by Paul Fischer
Ben Affleck, Jennifer Garner and Michael Clarke
Duncan StarTalk
by Chuck Schwartz and Paul Fischer
For those of you foreign to the ways of the comic book world,
learn the word ‘fanboy.' A fanboy is one who is an avid reader
and collector, one whose interest surpasses the usual single digit 
and
teenage comic book reading years. What then do you suppose you get when
you unleash a number of fanboys on the movie adaptation of one of their
comic book heroes. You get Daredevil, from writer/director Mark
Steven Johnson and stars Ben Affleck, friend
of writer/director and temporary DD scribe Kevin Smith, and Michael
Clarke Duncan, perhaps the only actor in Hollywood large enough
to portray DD's oversized nemesis Kingpin. Affleck places his first
comic book experience at around age nine. Duncan pegs his by a twelve
cent cover price (trust the fanboy Cranky, that was a long time ago) and
tells a very familiar story to the room full of fans he is speaking to.
"I had Spider-Man, Batman, Superman, Hulk, Green Lantern, Fantastic
Four. I collected comic books and I had 'em on the floor because I knew
if I wanted to trade I could just look down to see what I had. One day
I came in and it was all clean! I said 'mama what did you do with my comic
books?' She said 'Oh, I threw em in the incinerator.'" At this point
a room full of fanboys lets out a big collective groan. "To this
day, when she asks for money it's back to that incinerator and three point
five million she might have cost me."
Affleck, who portrays blind lawyer Matt Murdock -- his powers are
a hyperextension of his remaining senses - followed Daredevil for a
different
reason. "When I was a kid, the comic book universe was predictable.
[Super heroes] fought intergalactic foes and it was fun in a little
kid
way but it was nothing I could ever identify with. Daredevil represented
something to me I guess that I thought was more realistic. It sounds
funny
to say that about a guy who puts on a red suit and fights crime but he
was a flawed hero and he had his own struggles. He was 
openly
religious. He had these tragic love affairs. He didn't always
win; he didn't always do the right thing. He was more of a ground
level guy. He wasn't fighting intergalactic empires or traveling
through alternate universes and didn't have a ring that shot
green rays, he was just a guy, who had evolved. In particular, he
had this handicap.
So he has this peculiar vulnerability that I thought was really interesting."
When Stan Lee created Daredevil (with artist Bill Everett), not a lot of thought went into it. There was a standard secret identity ploy; a love interest (secretary Karen Page) who could never know the true identity of the super-devil-man who was saving her every month, month in and month out. There was a goofy supporting cast (Murdock's law partner, the overweight and intellectual "Foggy" Nelson) and some of the finest superhero girlfriends ever to come out of the pens of Marvel Comic's artist Gene Colan and Tom Palmer -- you won't see the black widow
in the DD movie but, trust us, to any thirteen year old Cranky to be, long red hair and a head to toe black spandex costume is yummy. That aside, Daredevil was a second rate comic book until an artist named Frank Miller stepped up to handle the writing chores. Then the Daredevil "universe" became a nasty place to live. The Kingpin of Crime, previously a Spider-Man villain, made his presence known by siccing Greek assassin Elektra Natchios, trained in the Far East by an equally deadly organized crime group called The Hand, on the firm of Nelson and Murdock. Elektra, it so happened, was Murdock's girlfriend from his days at Columbia University. Add to the mix a psychopathic killer named Bullseye -- he can make a weapon out of literally anything -- and the comic book world was shaken to its knees.
And that's why there is a Daredevil movie. And it is also why Duncan is insistent: "It would be really nice if you got Spider-Man and Daredevil in the same movie. Just split it down the middle. It would not be that simple but it's a great idea. So remember I said that!
For actress Jennifer Garner, who isn't stretching much from her spy antics on teevee's Alias, her Elektra is "a challenge. First of all you have all of these comic books to draw from, from which to build a character. You also have all of these fans that think of this character in a specific way before you ever say one word and there is a weight of the responsibility of that. Then at the same time, it's a comic book character so you can go anywhere with it. It can be as big as you want or as real as you want or as crazy as you want so it took a little while to find our way, but it was great to start with the physicality of it." While Bullseye can turn anything into a weapon, Elektra prefers the three pronged sai, a weapon as deadly as it is deadly looking.
With a story firmly rooted in its comic book mythos, what does Daredevil offer to those who could care less about four color heroes? Action, action and more action, all in keeping with the violence laden four color world. The chance to see People Magazine's sexiest man in the world in red leather, for sure.
