How Daredevil Almost Joined The Avengers After ‘Born Again’

With the finale of Daredevil: Born Again hitting our screens this week, the Comicon team wanted to look at a what if tied to the storyline that partially inspired the Disney+ series.

For a long time, Daredevil stood as one of the rare major (and non-mutant) characters in the Marvel Universe to not join the Avengers. While Spider-Man — another street level, solo character with a history stretching back to Marvel’s Silver Age — threw in with the team briefly as a reserve member in the early 1990s — Daredevil resisted, even after characters like Wolverine joined the Avengers as part of the “Justice League-ification” of the team in the early 00s. By 2011, the character finally could resist no longer and got drafted as part of the “Fear Itself” event. Yet had writer Steve Englehart had his way, Daredevil would have joined the West Coast Avengers twenty-five years earlier in 1986!

“Born Again,” Frank Miller‘s encore to his seminal and groundbreaking Daredevil run, stands as one of the Man Without Fear’s most critically-acclaimed stories of all time, with parts of it adapted into both the third and current seasons of Daredevil (and lending its name to the current season). Both the story and Miller’s tenure on the title came to a close with Daredevil #233, and Englehart was tapped to take over the series.

A longtime writer for both Marvel and DC Comics (with significant runs writing both the Avengers and Batman), Englehart was in 1986 writing West Coast Avengers, amongst other things. Speaking of his plans for Daredevil with Kuljit Mithra of the Man Without Fear website, Englehart explained how, in the wake of “Born Again”, he wanted to test Matt Murdock further by taking him out of his familiar NYC confines and dropping him back on the West Coast (where Daredevil had hung out for a time in the 1970s) and having him join the West Coast Avengers to operate as a high profile hero in the public spotlight for the first time. Yet in the end, that move never happened, and Englehart’s “run” on the series lasted only one issue.

Part of Englehart’s plans for Daredevil’s move west also involved Black Widow (who, at the time, was arguably as much — if not more — a Daredevil character than an Avengers character) joining the western Avengers. This, Englehart explained, would set up a dynamic where Matt was working with his ex-girlfriend — Black Widow — as a superhero by day, while trying to continue his relationship with Karen Page by night.

But before Englehart’s Daredevil run began in earnest, a trio of fill-in issues were scheduled to help bridge the gap between “Born Again” and the new direction. The last of these, in Daredevil #236, is written by Ann Nocenti with art by Barry Windsor-Smith. In it, Daredevil and Black Widow team-up to track down a super-solider from the same program that created Nuke (the final villain of “Born Again”). Englehart, who had already written the first meeting between Daredevil and Black Widow post-“Born Again” for an issue in his still-upcoming run, objected. He insisted the fill-in issue be changed to maintain the story he had written, but was told he would have to work with what Nocenti had written. And so Englehart decided to leave the series.

As a result, the first issue of Englehart’s Daredevil run, #237, turned out to be the only issue of his Daredevil run. Furthermore, its credited writer is “John Harkness”, a pseudonym Englehart deployed whenever a comic was published on which he worked but wasn’t entirely satisfied with the end result for whatever reason. Thus, despite being the writer tapped to follow on from “Born Again”, Englehart’s name doesn’t appear in the credits of any issue of Daredevil.

(In a further twist, Nocenti, the writer who indirectly pushed Englehart off the book via her fill-in story in issue #236, took over as the regular writer of Daredevil with issue #238, the beginning of a long run that would last til issue #291 and stands as arguably the definitive non-Frank Miller Daredevil runs of the 1980s.)

When Englehart left the series, his plan to move Daredevil to the West Coast and have him join the Avengers there left with him. Instead, Nocenti kept the character in New York, exploring the fallout from “Born Again” in her own way and eventually introducing the notable DD villain/love interest, Typhoid Mary. And Daredevil retained his status as one of the few major Marvel characters to not join the Avengers for another twenty-ish years.