I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t like Daredevil’s radar sense penetrating solid objects. Now, don’t get me wrong, if we are in fact dealing with electromagnetic waves (such as light, microwaves – i.e. radar – or radiowaves) they all display various properties depending on wavelength, and radiowaves do penetrate walls. They also penetrate people. So… Yeah, I’m sure you get my point.

I guess what I don’t like about it is this “have your cake and eat it too” aspect. The radar penetrates something very dense (brick wall) to then be reflected off of something less dense (a person), a signal which then once again comes back through the brick wall. This is a little nutty to me. The other part of the reason I don’t like it is because it’s completely unnecessary. Most of what he does with it, which usually consists of locating people in other rooms, cold be handled perfectly well with his sense of hearing. In the pure physical sense, most body sounds – such as heartbeats, breath sounds and even intestines moving (yuck!) – are quite loud. The only problem for us mere mortals is that our hearing is very poor in that particular frequency range. To Matt, these sounds should be at the same level as a normal conversation (which, in the pure physical sense, they are) and thus easily audible through a normal wall. So please Daredevil writers, drop the X-ray vision radar! It’s silly and redundant.

However, this post wasn’t meant to be a rant, but a chance to illustrate one occasion where Daredevil’s radar comes across as unusually X-ray-like. I’d like to preface the picture below with a famous quote from a certain movie: “I see dead people.”

“None of this makes sense!” You got that right, Matt. The above is from issue #97, one of Gerry Conway’s last on the book, and part of the Dark Messiah storyline. Not only could Matt stand in for a proper X-ray machine in this panel, he obviously has the medical training to determine what constitutes an abnormal bone structure. I call wacky on this one!