Who said it, Daredevil’s Wilson Fisk or actual NYC mayor Eric Adams? 

I’m both a lifelong superhero fan and a born and bred New Yorker, which means that as this week’s Daredevil: Born Again rolled out its version of Wilson “The Kingpin” Fisk’s rise to the office of mayor of New York City, I wasn’t thinking about what this would mean for Matt Murdock. Instead, I was doing mental math on how Wilson Fisk’s candidacy fit into New York City’s electoral processes. 

See, in New York, we do ranked choice voting, which might imply there were other candidates more extreme than Fisk on both ends of the spectrum. And if Staten Island voted heavily for him, as one line of dialogue suggests, he probably ran as a conservative Independent or a Republican. And if he’s the 112th mayor of New York in a special election, that would imply that Eric Adams’ successor leaves office in an unexpected way. 

All I can say is: At least Marvel is letting us have someone between Adams and Fisk. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but New York City has its own embattled mayor at the moment. Adams faces five federal charges spanning conspiracy, wire fraud, bribery, and solicitation of contribution by a foreign national — or he will unless he complies with our current president’s policy goals. Recent polling shows a majority of the city thinks he should resign and less than 20% think he is trustworthy. 

These are the national headlines Adams is making, which can obscure many of his weirder, relatively more minor statements, actions, and scandals, much in the way that a popular TV adaptation of a comic book character can obscure many of their lesser-known stories and characteristics. So, in the spirit of educating any non-New York City-adjacent readers out there about both comic books and New York, here’s a little game. 

I’ve prepared a list of things Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin, has done, said, or had a scandal about; and things Eric Adams, the actual mayor of the real New York City, has done, said, or had a scandal about. I may have also tossed in a few fake things here and there, just to keep it spicy. I’ll reveal the answers at the end of this post, and you can see how many you were able to get right. 

Fisk or Adams?

1. Was indicted for soliciting favors, campaign contributions, and luxury experiences from a foreign country.
2. Beat a man to death with his bare fists while observed by a city district attorney.
3. His campaign was plagued by rumors that he didn’t even live in the city.
4. Said: “All my haters become my waiters when I sit down at the table of success.”
5. Said: “This city isn’t a caterpillar. It doesn’t spin a cocoon and wake up a butterfly.”
6. Told a story about keeping a photo of a fallen police officer in his wallet for years; the photo was kind of a forgery.
7. Has apparently recovered from losing his sight in one eye. 
8. Is rarely seen in public with his romantic partner, whom he considers to be “clairvoyant.” 
9. Said: “Everyone that knows me, they know one thing. I hate rats. […] Well, you know what? We’re going to kill rats.” 
10. Believed some objects called the Tablets of Life and Time and Death and Entropy had been hidden around the city. 
11. Said that New York City possesses a “special energy” from all of its underground gems and stones.
12. Temporarily retired to Japan with his wife.
13. Said: “It was a long road. With experience, my one teacher. Poverty, my motivation. Hunger, my companion. And fear, first my enemy and then my friend.” 
14. Said: “When Jesus was on the cross, he said, ‘God, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ All […] who were asking me to step down, God, forgive them.” 
15. Attempted to police New York City with robot drones. 
16. Seemingly attempted to gain dual citizenship in a foreign nation by marrying a convicted criminal, in order to gain amnesty for past actions.
17. Said: “This is a place where every day, you wake up, you could experience everything from a plane crashing into our Trade Center to a person who’s celebrating a new business that’s open.” 
18. Was called before a federal grand jury trial investigating his connections to individuals belonging to a foreign terrorist group. 
19. Said: “The only hero this city needs is its king.” 
20. Said: “There’s no parachutes on this plane. We’re all going down together.” 

Answers

1. Yeah, that was Eric Adams. 
2. This one is Kingpin, in Devil’s Reign #5. These were your freebies — now it gets harder. 
3. During his campaign there was a lot of confusion over whether Eric Adams only claimed to reside in Brooklyn and was actually living and paying taxes in New Jersey. 
4. Yeah, it’s one of Adams’ pet phrases. 
5. This one’s a quote from the Daredevil TV series. 
6. Eric Adams! In 2023 the New York Times reported that a couple days after Adams first started telling a story about keeping an officer’s portrait in his wallet, he directed his office staff to print out and weather the paper themselves so he could start actually carrying it for the first time. 
7. This is actually both. Fisk recovered from being shot in the eye through plot contrivance; Adams says he recovered his eyesight by adopting a vegan lifestyle. 
8. That’s Adams. Fisk’s wife, Vanessa, doesn’t traditionally have superpowers.  
9. Also Adams. He was talking about rats, the animal.  
10. This is Fisk; he was going to use the tablets to resurrect Vanessa from the dead. 
11. “He learned that New York sits on a store of rare gems and stones,” Politico’s Ruby Cramer wrote of Eric Adams in 2022, “and believes that as a result, ‘there’s a special energy that comes from here.’”
12. This one is Fisk, who retired from a life of crime at the end of 1979’s Amazing Spider-Man #197, only to resurface in Japan during a 1981 Daredevil arc. 
13. Fisk, in Daredevil #12 (2000).
14. Eric Adams said this, comparing himself to Jesus. 
15. Both, improbably! As mayor, Fisk allowed Doctor Octopus to blanket the city with “anti-crime” drones to enforce his zero tolerance policies. Eric Adams had the city rent a 5-foot-tall trash-can-shaped surveillance robot to ineffectually Roomba around the Union Square subway station for six months. 
16. Wilson Fisk claimed citizenship of the mutant nation of Krakoa — and coverage under its universal amnesty policies — after marrying fellow Daredevil villain, and mutant, Typhoid Mary.
17. You can tell this is an Eric Adams quote because no editor would let a comic writer put that in a book. 
18. Wilson Fisk sat before a grand jury investigating his connections to the terrorist group Hydra in Daredevil #300. 
19. Fisk said this in Daredevil #600.  
20. Eric Adams said this in a community meeting at an elementary school.

I must apologize for lying: In the end, I did not actually make any of these up, and they are all real. I’m sorry, but I’m also not sorry. I live here. In New York City. And there’s never been any scandal about whether I do. 

I hope you’ve found all of this informative, amusing, alarming, or all three. I’ll be here, counting the days until the mayoral primary in June. 

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