Toucan: I get it, and it also kind of relates to Daredevil, because he’s probably one of the most ethical characters in comics right now, at least the way you’re writing him. For a while there he was written way too dark and conflicted and kind of an anti-hero, but now you’ve brought positivity back to him and he’s very moral and very ethical.

Mark: I think he has to be, and again I don’t speak for everybody who ever wrote or drew Daredevil and I would be foolish to, because it’s a murderers’ row of truly great talent, but from my point of view Matt had no choice but to be moral and ethical because it’s so deeply engrained in his psyche . . . he has to believe. And when I say he has to believe I’m not saying I think he must believe this and this because I want it to happen. I’m saying I think he has no choice but to believe that good can triumph and light can come, that might comes from right. That things can be put right and that the world can be made fair and there can be justice, because otherwise there is just no reason in the world why a 10-year-old boy who helped a man across the street in traffic could have been blinded in a horrible accident and had all this stuff taken away from him. In other words, if you’re Matt Murdock, you have to believe that it’s not that there’s a reason for it, not that there’s some sort of a cosmic destiny behind the accident that happened, but just on a more fundamental level. You got to believe that good can come out of that stuff. Does that make any sense?

Toucan: Yeah, definitely.

Mark: I’m not sure I’ve hit exactly the nail on the head, but these are good questions you’re asking me because you’re making me articulate things I have not yet articulated in 800,000 interviews about Daredevil.

Toucan: And you’re right in that Daredevil over the years has had a murderer’s row of creators on it, but he’s also a character that every once in a while has to be jump started again.

Mark: Yeah.

Toucan: What attracted you to the character that made you want to take over the book at this point in time?

Mark: A short story. A pro short story actually that was written in the late ’70s and it was . . . did you ever see those Marvel novels of the late ’70s, early ’80s?

Toucan: Ted White wrote a Captain America one I think, but that was maybe in the ‘60s.

Mark: Yeah, and Otto Binder wrote an Avengers one and that was the ’60s. In the ’70s it was Len Wein and Marv Wolfman and Ron Goulart and guys like that doing Hulk and Fantastic Four and Spider-Man novels. But there was a short story collection, Marvel Superheroes, and I think Chris Clairemont wrote one and I know Jim Shooter wrote one, and in there was a short story about Daredevil written by Marty Pasko—he’s one of my favorite writers—under a pen name, it escapes me what it is now, I forget. I read that short story when I was a kid, and it starts with Matt waking up in the morning, it’s that simple. In prose you don’t get the cool visual cues that you get from Daredevil and his radar sense, you have to rely purely on prose, and Marty did a great job of in a few pages outlining what your life is like if you have radar sense and you have enhanced senses and you have to live in that world. And the way he focused on Matt’s powers, the way he defined them for me in prose, made me really think about them, and I’ve always loved that set of superpowers. I’ve always been fascinated by what the world was like through Matt Murdock’s enhanced senses. And so that as much as anything is what drew me to the book. I mean I had always been a fan, and honestly the other thing that drew me to the book was Marvel was great. I said, “Look I accept the assignment but I can’t do what Frank did. I can’t do stories in the style of Frank Miller, because that’s just not what I do well. What I would like to do is what Frank did, which is do my own thing. Just go and sort of break rank with the tone of the book that had been established since Frank got there and try to find some new voice. I think it was a horrific gamble, I really do, because there’s every chance in the world that fans could have just strung me up and said well this isn’t Bendis, go to hell. You know, where’s Hell’s Kitchen, where’s Dark Daredevil, where’s the blood? But instead we just—in a gargantuan way thanks to Marcos Martin and to Pablo Rivera, the artists—we hit the right place at the right time, I don’t know, but man we struck gold.

Toucan: Well, both in the writing and the art, a lot of readers think you’ve made Daredevil fun again.

Mark: You know the reason he hasn’t been fun is because fun comics don’t sell. Thanks . . . you just killed the book, thanks.

Toucan: I don’t think that book is in any danger of being killed right now. When you look back, the character is almost 50 years old. It’ll be 50 in 2014. He was created to be kind of more of a wise-cracking, fun superhero like Spider-Man was at the time, not that Spider-Man, especially under Ditko, didn’t have his dark moments, but Daredevil was a lot lighter.

Mark: In some ways he was a poor man’s Spider-Man in that they were trying to emulate the same sort of soap opera, but the problem that you have with Matt Murdock was that first off, the supporting cast was much smaller. Spidey had a huge supporting cast, and Matt had Foggy and his secretary Karen and that’s it. And for some reason it’s just not as angsty and soap operay when problems happen to a successful adult attorney with money as they are when they happen to a hapless teenage kid who is struggling to make the rent. It was always a swashbuckling book, and I loved that as a kid. That’s one of the reasons the character appealed to me as a kid, but you know as well as I do fun comics . . . they close out of town. Especially in the superhero world there’s just not much room for whimsy or lightness or what have you. I don’t understand why we seemed to have escaped that curse for the time being, but I’m kind of looking at it like I’m the coyote walking off the cliff. I don’t want to look down or I’ll fall.