#bart hill

Daredevil Comics #11 (June 1st, 1942)

Daredevil

Creator(s): Jack Cole

Alias(es): Bart Hill

1st Issue w/Uniform: Silver Streak Comics #7

Year/Month of Publication: 1941/01

    Yes! Well, maybe. I’m not sure I would want a fusion, necessarily, but I would love a team-up! 

    I realize that some people might not be familiar with “the OG” Daredevil and the Golden Age, and I haven’t discussed them yet on this blog, so here’s a little history: 

    Daredevil debuted in Silver Streak #6 (Lev Gleason Publications) in 1940, as part of the Golden Age of superheroes kicked off by the success of Action Comics (Superman) in the late 30s. This Daredevil was an orphaned, mute (for a little while, anyway) circus acrobat named Bart Hill, who wielded a boomerang and fought the bad guys in a spiffy red-and-blue costume and spiky belt. 

[ID: A comic illustration showing Golden Age Daredevil standing poised to throw a boomerang. He is wearing a head-to-toe spandex suit split down the middle (red on the left and blue on the right), little red-and-blue superhero undies (blue on the left and red on the right), and a yellow spiked belt. There are two WWII-era soldiers on either side of him, firing guns, and a big American flag in the background.]

    The comic was hugely successful. Alongside his thrilling swashbuckling, Bart did all of the typical World War II-era superhero things, like punching Hitler and fighting racist Japanese caricatures. However, the end of the war brought with it a severe drop in readership across the whole genre. Suddenly, people were no longer interested in reading about superheroes, and many comics publishers went under, taking their characters with them-- including, sadly, Lev Gleason Publications and Daredevil. This slump marked the end of the Golden Age. 

    Two of the surviving companies were Detective Comics (DC) and Timely/Marvel, which continued to make money with other genres of comics-- romances, horror anthologies, westerns, etc. But then, in the early 50s, the clever people at DC had an idea. They would try and revive the superhero genre-- not with new characters, but by salvaging code names and concepts from defunct Golden Age comics and reinventing them. They tried this first with the Flash, transforming chemist Jay Garrick, who got his powers in a lab accident involving hard water, into forensic scientist Barry Allen, who got his powers in a lab accident involving a shelf of chemicals and some well-placed lightning. And it worked! The new Flash debuted in 1956 and took off (...as it were). And so they did it again, repurposing lost Golden Age heroes like Green Lantern, Blue Beetle, and the Atom into newer, shinier forms and selling them with great success to an audience that was once more becoming receptive to superheroes. 

    Timely/Marvel didn’t revive their own superhero success until a few years later, but they did it almost exclusively with their own characters. The debut of the Fantastic Four in 1961 was a rousing success, and then Spider-Man appeared the next year and changed everything. Superhero comics were popular again, and the creative minds at Marvel went into overdrive to pump out more issues and new characters to feed the fans. As I said, most of the characters were their own creations, but a few key exceptions were Ghost Rider, the infamously lawsuit-plagued Captain Marvel and, first of all, our guy Daredevil, who was snapped up out of public domain obscurity and salvaged for parts. Matt Murdock bears almost no resemblance to his Golden Age predecessor, but he certainly wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Lev Gleason's Daredevil. 

    There’s one more detail to mention, and it’s relevant to my answer: 

[ID: The cover of The Flash #123. In the foreground, a man is cringing as a steel girder falls toward him. The image is split down the middle by a brick wall. On the left side of the wall, the Silver Age Flash is running forward toward the man, and on the right side, the Golden Age Flash is doing the same. The man is saying “Flash! Help me!” and both Flashes are saying “I’m coming!” A red caption box in the bottom left corner reads, in yellow lettering: “Featuring ‘Flash of Two Worlds!’ A spectacular story that is sure to become a classic!”]

    DC could have just taken their fancy new Silver Age heroes and moved forward from there, but they didn’t. In the groundbreaking story “Flash of Two Worlds” (The Flash #123), Silver Age Flash Barry Allen meets Jay Garrick, the Golden Age Flash, and rescues him from the parallel dimension in which he has been trapped. With this story, Jay was integrated in his full original form into the new DC superhero universe, and soon the same was done with all of the other Golden Age heroes, bringing them back alongside their younger, hipper counterparts. This process was not only a wonderful way of preserving those original characters, but it also created the DC Universe’s rich tradition of superhero legacies, which has continued to this day. 

Lev Gleason's Daredevil, the Death-Defying 'Devil fan art (2020)

Daredevil Comics #3 (September 1st, 1941)