BIOGRAPHY -- Page 26
Daredevil’s conscious mind began to retreat from reality. Typhoid’s assault on his life so soon after Kingpin’s initial strike left him weakened spiritually. He spoke to Sister Maggie and tried confession, but that did nothing to assuage his guilt. He ran into Bullet’s son Lance and saved him from some bullies. Daredevil walked Lance back to Bullet’s apartment, considering revenge against the hired bruiser. In the end, though, Matt acknowledged Bullet only worked for money and it wasn’t personal. He collapsed into the extraneous input from his senses, fixated on what he sensed instead of what it meant. This mantra of collecting data instead of empathizing with it allowed him to keep the world at an arm’s length. Matt bought a train ticket to upstate New York, abandoning Manhattan for the time being. He still felt compelled to save people, but it was more a “muscle memory” of justice rather than a true calling. [Daredevil (1st series) #267]
Things happened upstate. [Daredevil (1st series) #268-282]
Daredevil survived a metaphysical battle in Hell itself with Mephisto and the Devil’s son, Blackheart. However, Matt Murdock was shellshocked and psychologically unstable as he struggled to process his experiences. Exhausted, Daredevil eventually made his way back towards New York. He had the misfortune of crossing paths with an equally unstable Captain America. Cap had accidentally inhaled massive amounts of a designer drug similar to cocaine which made him manic and paranoid. Daredevil was already off his game when he was severely beaten by the raving Cap, followed by another physically bruising battle with Cap’s foe, Crossbones. [Daredevil (1st series) #283, Captain America (1st series) #374-376]
At this point, Matt Murdock’s mind simply broke. He couldn’t reconcile his Catholicism with having confronted the Devil himself, or his role as a crime-fighter with having fought with Captain America. His sense of reality broke down as he began to doubt his own mind and his own memories, hallucinating people around him as angels or devils. At his lowest point, Daredevil was found lying in the streets by his old foe, Bullseye. The assassin saw an opportunity and stripped Daredevil of his costume, leaving Matt in Bullseye’s street clothes. Bullseye then began using the 
Daredevil costume himself to besmirch his nemesis’s reputation. Matthew lost all sense of his identity and experienced a dissociating fugue. He forgot both of his previous identities and began calling himself “Jack Murdock,” confused over his missing memories and the bizarre “vision” his senses gave him. [Daredevil (1st series) #284]
Murdock found himself relearning his sense of justice and the law. He instinctively stopped a thief from stealing at a fruit stand but couldn’t explain why once the thief pointed out they were both hungry. He met a street artist named Nyla Skin and accepted her offer of a place to crash. She convinced him to perform a burglary, stealing from rich folk who were out of town and wouldn’t miss their extravagant wealth. Jack’s senses and acrobatic ability made him alarmingly good as a thief, but he couldn’t go through with the act. When he found a judge beaten in the streets, Jack 
carried the old man home to his son for recuperation. He offered to walk the man to work the next morning, but the judge was assaulted and killed inside his home before Murdock got there. He stopped the judge’s son, Marcus, from murdering the local thug who killed his father, and instead Murdock instinctively turned the killer over to the police to face the law. [Daredevil (1st series) #285-287]
Looking for his place in the world, Murdock wandered back to Fogwell’s Gym and got the sense he had once been a fighter. He proved himself to the promoter by entering the ring with a blindfold on and was soon fighting for a steady wage. As the notoriety of “Jack Murdock, the Blind Boxer” grew, Wilson Fisk came down to observe the spectacle. Kingpin realized Murdock was unbalanced and thought it would be amusing to push him further over the edge. Matt Murdock’s father Jack died after refusing to take a bribe, and Fisk wondered what would happen if he forced the Blind Boxer into the same position. Kingpin had Bullseye kidnap Nyla, forcing Murdock to throw the fight or risk her safety. Instead, Matt refused to take a dive and relived his father’s last 
moments, regaining his memories in the process. Murdock fought through Kingpin’s thugs and rescued Nyla, but Fisk merely laughed that his jest had failed. Murdock now knew that Fisk would always return to interfere with his life unless the Kingpin was permanently removed from his throne. Matt sent Nyla away for a while as he prepared himself for a final confrontation with the Kingpin. [Daredevil (1st series) #287-289]
In the meantime, however, he still had Bullseye to deal with. While Matt had been living as “Jack Murdock,” Bullseye took the Daredevil costume to destroy his rival’s reputation, committing robberies, attacking the police and civilians, and so on. However, Bullseye started to lose himself in the play-acting and began to believe he was really Daredevil. Murdock found Bullseye’s hideout and stole HIS costume, confronting “Daredevil” as “Bullseye” to further unsettle the assassin’s mind. The ploy worked and Bullseye lost track of whether he was the hero or the villain in the fight. This gave Murdock an edge to beat his nemesis and reclaim his costume. [Daredevil (1st series) #290]
Reclaiming his reputation would take time, though. Thanks to Bullseye, people on the street didn’t trust Daredevil to help them anymore. Ben Urich was the only reporter who published doubts about the true identity of “Daredevil” during Bullseye’s spree, and Matt gratefully reconnected with the writer. Ben gave him a tip about a corrupt land grab, and Daredevil intercepted Bullet on a job for the Kingpin to steal some original zoning maps to cheat people out of their land. Fisk was on his own path to restore his public reputation as a legitimate businessman, planning to establish a media enterprise in his name to exert real power on the world. Beating Bullet in public helped restore Matt’s confidence, the public’s respect for him as a hero and also waylaid the Kingpin’s plans. [Daredevil (1st series) #291]
Matt had a heartfelt reunion with Foggy Nelson as he started to put the pieces of his life back together. Foggy had been wracked with guilty ever since the Kelco case. He spent his spare time building a case to reverse the damage done to Matt’s finances, credit and establish a case to restore his license to practice law. Matt was profoundly grateful for the legwork Foggy had done already, and he started crashing on the couch in Foggy’s small office as they worked on his appeal together. In the meantime, Daredevil was bouncing around town hunting Tombstone and 
Taskmaster, assassins hired by the Hand to eliminate certain targets who stood in the way of their plans. Daredevil had the added wrinkle of stopping the Punisher from killing the assassins before he could bring them to justice. [Daredevil (1st series) #292-293]
The Hand got directly involved after their outsiders failed, gathering victims to serve as sacrifices to their demon patron, the Beast of the Hand. Daredevil and Ghost Rider fought against the ninja and rescued their kidnapped targets. Matt was also assisted by a new order of the Chaste, gathered by Stone in Stick’s name. However, one of Stone’s new acolytes Spear had already betrayed them to the Hand, putting Daredevil in the position where he had to kill the Hand’s vessel of evil, Izanami. On the streets of New York, Matt also caught the heartbeat of Karen Page and 
found her working as a volunteer activist campaigning against pornography. He tried to apologize for cheating on her and letting Typhoid Mary get between the two of them. Still, Karen made it clear Matt had a long way to go before she would trust him again, much less rekindle their old relationship. [Daredevil (1st series) #294-296]
Connecting with Punisher, Ghost Rider and the Chaste helped convince Matt that sometimes brutally effective methods must be taken when the threat is high enough. He started making plans to finally bring down the Kingpin… by any means necessary. Daredevil first chose to drive a wedge between Kingpin and Typhoid Mary, still operating as his chief enforcer. He unsettled Fisk by confronting him in his office, leaving behind a cameo picture of Wilson’s lost wife, Vanessa. Next, he confronted Typhoid while she was on an intimidation job for Kingpin. Using Typhoid’s own tricks against her, Matt was sexually assertive with the dominant mercenary, throwing off how she expected their dance to go. They fell into each other’s arms but, after a night together, Matt 
disappeared. Mary’s timid side awoke in their hotel room to face the Department of Social Services. Falsified legal documents allowed Matt to get Mary committed against her will for psychiatric evaluation, getting her the help she genuinely needed. And all he had to do was violate the law and sleep with a mentally ill woman to manipulate her out of his way. Even a blind man had trouble facing himself in the mirror the next morning. [Daredevil (1st series) #297]
Matt Murdock’s vendetta against the Kingpin took an unusual turn when he was kidnapped by Nick Fury’s agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Fury made it clear he knew all about Murdock’s “nocturnal activities.” He warned Murdock to steer clear of Fisk for the time being, but it was clearly a set-up to give Nick plausible deniability when Daredevil “illegally” accessed S.H.I.E.L.D.’s files on the big 
man. It turned out the Kingpin was being played, and the investors in his news network were actually working for Hydra (which explained Fury’s interest). Even criminals weren’t fond of Nazi terrorists in New York, and Murdock used his contacts to spread the word in the underworld that Fisk was in bed with Hydra. This forced a more direct conflict between Kingpin and Baron Strucker’s people, as each believed the other party was responsible for spreading word of their illicit dealings to compromise the other. [Daredevil (1st series) #298]
As Hydra prepared for war with the Kingpin and his own people started to question whether Fisk was really in charge anymore, Daredevil turned to the legal system for more help against Kingpin. Federal prosecutor Kathy Malper was intrigued by Daredevil’s evidence that Wilson Fisk’s media group was violating F.C.C. regulations, trafficking with known felons across state lines, triggering the racketeering statutes, and so on. In exchange for his tip, she agreed to look into the disbarment case against Daredevil’s “friend,” Matt Murdock. His other machinations bore fruit as Kingpin tried to punch above his pay grade by fighting with Hydra. The international terrorist group 
not only simultaneously destroyed all his property holdings in New York, they also cleaned out his assets thanks to a computer worm virus he inadvertently accepted into his systems along with their electronic transfer. In a matter of days, Wilson Fisk’s criminal empire was on the brink of collapse. [Daredevil (1st series) #299]
There was blood in the water for the Kingpin. Malper personally served a search warrant on Fisk Plaza for the upcoming racketeering charges before the grand jury. Fisk’s payoffs and influence were localized at the city and state level, leaving him unprepared for federal intervention on his affairs. Everything from the Hydra situation back to the Nuke fiasco was brought before the court. 
The newspapers finally published against Fisk, his open tab at different fine establishments was closed, and his various legal and illegal cohorts weren’t getting paid. It was only then, for one brief moment, that Murdock stepped out of the shadows to taunt the Kingpin, letting Fisk know it was him.
It was here where Daredevil and Malper allowed the beleaguered Kingpin a glimpse of salvation. A state senator was reportedly willing to pull strings on his behalf, in exchange for justice regarding a “favorite cousin” named Jon Gold who died under mysterious circumstances months earlier. To Kingpin’s delight, Jon Gold was the cabbie sent off a bridge with Matt Murdock the night Murdock’s life was utterly crushed by Fisk. As part of a long-standing contingency plan, Fisk had had Gold beaten to death with Murdock’s own billy club, the blind lawyer’s fingerprints clearly preserved on it. All he needed to do was retrieve the club from hiding, deliver it to the senator, and then both save himself and destroy Murdock all over again.
Unfortunately, the besieged Wilson Fisk couldn’t produce the cash or credit needed to retrieve his item from long-term storage. Already on the verge of a breakdown, Fisk snapped and smashed his way through the clerk’s window to take it by force. Daredevil was on the scene to witness the fall of Wilson Fisk as the Kingpin began physically attacking him in full view of the public. As Fisk tried to run from his crimes, Daredevil taunted him that the senator was a smokescreen, and there was no deal waiting for him. The veneer of respectability crumbled from Fisk as he fought Daredevil hand-to-hand, the last act of a desperate man. In the reverse of their fight months ago 
at Fisk Plaza, Daredevil remained calm and in control this time. He recovered the parcel from Fisk and tossed it into a fire. As he saw his life raft disintegrate in front of him, all the fight left Wilson Fisk’s spirit. He was taken into custody, only to violate bail a few days later and vanish into the streets, his empire destroyed. Kathy Malper was good to her word and helped fast track Murdock and Nelson’s appeal work through the courts. Matthew M. Murdock was reinstated to practice law in the state of New York. [Daredevil (1st series) #300]