Most of what I'm reading these days on Marvel Unlimited is X-Men related, primarily the original Uncanny series but also X-Men: Legacy, Astonishing X-Men and various other titles. However, I've also been following a couple of other books, the main ones currently being Walt Simonson's run on Thor and the original Daredevil comic from the 1960s.
Daredevil's a character I've always loved, having read snippets here and there of Frank Miller's take in the early 80s, plus a bit of Ann Nocenti's run after that, and then DG Chichester's 90s books. I was conversant enough with the character's history to know what was going on in Kevin Smith's Marvel Knights run on Daredevil, in the late 90s/early 2000s, but apart from a few issues translated in Italian, I didn't have much sense of what Daredevil was like in the 60s, when Stan Lee was writing him.
So at the start of the year I started reading Daredevil from the first issue, which was written by Lee and drawn by Bill Everett. I was interested to learn that Lee continued writing Daredevil until issue #50, in 1969, especially given that this early incarnation of the character isn't great. The book at this stage has certain Stan Lee hallmarks, such as Daredevil bemoaning the fact that he can't be with the woman he loves, Karen Page (which echoes the romantic drama in the X-Men between Cyclops and Marvel Girl). But it also feels underbaked, like Lee and his co-creators had this idea for a character concept but didn't really know what to do with it.
Most of the villains are pretty lame. The most notable one is Killgrave, the Purple Man, who would appear to such chilling effect in Brian Michael Bendis's Alias and in the Jessica Jones Netflix show. On the other hand, the villains DD tangles with the most are Stilt-Man and Gladiator, the latter of whom is a costume-designer with a chip on his shoulder. Both appear as minor characters in Daredevil's own Netflix show, but those are more easter eggs than loving tributes to fondly remembered characters.
The interesting thing is that, for all its lack of direction, crap villains and weird story directions (like when Matt Murdock pretended to be his own twin brother Mike), Daredevil went on, unbroken, until the late 90s. I've still only read to issue #51, when Roy Thomas took over, but I've glanced ahead and the 70s seem like a lost decade for Daredevil, until Frank Miller came along and turned him into something akin to Batman.
Daredevil wasn't the only character whose adventures continued despite nobody really caring. The Hulk is the most notable, because basically every issue until the 80s was the same: the Hulk would arrive somewhere, cause trouble, wake up as Bruce Banner and then feel bad, before moving on again. The Fantastic Four lost their creative momentum after Jack Kirby and then Lee left the book, and they never quite recovered it.
I find this fascinating because the X-Men were the only book that really seems to have been unloved among these early Marvel stories. Lee spent the exact same amount of time writing the X-Men as he did the Avengers (1963-1966), but in that period he wrote only 19, mostly bimonthly, issues of X-Men, whereas he wrote 34 issues of the Avengers. Lee then wrote Captain America until 1971, Thor until 1972, Spider-Man until 1973, the Hulk until 1968, and the Fantastic Four until 1972. The Hulk's original book was canceled after just six issues, but then the character came back in Tales to Astonish, which eventually was retitled as the Incredible Hulk. Compare that with the original X-Men book, which was published continuously until 2011 but which ran nothing but reprints between 1970 and 1975.
I'm more of an X-Men fan than a Marvel fan, so I find this all oddly suspect, but it does point to an interesting quirk of the comics industry in those years. Even books that weren't selling particularly well and that nobody seemed to care about were kept alive through the 60s, 70s and into the 80s, when they all seemed to undergo creative renaissances. Compare that with now, or indeed with the industry in the 90s, when a book that didn't sell could get cancelled without mercy after less than a year - the latest versions of X-Force and X-Factor, launched in 2024 after the end of the Krakoan Age of the X-Men, lasted just 10 issues each, for example.
Not that Marvel was so averse to canceling books in the 60s. Doctor Strange didn't get his own full book for a long time, and his was cancelled in the early 70s, before he came back to sharing books with other characters. But again, it's fascinating that Marvel didn't cancel more of their underperforming books in that period - although it's possible that, boring as Daredevil, Iron Man or the Hulk were in those years, they were still outselling most of the books DC and other publishers were putting out.
On the other hand, DC was definitely canceling books more frequently in the 60s and 70s - I don't have any concrete numbers in front of me, but a lot of features like Animal Man, the Doom Patrol and, er Swing with Scooter, lasted only a few years. Would-be big names like the Atom or Hawkman weren't able to hold down their own books until the 80s or so (if then), but would get the occasional reboot.
But back to Daredevil. As I mentioned, I've now read through the entirety of Stan Lee's run on that book, apart from a backup story he wrote in 2001, so now I get to see what Roy Thomas made of the character, as well as whoever followed him. I'll get to see the book retitled to Daredevil and Black Widow, when the two characters were in a relationship, and then, hopefully, I'll get to connect the dots to Frank Miller's run.
In his book All of the Marvels, Douglas Wolk says not to read each of these series in strict chronological order, but in the case of these books, be they the X-Men, Daredevil or Spider-Man, I find it interesting to see how they changed over the years. X-Men had some distinct flavors based on who was writing or drawing it, and I look forward to seeing the different directions that subsequent writers took Daredevil down. At the very least, they'll have to introduce better villains than Stilt-Man, but I don't really have high hopes.
