DAREDEVIL

 

DAREDEVIL

Real Name: Matthew Michael Murdock

First Appearance: Daredevil (Vol. 1) #1, April 1964

Powers: Matt Murdock lost his sense of sight during his childhood when he saved a man from an oncoming truck. The vehicle then spilled a cargo containing radioactive waste which struck Matt's eyes and left him blind. His remaining senses were elevated to superhuman, and he also developed an additional sixth "radar" sense that helps compensate for his blindness.

Contrary to popular belief, the radiation that caused Matt Murdock's blindness is not responsible for his super-senses; they are the result of extensive training he underwent from his mentor, Stick. All human beings have a natural potential for heightened sensory perceptions, including radar, as well as various other quasi-mystical skills and abilities employed by Stick and his cadre, the Chaste. The radiation artificially and temporarily awakened Murdock's mind to this potential, making him more open to receiving Stick's tutelage than a normal person. Though the radiation faded in time, his enhanced senses and radar sense remained. It should be noted, then, that Daredevil's mind is also open to developing the other paranormal abilities that Stick and the Chaste share, such as telepathic communication and transferring spiritual energy. Regardless of what he's allegedly capable of, Daredevil's superhuman senses are the powers he actually uses.

His senses of hearing, taste, touch, and smell are incredibly sensitive and adaptable to stimuli, and he possesses the additional power of his "radar sense". Far greater than the sum of their parts, Daredevil's senses paint a vivid picture of his surroundings for him, making him hyper-aware of virtually everything in his environment. The radar sense allows Murdock to produce waves into his environment on all sides which reflect off of objects in his vicinity and return these "echoes" to his brain, where they are interpreted into a 360º degree view of his surroundings. Thus, Daredevil can "see" in all directions at once, regardless of light, but the images he perceives are indistinct -- basic shapes and patterns, without detail. The biggest failing of his radar sense compared to actual sight is his inability to sense two-dimensional projections such as television, photographs, etc. His hyper-sensitive fingers compensate for that as he can read and understand printed type simply by running his hands across the imprint of the ink, and can "read" computer screens by the subtle temperature differences between lit and non-illuminated pixels. The radar sense is unique, different from actual radar, sonar, or echolocation and therefore unaffected by the flaws in any of the above. Rough comparisons in the past have claimed that Daredevil's hearing is better than Wolverine's, but his sense of smell is slightly less acute. He tends to recognize people by a combination of their individual scents and heartbeats, though even without his hearing, scent, and radar he could feel their presence simply by their body heat and the changes in wind patterns around their body. Murdock has memorized hundreds of people's "impressions" this way. He is able to detect subtle shifts in their mood and emotional state by the pheromones they give off in different situations, and can detect irregularities in someone's heartbeat as a form of lie detection. Murdock can mentally adjust the sensitivity of his senses to some degree, thanks to extensive practice and Stick's instruction. By mentally expanding his sensory range while simultaneously tuning out background stimuli, Daredevil could scan an entire city for a particular person's scent and heartbeat. He also can broaden or narrow his senses' receptivity more generally, amplifying his overall awareness of a given "zone" but making him more susceptible to being surprised by stimuli from outside that "zone". By focusing all his senses on one person, for instance, he can detect even the slightest change in their bio-rhythms, if they're lying, about to attack, what they ate for dinner last night, but may not even be registering what they're saying or catch wind of another attack from a different angle. His hearing allows him to eavesdrop on conversations from blocks away or from the other side of standard "soundproof" glass. He can recognize when someone has been in a given room hours after they left by their residual scent.

Daredevil is hyper-sensitive to changes in temperature in his environment, so that even something as small as a match being lit within a few dozen feet of him is instantly felt. He can also feel the tickle of a laser-scope sighting on his skin, and tell whether he is in an area of shadow or light by minute changes in the ambient temperature. His acute feel for an object's weight and shape allows him to perform tricks like flipping a coin with just the right force to establish which side it will land on, and combines with his radar sense to make him incredibly accurate with any projectile. His sense of taste allows him to identify, catalogue, and recall the ingredients found in anything he eats or drinks. Just as Spider-Man's spider-sense allows him to dodge bullets by sensing their threat faster than a normal man would, so can Daredevil detect projectiles by the whistling through the air and displacement they make in their paths. Besides dodging projectiles, he can also perform feats like catching a hail of shuriken embedded on his billy club, or use it to bat away a bullet, knocking it onto a specific new course.

Daredevil carries an all-purpose billy club as his primary weapon. This tool is composed of two shafts which link together with a curled handle to pose as a blind man's cane when he is in civilian garb. As he changes for action, the club splits in two and the handle reverts into a straight rod. Both clubs can be used as fighting batons in combat. The half with the handle fires a wired grappling line which he uses for swinging through the city or wrapping up opponents. The other half is an expertly weighted steel-reinforced wooden shaft which can be thrown with enough force to break bones or shatter glass. Similar to Captain America's stupendous skill with his shield, Daredevil's radar sense and sense of touch enable him to throw the billy club, deliberately guiding it to strike and rebound off of multiple targets, hitting exact locations, and then return to his grasp on the final ricochet. Murdock can throw the club from a stationary position and have it return to him, or plot his advancement through a combat situation in his head to make the shaft arrive at a different location on the battlefield at the exact moment he lands there as well. Naturally, Daredevil needs not look at the billy club to catch it. Briefly, Murdock adopted a new costume made of bio-mimetic material that was flexible as cloth but redirected the force of any impact away from his body, making it strong enough to withstand small arms fire. During this period, his billy club was remodeled to also transform into a quarterstaff or nunchaku.

Matt Murdock holds a Doctor of Jurisprudence degree and is a practicing attorney-at-law. Possessing extensive encyclopedic knowledge of the American legal system, he is both admitted to and licensed to practice law by the New York State Bar Association. His fighting style is a unique synthesis of Judo, Ninjitsu, boxing, gymnastics and various other martial arts.