For me, like others on here, my first exposure to Daredevil was the 90s Spider-Man cartoon. I saw him in that, and I got the action figure: which I remembered liking because it had ball-jointed arms and legs and was more poseable than most of the toys from that line. But still, at the time I was more a Spider-Man fan than a Marvel Universe fan, and mainly just thought of Daredevil as a Spider-Man supporting character.
That changed when my mum bought me a big hardcover book called Marvel Universe for Christmas one year, it must have been 1996 or 1997. That book changed my life. I must have read the whole thing cover to cover several times over, it took up countless hours of my life. It was a history of Marvel Comics, packed with lots of pictures of heroes and villains and reprints of famous pages and panels, and it profiled all the major heroes and their villains. And perhaps the section I reread most of all was the Daredevil section. The book went into the Elektra saga and her death at the hands of Bullseye, it went into Born Again and the Kingpin's destruction of Matt Murdock. And I was hooked like I was reading the comics themselves. It would be years later before I'd finally get to actually read the Frank Miller Daredevil comics, butBorn Again in particular has remained one of my all-time favourite Marvel comics.
I remember picking up an issue or two of the Kevin Smith/Joe Quesada Daredevil relaunch under Joe Quesada. But I think at the time I was more a fan of Kingpin and Bullseye than Daredevil himself. I didn't read Daredevil regularly at the time, and for a few years in the early 2000s I almost fell away from reading comics entirely, but I'd make an exception for comics I spotted on the shelves that featured either of those villains. There was one year where Bullseye: Greatest Hits was the only comic I bought.
I remember really looking forward to the Daredevil movie, and in fact when I first joined the Hype in 2002, it wasn't to talk about the fast-approaching Spider-Man, but the 2003 Daredevil due the following year. I remember that the film didn't blow me away at the time, but I didn't hate it either, I thought it was a fun enough movie.
When I did get back into reading comics regularly in the mid 2000s, it was DC, not Marvel, but when I did start trying Marvel titles a few years later, one of the first ones I picked up was Daredevil. It was in the middle of Brubaker's run, and I enjoyed it enough to read right through to the end. But then I dropped the book at the start of Diggle's run.
So, Daredevil is a character who has flitted in and out of my life as a comics fan for close to 20 years now. But I'd say it was probably only in the last year or so that I became a huge fan of Daredevil himself. I'd made a couple of attempts to get into Mark Waid's run - once with issue #4, and once around issue #25 - but while I enjoyed the issues I read I never stuck with collecting them. It wasn't until the Vol 4 Waid/Samnee relaunch that I took the opportunity to jump on. Then I went back and bought the 3 Daredevil by Mark Waid deluxe hardcovers. And it was reading this run that actually made Matt Murdock my favourite character in Daredevil lore as opposed to his villains. And from there Daredevil became one of my favourite characters in comics. And that has opened me up to a whole new appreciation of the character, prompting me to go back and get the full Bendis/Maleev run (which I devoured over the Christmas holidays) and now starting from the beginning of the Brubaker/Lark run to read the parts I missed.
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