Daredevil Born Again and the Amazing Comic Book Prophecy
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| The author’s entire existing comic book collection |
When Marvel recently announced their latest wave of upcoming movies and series, the fanbase was, understandably, stoked. (Secret Wars? Oh HECK yeah!) But something you may have missed in all the excitement was this: Marvel confirmed an amazing comic book prophecy wherein I foretold some of their coolest productions over 30 years ago.
You couldn’t have known it because I didn’t even know.
First, all my cards on the table: I have not purchased a comic book in decades. Once I went to college back in the early 1990s the collecting game was over for me. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago in the post Love and Thunder, Ragnarok, and The Mighty Thor #362, I sold most of my collection for college money and kept only a handful of my favorites.
These were not comics I expected to be worth money one day. In fact, I did not preserve them well at all. My serious comic collector friends entombed their favorites in mylar and set laser defense systems around them to protect against any corrupting influence on the delicate sheets of comic paper. I, on the other hand, did my best to remember not to set my Big Red soda on my collection.
I just kept them because I really loved the stories in these particular issues.
Amazing comic book prophecy
Back to the Marvel announcements: there’s a new Disney Plus Series in the works. Are you sitting down? Of course you are. You’re reading about TV series based on comic books. Neither you nor I are on the treadmill right now.
This series brings back Daredevil into the MCU. But not just any Daredevil story, if the title is being at all honest. It’s called Daredevil: Born Again, and it sounds like they are bringing to life one of the most intense storylines from the 1980s. It was written by none other than Frank Miller, so you already know it’s going to be savage.
But this is the really funny thing: as I wrote in the Thor post mentioned above, I only own 6 comic books today, the remnants of a once mediocre comic book collection I had in the 1980s. One of them was Thor #362, one of the comics on which the movie Thor: Ragnarok was based. I found this to be very cool, since of all the comics I owned from the 80s, I held fast to one that was so compelling it rose above decades of subsequent comics to help shape a wildly popular movie.
Of the remaining 5 comics I own, it now seems that Marvel and Disney are about to turn two more of them into live action, as I still possess Daredevil issues 227 (published February 1986) and 231 (June 1986), the beginning and the end of the Born Again storyline. That means (if I did my calculations correctly), that 50% of the 6 comics I own have been or will likely be turned into multi-million dollar live screen adaptations.
You can just call me Nerdstradamous.
Beware: if we’re right about this, then there may be spoilers here, so stop reading if you are unfamiliar with this storyline and would rather wait for the series…in Spring 2024.
Daredevil: Born Again is the title of the storyline first printed in Daredevil #227 – #231, starting with the mind-blowing issue titled Apocalypse. The story is gritty and complex. At its core Born Again is superhero/crime drama, and is set in motion by everyone’s favorite massively-framed Disney crime lord:
Dang it, wait. No, it’s the other one.
The Kingpin. We’re not going to go into all the details at all, but the storyline is intense. The Kingpin acquires Daredevil’s secret identity, and begins the process of destroying Matt Murdock. This destruction is meant to be absolute: personally, professionally, both as a lawyer and a hero. Does it work?
We’ll just say it gets pretty dang close.
We’re not going to spoil the entire storyline. But if the upcoming series is anything close to the printed Born Again, we’re all in for a heck of a ride.
Before we end, you’re probably wondering which of my last 3 remaining comics will be turned into a movie or Disney Plus series next. Well, one of the six is the first issue of Classic X-Men, which was kind of sort of turned into a movie, but I don’t count it because it’s so obvious.
I have Longshot #1, the first of the original limited series about a genetically engineered human who was later counted as a mutant, whose power is luck. I haven’t heard anything about Longshot in decades, so this one is a literal longshot.
That leaves my last comic: X-Men Issue #268, written by Chris Claremont, penciled by Jim Lee, and inked by Scott Williams. You could tell me you wouldn’t watch a movie that teams up Captain America, Wolverine and Black Widow, but we’d both know you’d be lying. This is my final amazing comic book prophecy.
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