Brian Bendis' stint on Daredevil will go down as one of the medium's greatest runs, and one of the greatest story-arcs to have featured within it was The Murdock Papers, a plot that placed Matt's secret-identity in great jeopardy.
While the topic of Matt Murdock's double life has become something of a gag for comics writers ever since (Mark Waid and Chris Samnee's famous "I'M NOT DAREDEVIL" sweater comes to mind), at the time, Fisk's whistleblowing of Matt's identity as Daredevil was quite the big deal. People were sceptical, of course, owing to the fact that Matt Murdock is blind, but Fisk was still able to use his file on Murdock (which later turned out to be fake) to send Matt's life into chaos.
Murdock would later be gravely wounded by an FBI SWAT team attempting to recover the file, culminating in his imprisonment with Fisk on Ryker's Island and the commencement of Ed Brubaker and Michael Lark's The Devil in Cell-block D.
Fisk might not've managed to cash in his get out of jail free card, but he did succeed in irrevocably changing Matt Murdock's life for the worse, forcing the lawyer to fend off charges of vigilantism for years to come.
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.
