The funny thing about Daredevil: Born Again is that, despite sharing a name with one of the most iconic Daredevil stories ever told, it’s not based on that story at all. (In part because 2018’s third season of Netflix’s Daredevil already adapted it.)
No, Daredevil: Born Again owes much more to Charles Soule’s 2015-2018 run on the character, in which Wilson Fisk suddenly and unexpectedly became mayor of New York City. And it continues that focus in this week’s fourth episode, by introducing just a glimpse of a dead ringer for one of that run’s early villains.
Daredevil: Born Again clearly has plans for the character, so if you’d like to follow along with the mystery, stop reading now. But if you simply can’t wait to find out that guy’s deal — read on!
[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for Daredevil: Born Again through episode 3, and for some comics from the 2010s.]
We only catch a glimpse of a man dragging a body through the bowels of the New York City subway, but his mask is the giveaway. This is Muse, a graffiti-painting serial killer who menaced Daredevil in the late ’00s.
Who is Muse?
Muse, created by writer Charles Soule and artist Ron Garney, is a serial killer and graffiti artist who battled Daredevil and his allies in a couple story arcs in 2016 and 2018. A twisted kind of artist, he felt his work (made with an indelible paint he’d invented that required oodles of human blood as an ingredient) had a grand role to play in New York City.
He didn’t have much of a uniform or outfit, but he did wear a distinct white full-face mask decorated with two smears of blood that dripped from where his eyes would otherwise be, just like the man in episode 4 of Daredevil: Born Again. Muse’s origin was left mysterious, but he did show off a bevy of odd and unnerving superpowers — speed, strength, and a silencing effect that messed with Daredevil’s ability to perceive him — and while Soule never confirmed it, his comics heavily implied that Muse was an Inhuman.
When Wilson Fisk became mayor on a platform of superhero registration, Muse started tagging the city up with huge murals in support of folks like Spider-Man, Power Man, the Punisher, etc. As Mayor, Fisk declined to muster city forces to track Muse down, because a pro-superhero serial killer preying on innocent people, the marginalized, and police officers was great optics for him. Eventually Muse was defeated in a confrontation with Daredevil’s ally, Blindspot, and Muse walked into a fire, taking his own life because he felt it was the stronger artistic choice.
Wait, Muse is an Inhuman?
Yes, but in this writer’s opinion, that’s probably not something Daredevil: Born Again is going to bring up.
Marvel’s Inhumans silo of characters were having a manufactured moment in the mid-’10s, with the Marvel Cinematic Universe attempting to spin them up into a replacement for the X-Men, who were still under an exclusive film license to 20th Century Fox. On an edict from on high, the Inhumans became a major pillar of Marvel Comics Continuity, with the Inhuman royal family parking their palace of New Attilan in the Hudson River next to the Statue of Liberty, and Terrigen Mist weather patterns awakening Inhuman powers in unsuspecting human beings.
Much in the same way that “mutant x-gene” has served Marvel Comics as an easy explanation for how a character got their strange superpowers, Inhuman abilities served to explain Muse, because the Inhumans were really hot at the time (or, at least, were being made to act like it).
Being the grounded show that it is, Daredevil: Born Again doesn’t seem likely to want to rehash the MCU’s infamously failed TV series. Whether or not Muse turns out to have superpowers in Born Again, the show already has a lot on its plate — between Mayor Fisk and new characters like White Tiger, the Punisher, and Matt Murdock to give air to — it seems unlikely it’ll add on “reintroducing the Inhumans” to that case docket.
The post The comic book story behind Daredevil’s mystery killer appeared first on Polygon.
