Though he may have started off life as a Spider-Man villain, there's no denying the synonymy Wilson Fisk - the self-anointed Kingpin of Crime - shares with Daredevil.
Since being inserted into Daredevil's comics during Frank Miller's critically lauded stint on the character, Kingpin has made it his life's mission to mess with Matt Murdock, a motivation best exemplified by Miller and artist Dave Mazzucchelli's equally revered graphic novel, Born Again. It's an obsession that transcends Miller's run however, and - barring perhaps Batman and the Joker - it's difficult to think of a rivalry as mythic as the one shared between Murdock and Fisk.
That in itself has presented a big challenge to writers, and while Matt Murdock's life has always been a bit of a punching bag, the stuff Kingpin has done in his long and storied career sits among the most abject schemes in the superhero genre - he really is that much of a villain.
It’s a danger intimated on the screen in Vincent D’Onofrio’s rendition of the villain, and off it in the pages of the character’s comics. How unlucky Daredevil is, that he gets to be his arch enemy.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
