While growing up in New York City's Hell's Kitchen, a crime-ridden, working-class, Irish-American neighborhood, Murdock pushes a man from the path of an oncoming truck and is blinded by a radioactive substance that falls from the vehicle.

He hones his physical abilities and superhuman senses under the tutelage of a mysterious blind stranger named Stick, eventually becoming a highly skilled and expert martial artist.

Eventually, in ironic contrast to his Catholic upbringing and beliefs, Matt dons a costumed attire modeled after a devil and takes up a dual life of fighting against the criminal underworld in New York City as the masked vigilante Daredevil, which puts him in conflict with many super-villains, including his arch-enemies Bullseye and the Kingpin.

Daredevil is a critically acclaimed series, and has won multiple Eisner Awards, in particular for authors Brian Michael Bendis, Ed Brubaker, and Mark Waid.

Martin Goodman, the publisher of Marvel Comics, was impressed by the popularity of Spider-Man and asked Stan Lee to create a similar character based on the original Daredevil, a superhero of the 1940s.

Lee then sought the creative input of Bill Everett, who had previously created Namor, and Jack Kirby, the co-creator of the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, and other well-known superheroes.

[5] The character was generally considered second-string in Marvel's pantheon of heroes, and had low commercial viability for the first decade and a half of his existence, prior to Frank Miller's re-invention.

[6] The character debuted in Marvel Comics' Daredevil #1 (cover date April 1964),[7] created by writer-editor Stan Lee and artist Bill Everett,[8] The original costume design was a combination of black, yellow, and red, reminiscent of acrobat tights.

Adorned in a yellow and black costume made from his father's boxing robes and using his superhuman abilities, Matt confronts the killers as the superhero Daredevil, unintentionally causing the Fixer to have a fatal heart attack.

Most prominently, dedicated and loving father Jack Murdock is reimagined as a drunkard who physically abused his son Matt, entirely revising Daredevil's reasons for becoming a lawyer.

In issue #181 (April 1982), he attempts to murder Bullseye by throwing him off a tall building; when the villain survives as a quadriplegic, he breaks into his hospital room and tries to scare him to death by playing a two-man variation on Russian roulette with a secretly unloaded gun.

New York City itself, particularly Daredevil's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood, became as much a character as the shadowy crimefighter; the stories often took place on the rooftop level, with water towers, pipes and chimneys jutting out to create a skyline reminiscent of German Expressionism's dramatic edges and shadows.

[38] He continued McKenzie and Miller's noir take on the series, but backed away from the antihero depiction of the character by having him not only spare Bullseye's life but express guilt over his two previous attempts to kill him.

[58] Miller's period of authorship was enormously commercially successful; his story arcs on Daredevil were the only sales competition for Chris Claremont's Uncanny X-Men, the consistent top seller in the 1980s.

[65] She concludes her run with a positive turn in Murdock's fortunes: He returns to Hell's Kitchen, regains his sense of self, reconciles with Foggy Nelson, and resolves to seek out Karen Page.

[77] An injured Daredevil creates a more protective costume from biomimetic materials, resembling motocross gear: red and gray with white armor on the shoulders and knee pads.

[113] Comics critic Ryan K. Lindsay compares Brubaker's stories to the films of neo-noir and New Hollywood directors of the 1970s, such as Martin Scorsese, Roman Polanski, and Sam Peckinpah.

[126] Waid and Chris Samnee followed this up with Infinite Comics' Daredevil: Road Warrior weekly digital miniseries,[127] which focused on an adventure during Matt's trip to San Francisco.

A new volume began as part of the All-New, All-Different Marvel branding, written by Charles Soule with art by Ron Garney with the first two issues released in December 2015.

[134] Despite interference from the Kingpin, Murdock succeeds in taking this precedent to the Supreme Court so that all superheroes will have the same rights in future cases, and afterward returns to his traditional red costume.

He feels compelled to return to such endeavors when a team of supervillains invades Hell's Kitchen; he fights alongside a legion of ordinary citizens who have also adopted the "Daredevil" symbolism.

[178] Murdock's father, "Battlin' Jack", was a professional boxer who prohibited Matt from any athletic activity and compelled him to devote his time to study, attempting to mold an entirely different life for his son.

[204][205] In 1981, Miller declared that "violence is actually the theme of the book," insisting on the depiction of realistic injury in order to convey the hazards and moral ambiguity of a heroic lifestyle.

Disguised as a blind man's cane in civilian garb, it is a multi-purpose weapon and tool that contains 30 feet of aircraft-control cable connected to a case-hardened steel grappling hook.

[253] Their relationship in the early years of the series was fraught with tension due to Nelson's sense of inferiority to Murdock as a lawyer and as a target for the affections of their secretary, Karen Page.

The relatively high number of violent deaths for his partners has been criticized as examples of the women in refrigerators trope, according to which female characters in comic books are often disposable and serve as plot devices to motivate or complicate male heroes.

[285] Critics have noted similarities between Daredevil's early rogue's gallery and the villains associated with Batman, the popular character published by Marvel's competitor, DC Comics.

[290][291] Nocenti created Typhoid Mary after reflecting on experiences working in asylums for the mentally ill, about the condition of bipolar disorder, and about stereotypes regarding women in comic books.

[292] Subsequent writers, such as Jeph Loeb, Brian Michael Bendis and Ed Brubaker, have re-introduced the Daredevil's rogues gallery of the 1960s, particularly the Owl; however, in the new interpretations they are "radically different from their original incarnation – nastier, meaner, and more cruel.

[298] Joe Quesada, an editor at Marvel, says that Kevin Smith's authorship of the "Guardian Devil" arc of the Daredevil series in 1998-1999 "changed everything" and that this is "probably the single most important development in this particular era of comics, from the '90s to today."