The lack and unfulfilment of daredevil: born again

Abstract

ABSTRACT Serial narratives promote continuous storytelling across entertainment mediums, especially in comic books. These narratives are seemingly reflective of the never-ending plight of the superheroes and villains and their inability to ever find definitive resolutions of their struggles. Although many critics bemoan the repetition of these approaches to storytelling, seriality in comics performs a crucial function of providing readers the opportunity to connect with and reinforce the very human experience of our lives’ conflicts never really being resolved. The Lacanian concept of lack is the clearest formulation of this psychic drive. Applying this concept to a canonical comic book story arc, Frank Miller’s Daredevil: Born Again, this article demonstrates just how pervasive is the characters’ inability to truly find a sense of completion in their lives even when possessing superhuman abilities and/or access to resources, and how that absence of completion is what fuels the very nature of the serial narrative format of storytelling. The result is a richer understanding of how conflict operates in comics and how their seriality performs a conciliatory role in relationship to the human condition.