sympathizes with him at the same time. The Punisher being who he is, this dovetails into Worthy Opponent.
• Parental Abandonment: Matt's father dies in his origin story, and he never knew his mother; she's finally introduced some twenty years later, in the Born Again storyline.
• Pretending to Be One's Own Relative: To throw people off the scent that he was the Daredevil, Matt engaged in a Fake Twin Gambit and sometimes acted as his own twin brother named Mike, though he'd ultimately fake "Mike's" death. That said, events in Daredevil (Charles Soule) and Daredevil (2019) resulted in a Cosmic Retcon that made Mike Murdock an actual and still-living person.
• Radiation-Induced Superpowers: In some versions, his augmented senses are the result of the radioactive materials which blinded him. Frank Miller believed that was the Stupidest Thing He'd Ever Heard, instead integrating him into a 'Verse of Supernatural Martial Artists that has become integral to the character.
• Real Men Love Jesus / Religious Bruiser: Matt is often presented as a devout Catholic; in fact, his faith and how he deals with it while being a vigilante is a main source of drama in his comics.
• Really Gets Around: Fans generally agree that the title of supreme pimp of the Marvel Universe is a tossup between him and Tony Stark. A weighted tossup, as Stark tends to cheat by surrounding himself with expensive bombshell bait. Murdock just lays back and waits, knowing that any woman who thinks about it will realize that besides his sculpted physique, a blind man can give a woman the sensation of Braille being read.
  Wolverine: (Murdock), you're the biggest himbo that ever wore a pair of tights.

  - Wolverine #24
• The Rival: Severely downplayed with the Punisher as after a number of violent philosophical altercations, they both realized that nothing productive could ever come out of being near each other. Still, fate conspires to have them clash every blue moon, such as during Zdarsky's run where they battle each other with opposing armies of ninjas.
• Rogues Gallery: Bullseye, Elektra, Gladiator, Leap-Frog, Mister Hyde, Nuke, Ikari, Bullet, Man-Bull, Electro, the Eel, Typhoid Mary, Stilt-Man, Death-Stalker, Mister Fear, the Kingpin, the Owl, Bruiser, etc. You could arguably count the Punisher here, too.
• Rogues' Gallery Transplant: It's often been pointed out that most of Daredevil's villains are someone else's "castoffs". While Electro earned his spurs fighting Spider-Man, he was also the first supervillain Daredevil defeated, and returned to tangle with Matt on a semi-regular basis. Daredevil would also have one-off fights with other villains, such as Klaw (an enemy of the Black Panther), the Absorbing Man (an enemy of The Mighty Thor), the Blob and Pyro (enemies of the X-Men), and Nitro (an enemy of Captain Marvel).
  • Similarly, the Kingpin was originally a Spider-Man villain who was eventually permanently transplanted to Daredevil to the point that the character was officially licensed in other media adaptations, which meant no Spider-Man film appearances until recently. Unlike many transplants, Kingpin can and does routinely appear in Spider-Man stories still, given the extent of his criminal empire (and Fisk's hatred for superheroes in general).
  • Mysterio, again a Spider-Man villain, had Daredevil as his "adopted" nemesis during an arc because The Clone Saga deal kept Mysterio from knowing if Spider-Man was the real thing or just a clone.
  • And the Eel (originally a Human Torch foe) and Mr. Hyde (originally an enemy of Thor) both became more associated with Daredevil as time went on.
• Samaritan Syndrome: Matt can never keep himself from doing the right thing and it almost always costs him gravely.
• Scar Survey: Milia Donovan notices some of Matt's scars while feeling his chest, he explains that one of them is from when he was shot by Punisher, one of them is from a battle with the Gladiator, and one of them is from a battle with Bullseye.
• Secret Identity: Had one for a while, but it wasn't a particularly well kept secret. Eventually he was outed, and while he "proved" that he wasn't Daredevil in court, he himself commented "good luck getting that genie back in the bottle." Eventually, he outed himself in court.
• Shadow Archetype: Bullseye. And the Kingpin, whose constant evasion of criminal convictions cause Murdock to seriously doubt the law's ability to deal with the most calculating criminals.
• Stepford Smiler: In Waid's run, Matt starts acting all cheerful, much to the concern of literally everyone who knows him. They all speculate - including Matt himself - that he's trying to cover his trauma.
• Step into the Blinding Fight
  • Daredevil invokes this trope despite being blind himself. His superb hearing and "radar" senses allows him to "see" in the dark much to the disadvantage of the criminals who can actually see. While they're paranoid and distracted, he's calm and controlled and kicks their asses.
  • Turned on its head though any time his superior senses are overloaded, such as when in the movie Bullseye causes a raucous of noise and disorients Daredevil, thus making him "blind" to any attack Bullseye can impose on him.
• The Stoic: Accused to be this by Karen and Foggy after "his brother" was supposedly killed.
• Sunglasses at Night: Justified considering he's blind.
• Super-Reflexes: Possibly due to his exposure to the radioactive waste that caused his blindness, Matt's reflexes is enhanced to the degree where he is quick enough to catch catches a sai thrown by Bullseye, easily dodge gunfire, dodges point-blank gunfire when his back was turned, easily and repeatedly deflect point blank gun shots.
• Super-Senses: Although he is blind, his remaining four senses function with superhuman accuracy and sensitivity, giving him abilities far beyond the limits of a sighted person.
  • He has a radar sense that he has described as "like touching everything at once". It is a form of echolocation via low radio wave projection, according to one theory, an energy wave within certain portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. The signal emanates radio waves from regions of his brain, after which it travels outward, bounces off objects around him, and returns to receiving regions of his brain as well as use of his superhuman hearing. In any event, with this ability, Murdock synthesizes a very close analogue of three-dimensional 360% human sight.
  • His sense of touch is so acute that his finger can feel the faint impressions of ink on a printed page allowing him to read by touch, though laminated pages prevent him from touching and thus reading the ink impressions at a much faster pace than a normal person would be able to read. The rest of his skin is equally sensitive, enabling him by concentration to feel minute temperature and pressure changes in the atmosphere around him. Even with his senses of smell and hearing blocked, he can feel the presence of a person standing five feet away from him simply by his or her body heat and disturbance of air
  • His sense of hearing enables him to detect an acoustic pressure change of one decibel at a pressure level of seven decibels (whereas the lowest threshold for average human hearing is twenty decibels.) He can hear a person's heartbeat at a distance of over twenty feet, or people whispering on the other side of a standard soundproofed wall. Through practice, Matt is able to control his hearing acuity, mentally blocking out specific sounds like his own breathing and heartbeat, all ambient sounds to a normal human level of perception, or all sounds but a particular sound he is concentrating upon.
  • The Nose Knows: His sense of smell is so acute that he can distinguish between identical twins at twenty feet by minute differences in smell. He can detect odors of an atmospheric concentration of thirty parts per million. Further, his ability to remember smells enables him to identify any person he has spent at least five minutes with by smell alone, no matter how he or she might try to camouflage his or her natural odor. His powers of concentration are such that he can focus upon a single person's smell and follow it through a crowd of people at a distance of fifty feet
• Supernatural Martial Arts: Daredevil is a marginal case; he has superhumanly enhanced senses to more than compensate for his blindness, but his physical abilities are otherwise defined within human limits. His mentor, Stick, however had full on magic in his skills.
• Swiss-Army Weapon: DD's billy club has many different functions and features.
  • It also doubles as his cane, enabling him to carry it all the time without attracting suspicion.
• Terror Hero: Even if he won't kill criminals, which is not always sure, he will destroy them physically and morally.
• Thou Shalt Not Kill: Matt used to have a typical view of killing, claiming that it wasn't his place to pass judgment, but he has killed when the situation called for it. And when the situation has called for it, he has hated but not regretted doing it. That said, he does not endorse wholesale murder as the answer to his, or anyone else's, problems. Well and truly averted after he finally killed Bullseye.
• Too Broken to Break: Given how much the titular hero suffers in his life, this trope does tend to pop up now and then.
  • In the Born Again storyline, Wilson Fisk does everything in his power to make Matt's life living hell, and destroy everything he had. When Matt is left homeless and penniless with barely any of his sanity left, Fisk thinks he has beaten him... Only to realise that he has created a man with nothing to lose, and thus a man without fear.
  • This happens again in the Guardian Devil storyline, when Mysterio tries to break Daredevil as his dying act, only for him to deliver a scathing "The Reason You Suck" Speech and explain why that's not possible.
    Daredevil: You think you can break me? You're a joke and a fraud. [...] And trying to drive me insane? Kingpin nearly did it, once.
• Trauma Conga Line:
  • Matt probably the only super hero who has it even worse than Spider-Man. If something good happens, you can bet it won't last and will be swiftly followed by an unexpected punch to the gut, spiritually speaking. "Born Again" is the most famous example, but there are many, many others. Many issues have shown him as being so emotionally damaged that he is almost incapable of feeling happiness and he feels like he can do little more than brace himself for the next trauma or humiliation. Bendis and Brubaker's consecutive runs had him go though a mental breakdown over the death of his longtime girlfriend Karen Page, his secret identity being blown, getting sent to a high security prison (filled mostly with criminals he'd put away) for obstruction of justice, his wife being driven insane by a supervillain, getting committed to a mental hospital and his best friend seemingly killed.
  • It got so bad that Mark Waid made his run much Lighter and Softer because he was sick of, in his words, "needing a stiff drink" every time he read an issue. Naturally, the next writer after Waid immediately undid everything Waid set up so Matt could go back to being as utterly miserable as possible.
• Troubled, but Cute: Much of his charm that brings in the ladies lies in being a blind but personally troubled handsome man that women cannot help but want to comfort.
• Uniqueness Decay: Matt Murdock's radar sense was originally a super power, the freak result of the accident that blinded him. Later, Frank Miller introduced a mentor character and revealed that anyone could learn to "see" without their eyes the way that Matt does.
• Upbringing Makes the Hero: His father Jack raised him on his own and taught Matt not to use violence and that he could be someone great one day. Fittingly, Jack's murder is what convinced Matt to become Daredevil.
• Useless Without Powers: In an issue of Daredevil crossing over with Secret Wars II the Beyonder gives Matt Murdock his sight back. Murdock assumes that this will make him an even better crimefighter, but he can't adjust (including losing his Hyper-Awareness) and gets the Beyonder to take back the "gift."
• Weak, but Skilled: Matt is in peak physical shape but he's still a normal man, and a blind one at that, who often goes up against superpowered beings, forcing him to rely more on his skill than strength and has trained in a variety of disciplines such as Karate, Capoeira, Kung Fu, Taekwondo, Savate, Ninjitsu, Silat, Judo, Eskrima, Wushu, Muay Thai and Jeet Kune Do among others.
• Weaksauce Weakness: His main weakness is his vulnerability to powerful sounds or odors that can temporarily weaken his radar sense. This weakness is often used to immobilize him.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: His whole life he refrained from participating in any activities such as sports because his dad wanted him to study and get a respectable job. During Frank Miller's run, he openly wonders how many of his life decisions (mainly becoming a lawyer) were actually his own. He also feels very guilty of becoming Daredevil because his dad made him promise to never fight.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • Deadpool was not all that impressed with Daredevil on hearing about his first meeting with (the girl who would become) Typhoid Mary.
  • Matt got this a lot during the Miller era, particularly for things like making an alliance with the Kingpin and ruining his girlfriend's career.
• Worthy Opponent: This is essentially his relationship with the Punisher. Matt thinks Frank is a psychopath whose methods are far too brutal to be justifiable, while Frank thinks that Matt is a self-righteous asshole who needs to mind his own business and stay out of his way. While they dislike each other immensely and come into conflict enough to practically be members of their respective rogues galleries, they respect each other just enough to abstain from killing or permanently crippling one another.
• Would Hit a Girl: Daredevil keeps having to tangle with female enemies at a remarkable frequency. He's savvy not to underestimate them due to gender. Especially when most of them are equally or more super-powered than he is.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Lampshaded by DD himself when receiving a house call from a horde of Yakuza Mooks. He notes that when somebody is serious about wanting you dead, they won't bother with fancy costumes and theatrical Supervillain schemes. They will simply show up on your doorstep at odd hours and shoot you. However, that plan does not turn out quite as well as expected (see One-Man Army).

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