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Daredevil might be the most prolific Irish Catholic superhero. From the beginning, Daredevil’s Irish roots were implicit. The red hair, the name Murdock, and his New York neighborhood (later identified as Hell’s Kitchen). His Catholic faith wasn’t touched on until Daredevil #119, but it didn’t become a defining part of the character until Frank Miller’s run. According to Miller, who grew up in an Irish Catholic household, he was simply picking up on the seeds Stan Lee and Bill Everett planted when they introduced the character in 1964.

“Yeah, I brought that,” Frank Miller says during an appearance on the Word Balloon podcast. “I felt I brought it very legitimately because in the original very first story of Daredevil that was ever done that Stan Lee and Bill Everett drew, in that story there’s a brief mention that he comes from the neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen in New York. And Hell’s Kitchen is a historic neighborhood because it was named by Irish immigrants. The summers are so damn hot there that they named it Hell’s Kitchen.”

“[Hell’s Kitchen] was a very Irish neighborhood for a very long time. It had its own gangs that gave the mafia trouble. So, it seemed natural to make Matt Murdock more obviously an Irish Catholic. And I felt that fit in with his character too because, please take no offense, I mean this in a loving way, but we’re all a pack of liars, and good ones. And who but a liar would make a pledge to his father that he would never run out and be a tough kid and play baseball and everything else? All he’ll ever do is study and would become a lawyer and a vigilante. I thought that it all fit together as a guy who would achieve the right goals while playing with the truth.”

Fear not, we have the essentials when it comes to Marvel's Daredevil - especially with Marvel Studios' Daredevil: Born Again. Check out:

• The key difference between Netflix's Daredevil and Marvel Studios' Daredevil: Born Again, according to the showrunner
• The best Daredevil stories of all time
• What to watch before Daredevil: Born Again 
• If you’re starting Daredevil, here’s why Born Again matters
• Popverse Picks: Our favorite things for Marvel's Man Without Fear including Ann Nocenti comics, the Netflix series, and more
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• Marvel's Daredevil actors, ranked from Charlie Cox to Ben Affleck and even Rex Smith
• How Frank Miller accidentally killed a Daredevil cartoon (and Marvel killed a book to avoid pissing him off)
• That time we caught Daredevil actor Charlie Cox sneaking into New York Comic Con as Bluey