You know those numbers you can call to have someone read your fortune or give you advice on a pressing matter? I’m not going to get into a discussion on whether psychic abilities are real, but I will take a look at how, in the Marvel Universe, you can call a trusted superhero colleague for guidance. At least if you happen to be friends with Matt Murdock, owner of the sharpest ears in town. Too bad this particular scenario, from Daredevil #38 (volume 2), by Brian Michael Bendis and Manuel Gutierrez, doesn’t actually work. Read the below scene carefully (click the images to enlarge), and we’ll get to all the ways it doesn’t make sense…
Matt hears heatbeats by phone, panel 1
Actual nonsense under the cut –>
Tagged as:
Brian Michael Bendis,
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Daredevil vol 2 #1- 100,
Manuel Gutierrez,
Wacky powers
In his most recent review of Daredevil #106, Robert of the Matt Murdock Chronicles discussed an instance of Matt talking about his color sensing ability, and a dialogue on the topic ensued in the comments. Well, in all honesty, it was mostly me giving a very (confusing) lecture. So, I thought I’d try a more pedagogical approach here. First let’s look at some instances that showcase “color sensing.”
Daredevil’s ability to determine color is one of those tricks that has gone away almost completely over time, despite being prominently featured even in the very first issue, as seen below. “I can even blend colors, for each colored fabric has a different feel to me!” You sure about that, Matt? That first costume of yours, while iconic, hardly features an impressive blend of colors…
Read more under the cut –>
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Here’s another hand on screen moment. These are rare (probably because they should be impossible), but we saw a couple of instances of reading computer screens by touch back in Chichester’s run. The scene featured here is much more recent, I’m sad to say, and comes from the Parts of a Hole arc by David Mack and Joe Quesada. Matt is hanging out with Natasha and it’s just been reported on TV that a large fire has been set. Matt quickly deduces that this is Echo (Maya Lopez) trying to lure him out. But how does he figure this out? It could just be that he’s putting two and two together by what Natasha is trying to tell him rather than the palm on screen thing, but why would he be touching it at all? Because watching TV with your hands… just doesn’t work. Sorry, pal.
From Daredevil #14 (vol 2):
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Here’s an example from Daredevil #131, by Marv Wolfman and Bob Brown (with Klaus Janson on inks), of Daredevil doing something he’s presumably quite good at: detecting residual heat. We’ve read about it in the Marvel Universe Handbook or on DD’s page on Wikipedia, the part about how he can detect changes in heat and tell how long someone’s been dead or when an appliance was last used. Still, you rarely see any of this actually happen in the comic.
In all honesty, I don’t find an increased ability to gauge heat to be particularly wacky. Some people are very good at judging distances, or how much something weighs. Some people have perfect pitch. I think this might be intended to work along those lines. The part that gets a little wacky is when this ability is actually put to work. Below, we see DD determine that the murderer in question (who happens to be Bullseye in his very first appearance, by the way) was wearing gloves because there is no heat residue on the pen he used to write something on the wall next to the victim.
Okay, let’s back up a minute here… Just how long does someone’s heat residue stay on something they’ve touched? Not very long. Also, what kinds of gloves is Bullseye wearing? As long as they’re not mittens, wouldn’t the outside of the glove be almost the same temperature as Bulleye’s hand? The surface would most certainly be hotter than the surrounding air temperature. But, you say, it may not be as high as if he hadn’t been wearing gloves at all. Possibly. The only problem is that we don’t know what kinds of gloves he was wearing. Also, we don’t know where his hand had been just before he wrote that note. Wrapped around a cold beer? Could be.
Okay, I won’t nitpick too much, but being able to gauge temperature just doesn’t strike me as a very useful skill considering all the other factors involved. That didn’t keep this skill from being featured in the director’s cut of the Daredevil movie where Matt reaches up to touch a lamp, presumably to determine how long it’s been out. Again, this would depend on how quickly the surface of the lamp cools down and even the wattage of the light bulb. And, once it’s gone cold, that’s it. Yes, I know I’m a geek. It’s just that the things Daredevil can do with this dubious skill of his strike me as a little, well, wacky…
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Daredevil vol 1 #101-150,
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I have a couple of panels ready for this post and the distantly related “seeing goof” I’ll get to next, so I thought I’d just get them out of the way and get ready to have my Daredevil #109 review posted by tomorrow. I want to apologize in advance for being really obnoxious with this one. In fact, my last post was pretty obnoxious as well (I’ve just been in that kind of mood lately). I promise to crank up the funny in the next post. 
On the right, from issue #56 by Roy Thomas, is one of the goofier examples of an ability Daredevil used to have in the good ol’ days which he has since lost (as in it explicitely being mentioned as a “weakness” in the MUH).
Here we see Daredevil using his gloved hand to discern the appearance of Karen’s father. We can probably also assume that this framed photograph is protected behind a glass cover. However, aside from those external “obstacles,” there are plenty of reasons why Matt should have big problems with any and all forms of imagery, beyond very simple line drawings or prints, and something like a photograph should be the least accessible of them all. Here’s a short list:
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An image usually makes much more sense when processed as a whole rather than the sum of its parts. Even if we go along with Roy Thomas in this example and assume that Matt’s fingertips give him an actual picture of what they’re “seeing,” he can only “see” what he’s touching at any given time. Try making sense of a large map on a wall if you can only see it through a narrow tube. Kind of hard to get any real feel for it, isn’t it?
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Images are meant to be perceived by the eyes. I know, this one sounds like a no-brainer, but what I’m getting at is that something like a photograph represents a two-dimensional color image of the three-dimensional physical world, as viewed through the eyes. If that image doesn’t really correspond to what the world “looks” like to you, it won’t make a lot of sense. The idea of Matt being able to match a flat color image to a three-dimensional colorless reality with any kind of reliability is wacky in and of itself.
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How would such an image be perceived? Matt’s print-reading ability actually makes sense to me, since it’s based on differences in texture. Depending on the printing process, the ink layer can actually be quite high and well into the realm of where even the average person can perceive it. If you crank up the sensitivity and, most importantly, the resolution of the fingertip it even seems logical that it would be possible to get something from that. Most photographs (or even printed color images), on the other hand, are completely smooth, so he can’t use differences in texture to learn anything about them. That leaves color. I personally think that any color sensing ability at all is goofy. I just don’t buy it (I could go into the long and technical explanation for why that is, but I won’t). It gets even goofier when you imagine what kind of resolution this ability would have to have for him to be able to discern fine detail. His fingertips would have to match the human retina in photosensitivity. Yeah, not really buying it. 
Again, sorry for getting long and technical here. It’s that old science degree creeping up. This was just the wordy and geeky way for me to say what could be summed up in one word: Wacky!
Tagged as:
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Daredevil vol 1 #51-100,
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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!
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Daredevil vol 1 #51-100,
Gene Colan,
Gerry Conway,
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The careful observer may remember one of the very first posts in this series, in which Daredevil lands a rocket guided only by his uncanny senses (I think he found a safe place to land by listening to where there were no heartbeats… *ahem*). For some reason, new Daredevil scribe Steve Gerber obviously felt that a return to Daredevil piloting aircraft was long overdue, and in issue #100 – yes, this is the same issue as the one mentioned in the previous post below – we once again behold the blind superhero safely navigating the skies. The funny thing about this (well, there are a lot of funny things about it, but I digress) is that it actually contains some elements from the last wacky power we looked at, which was reading computer screens by touch, but I’ll get to that below.
Okay, first of all, why is Daredevil drawn looking out the window? However, the best part is this:
“His hypersensitive fingertips read the dials and meters his eyes cannot see. And he knows that he is… home?”
Since when can displays and meters in cockpits be touched directly? Well, they can’t, it’s as simple as that. This gets even goofier on the next page, as we learn that it’s not just the meter and dials that his fingers read (oh, and do note that he’s still wearing gloves), but an image on a screen of a robbery in progress!! What kind of weird flight radar is this? I’m stunned! And Daredevil knows all this by placing his hand on a screen depicting this event, because there’s no way that could just be a flock of birds or something, right? Follow along for yourselves below. Ah, yes… So wacky, I think I just ran out of the sarcasm I need to comment further.
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Gene Colan,
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Steve Gerber,
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Here is another panel from Daredevil #12, suggested a while back by fellow DD fan Francesco (*waves*). This panel is funny for a couple of reasons… First of all, shouldn’t DD get his priorities straight? He approaching an island with a giant skull taking up roughly eighty percent of the surface. The island, as you’ll see, is appropriately named Skull Island. Whatever surface isn’t covered by a gigantic skull is set ablaze. Rather than concentrating on the more immediate issues, Daredevil comments on the type of vegetation present. Again, aren’t all the plants burning at this point?
I’m sure Matt can sense vegetation. He can smell it, there’s probably some pollen in the air, the rustling of leaves… One thing we know for certain, however, is that he wasn’t around millions of years ago. Heck, this is even one of those times where I’d be inclined to say that he would be in a better position to make the absurd claim seen below if he could see. That is, compare what he would then be seeing on the island with a drawing showing a reconstruction of old plants (based on the available fossil record). Nope, this is certainly wacky…
Daredevil approaches a burning island, from Daredevil #12
“… as though I’ve been transported to the dawn of time.” Well, DD you obviously must have been at some time. How else would you know what those plants are? Here’s an idea though: maybe some of the plants contain hallucinogens that when burning produces smoke, which…Yeah, you get my drift.
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Well, I thought I’d get back to posting again with a couple of wacky power posts, just to warm up. This one, from Daredevil #12 (Vol 1, of course…) shows Matt checking the time by feeling the face of his watch. Makes sense, no? Well, the problem is that he isn’t actually touching it directly but is apparently feeling the the sounds it makes – through the glass! Since I believe everything probably can be “explained” (if you’re Stan Lee…), I might even be willing to guess that he’s really performing this trick by feeling the difference in heat from where the hands of the watch have cast their shadow after being held for some amount of time next to a light source. Don’t buy that one? Well, the below panel doesn’t make a whole lot more sense either…
Matt checking the time, from Daredevil #12
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Christine is a thirty something Daredevil fan from Sweden who spends way too much of her free time writing posts for this blog. Check the
Wacky power #11 – Reading computer screens… by touch
by Christine on June 19, 2008 in Commentary, Humor, Wacky Powers
Since this one came up in the comments section of a previous post, and I’ve been thinking of posting it for a while, I decided to just get to it. Sadly, this one isn’t from the Silver Age, but from the early 90’s when Daredevil scribe D.G. Chichester decided to give Matt something of a power boost, and a pretty big one at that. I’ve read in some interview that Chichester was into computers and technology (I’ll try to look for the source when I have the time). What a bummer for him that he was working on a book featuring a character who can’t realistically – and I’m already allowing for a more liberal use of the word “realism” – access content displayed on a screen by ordinary means. What does he do about it? He makes up a new power for Daredevil.
Why am I calling it a new power? Well, every single time Daredevil has read print in the comic, it has always been based on the idea that he can discriminate the difference in texture between the imprint of the ink on the page and the paper it is printed on and use this ability to discern the features of the text. This is relatively believable in that even a living breathing human in our own reality can actually feel the ink imprint in a regular newspaper (try it if you don’t believe me). The difference between us mere mortals and Matt Murdock is that his sense of touch is heightened to levels where the resolution of his fingertips is much higher than ours. That’s key here, because heightened means heightened and not fundamentally altered. Let’s have a look at the first panel from issue #298 (art by Lee Weeks)…
Okay, so we’re dealing with “heat reading” here. I buy the increased sensitivity to variations in heat, but sadly for Chichester, this is simply impossible. I know what some might be thinking, it’s a comic book, right? Well, yes it is. On the other hand, Daredevil’s senses – when written well – don’t so much violate the laws of physics as the “laws” of biology. In fact, the whole premise of the character’s powers is that they are just heightened senses. Incredibly heightened, sure, but not enough to perceive something which simply isn’t there. This actually violates the laws of physics, because heat (and we can only assume the differences in heat on the screen are infinitesimal, if they exist at all) simply doesn’t behave that way. Light travels in nice little bundles, heat does not. Its pattern breaks down almost immediately. Besides, this is simply lazy writing. Wouldn’t it have been much cooler to see Matt use his head and just press the PrtSc button?
The computer-reading nonsense continues in ways that are even worse in issue #303, (art by M.C. Wyman) as seen below…
Another reason not to indiscriminately increase a character’s powers without thinking first is that you remove a source of weakness that might serve as a plot point later on to get the character into trouble, which is why the below panel, from issue #306, (art by Scott McDaniel) suddenly makes very little sense…
Wait a minute now… Weren’t those meaningless swirls a source of high-resolution information just three issues earlier? I’d say that writers are better off sticking to the rules of the game in the first place so they don’t have to backtrack later on when the new power comes to bite them in the rear end. As for the computer situation, this already wacky ability seemed to fade away and was gone by the mid-90’s to be replaced with seemingly nothing at all. The current incarnation of the character appears to not use computers, which is a little odd, to say the least. We’ll see if Brubaker can deliver on that one somewhere down the line.
Tagged as: Commentary, D. G. Chichester, Daredevil science, Daredevil vol 1 #251-300, Daredevil vol 1 #301-350, Lee Weeks, M.C. Wyman, Scott McDaniel, Wacky powers
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