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I know you're a big fan of Milla (she deserved better!) but what do you think about Heather Glenn? Her life is pretty much an endless downward spiral after her relationship with Matt. It's horrifying to see the impact of how her relationship with a superhero destroyed her psyche.

I've been meaning to write about this phase of Matt and Heather's relationship for a very long time, because I find it fascinating—in its tragic/horrifying elements, in how Matt, our "hero", is depicted, and also just as a study of Heather, who is a character I like very much (I have toyed with the idea of doing a Heather Appreciation Day, and maybe I will). This is one of the periods of Daredevil history in which Matt is truly presented as someone to root against, and from a writing and character development perspective, I find that extremely interesting.

Matt and Heather's relationship was a rollercoaster, even in comparison to most of Matt's other romances (his relationship with Karen Page might outrank it, but they were together for much longer and so had more time in which to accumulate chaos). They met by pure chance—Heather literally wandered into Matt's apartment in the middle of the night because her ex-boyfriend used to live there and she still had a key and didn't realize he'd moved. She liked Matt immediately and was aggressive in pursuing his affections, until Matt was able to assert some control in the relationship and set a few boundaries. Matt initially found her annoying. But he had also just broken up with Natasha Romanov, and so she presented a welcome distraction from his heartache. Matt has a long, consistent history of rebound-dating, and this is a prime example.

Daredevil vol. 1 #128 by Marv Wolfman, Bob Brown, Klaus Janson, Michele Wolfman, and Joe Rosen

After spending some time with Heather, Matt realized that he actually enjoyed her company, and soon ended up falling for her. From a purely character-consideration perspective, I think it's a shame that people tend to focus so much on the terrible end of their relationship and so little on the rest of it, and so I'd like to toss out a reminder that when their romance was in its prime, when the world wasn't throwing one horrific event after another at them, these two were gaga for each other. They were extremely physically affectionate on-panel (with implications of more Comics Code-unfriendly intimacy off-panel), which is an interesting progression in itself. Matt and Karen's initial romance, such as it was, was very chaste. He and Natasha were more openly affectionate. But Matt and Heather took things to a previously-unseen (for DD comics) level, which speaks to the times but also, I think, to the nature of their dynamic. Physical attraction played a key role in their interest in each other.

Heather herself was someone I would classify as a "character", in a way that I personally find fun and charming. She feels unique. She presented herself as wild, spontaneous, unfettered and weird, and she flaunted it proudly; during what was arguably their first genuine date, she teased Matt about being a "total cube" and promised to loosen him up—and it seems she succeeded (see the comments above about physical affection). She was confident, she wore bright colors, called Matt "handsome" and "lover" as terms of endearment, and had a quirky way of turning a phrase and a disarming sense of humor that was alternately self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating.

Daredevil vol. 1 #135 by Marv Wolfman, Bob Brown, Jim Mooney, Michele Wolfman, and Joe Rosen

Daredevil vol. 1 #132 by Marv Wolfman, Bob Brown, Klaus Janson, Michele Wolfman, and Joe Rosen

("Screaming Yellow Zonkers", for anyone not familiar.)

At the same time, Heather also appreciated Matt as a stabilizing force, someone a bit more down-to-earth, who could ground her and, in some ways, protect her. She occasionally referenced a hospital stay following a serious accident of some kind that we never actually learn much about, but which left her feeling mentally "dippy" and vulnerable.

Daredevil vol. 1 #132 by Marv Wolfman, Bob Brown, Klaus Janson, Michele Wolfman, and Joe Rosen

And Matt has always loved protecting people; his relationship with Natasha went off the rails partly due to his inability to treat her as a fellow superhero and an equal. Now, with Heather, he had found himself a civilian girlfriend again—one who tended towards the naive, who openly and effusively admired him, and with whom he could feel strong and capable. She was exciting, she was distracting, and he ended up falling for her hard...and with genuine love came some of the classic dual-identity challenges. Matt's dating life has been a learning process: one of the biggest disasters in his relationship with Heather would be, ultimately, her finding out about his double life at the worst possible moment, but the reason he didn't tell her sooner was because of what that side of his life had done to his relationships with Karen and Natasha. He was afraid of DD ruining yet another romance.

Daredevil vol. 1 #134 by Marv Wolfman, Bob Brown, Jim Mooney, Michele Wolfman, and Joe Rosen

The irony here is that Heather was very much not Karen or Natasha; when the smoke from the disastrous reveal finally cleared, she made it obvious that—while she feared for his safety and wasn't a fan of his tendency to run off on her—she also found the idea of dating a superhero to be exciting and sexy. Which Matt probably could have predicted, if he'd actually thought about it for more than two seconds. But it's also easy to see why prior experiences would have made him gun-shy, and anyway, he has always erred on the side of hiding information from his loved ones. Secret-keeping is the natural Matt Murdock response to most things.

Earlier challenges to Heather and Matt's relationship, while dire, were mainly brought on by circumstances: most notably, the Purple Man's manipulation of Heather's father, which led to Matt spending lots of time as Daredevil trying to get to the bottom of the situation and not much time being with and supporting Heather through this difficult experience (for which she did dump him), and then (as Daredevil) getting her father arrested for a crime he did not willingly commit, which led to her father committing suicide while in prison, for which Heather, in her grief, blamed Matt (brutal foreshadowing, by the way). Through this, Heather joined the long list of Daredevil characters (Elektra, Glori, Karen, Maya, Matt himself) who have suddenly and violently lost their fathers. It would be nice to imagine that Matt might have taken a moment to discuss this shared pain with her, when he felt able to bring it up and she felt capable of hearing it. But that's probably wishful thinking.

This period, the Purple Man's puppeting of Heather's father and the many terrible events surrounding it, was the Daredevil comic's first (and criminally underrated) look at what happens when everything in Daredevil Land falls apart. Absolutely everybody was going through hell—Heather, Matt, Foggy, Heather's father, Foggy's poor fiancée Debbie—and Matt was just trying to keep his feet under him as the situation, impossibly, kept on getting worse. Every choice he made seemed to be the wrong one, particularly when it came to Heather and her precarious position within the unfolding nightmare.

Daredevil vol. 1 #143 by Marv Wolfman, Bob Brown, Janice Cohen, Keith Pollard, and John Costanza

With Heather's father dead, and in the wake of the disastrous identity reveal, in the end, Matt nearly died from one of the worst beat-downs of his life after Heather was kidnapped and he was forced to battle a gauntlet of enemies in order to save her. But, having survived it all, he and Heather eventually got back together again—a little bit more damaged and world-weary, but still willing to give it another try. The Murdock gravity is strong, and this is a pattern that we have seen throughout the history of Daredevil comics. Few are able to escape it.

Daredevil vol. 1 #157 Mary Jo Duffy, Roger Mac, Gene Colan, Klaus Janson, Glynis Wein, and Joe Rosen

However, the loss of her beloved father had removed a pillar of stability from Heather's world, rendering her vulnerable in ways that would become more obvious later. She was now in the dangerous position of being forced to look mainly to Matt for her emotional support. This was not initially a problem, but it would become a vital one later on.

Daredevil vol. 1 #176 by Frank Miller, Klaus Janson, Glynis Wein, and Joe Rosen

We see, as we move into Miller's run, that when Heather is angry with Matt, her key tactic for showing her displeasure is to temporarily leave him in favor of other men. But she couldn't ever seem to actually sever that bond for good. Matt was her anchor, and she was in deeper than perhaps she realized. With that said, while their relationship in this era was a bit chaotic, they also rediscovered that earlier closeness, seemed deeply in love and very sweet together in the moments when they were happy, and were willing to fight for each other or forgive each other when things went wrong.

Daredevil vol. 1 #165 by Roger McKenzie, Frank Miller, Bob Sharen, Klaus Janson, and Joe Rosen

And then Elektra died.

Elektra's murder at Bullseye's hand was (unless my memory is failing me) the first real-time death of a major character close to Matt in the history of the comic. Before that, we had only Jack's death and the flashbacks to its aftermath—Matt, immobile with grief on the bed in his college dorm while Foggy tried to cheer him up. Losing Elektra shattered him in hitherto-unexplored ways. He underwent a complete mental breakdown, the first stage of which involved convinced himself that she wasn't actually dead, that she was deceiving him somehow. He set himself the task of uncovering the truth and obsessed over it to the exclusion of all else.

Daredevil vol. 1 #182 by Frank Miller, Klaus Janson, and Joe Rosen

(It is worth noting, and very interesting to me, that he would initially react to Heather's death with a similar kind denial and avoidance. But more on that later.) When Matt reached the limits of that coping mechanism, faced with inarguable proof that Elektra was dead after all, he grasped for a new distraction. And Heather was right there, vulnerable in all of the right ways, maybe to a degree that Matt didn't even realize through the haze of his own emotional damage. Though he did not have Elektra back in his life for long, he tells Heather outright that her loss has ripped a deep hole in him and he needs someone to fill it. Just two issues after Elektra's death, his psychological manipulation of Heather began.

Daredevil vol. 1 #183 by Roger McKenzie, Frank Miller, Klaus Janson, and Joe Rosen

There's a deep tragedy in the fact that if the circumstances were not so twisted, if Matt's proposal had been genuine, Heather would likely have accepted. She loved him, and there had been a time when he loved her too, and maybe, underneath all of the trauma and rot, he still did. But the motivation behind Matt's actions toward Heather in these ensuing issues is blatantly not love. It is greed: he needs her, and he needs her to need him, and anything he does to her is justified in his mind if it allows him to achieve that ultimate goal of having her. This is the point at which Matt ceases being the hero of the comic and instead becomes something like a villain.

The initial target of his assault on Heather is her involvement with Glenn Industries—all that she has left of her father, and now Matt's competition for her time and affection. His abuse is centered on undermining her sense of self-confidence, independence, and intelligence: she couldn't possibly run a business, she "hasn't the head for this sort of thing", and moreover, she shouldn't bother to try. Naturally, she should just marry him and let him take care of her. What makes this extra diabolical is the way Matt's verbal attacks draw upon Heather's own pre-established patterns of speaking about herself—how scatter-brained and "dippy" she is, how she needs capable people in her life to keep her grounded. When (to her immense credit) Heather refuses to be pressured into stepping away from Glenn Industries, Matt changes tactics and instead attacks the company itself. Fate intervenes cruelly here; in her attempts to solidify her position as the new CEO, Heather discovers corruption at the core of the company, and when this information falls into Matt's hands, he seizes it as the weapon he needs to destroy her business ambitions once and for all.

Daredevil vol. 1 #186 by Frank Miller, Klaus Janson, and Joe Rosen

(Note the shadow of the window behind Heather; the bars of a cage closing around her.)

There is an on-panel emotional separation that is created between Matt and the reader at this point in the comic: whenever Matt is interacting with Heather, we are no longer in his POV. We don't get any thought bubbles, and are cut off entirely from Matt's internal world. All we have are his words and his actions. We only get thought bubbles from Matt when he is engaged in the comic's various A-plots (at the end of one, a Punisher story centered on moral grayness and what being a "good guy" means, Matt comments fittingly: "We're only human. We can be weak. We can be evil"). When he is with Heather, all we can do is observe him—see his creepy, empty smiles, see the horror on Foggy and Becky's faces. We are shown Heather's grief and discomfort even when Matt seems oblivious to it, and are privy to her attempts to sneak meetings with Foggy without Matt finding out (note her "not so loud" in the scene below; Matt's hypersenses must be terrifying when you're on the wrong side of them). I have heard people condemn this story arc as symptomatic of Frank Miller's sexism, and while I will never stop anyone from criticizing Miller, I'm always surprised to see that argument made here, where it is so profoundly clear that Matt's behavior is being criticized by the narrative.

Daredevil vol. 1 #186 by Frank Miller, Klaus Janson, and Joe Rosen

I mentioned earlier that we only get Matt's thoughts when he is not interacting with Heather, but beyond that, it is notable that even when we do see Matt's thought bubbles in those adjacent A-plots, neither Heather nor Elektra appears in them. It isn't like he is sitting at home, grieving and scheming. He's off doing completely unrelated things, Daredevilling as usual. This adds to the disturbing nature of the Heather plot because it really does feel like an afterthought, like Matt is feverishly compartmentalizing—which, as we know, is one of his key coping mechanisms ("I won't use my fists to solve my problems, because my father told me not to. Instead, this completely different guy called Daredevil will do it.") . Once Glenn Industries has been destroyed and Heather has agreed to marry him, it's like Matt just puts her out of his mind entirely. He has solved that problem; now he can focus on other things. It is a disturbing degree of emotional disconnect, especially for Matt.

When Heather stumbles into Matt's apartment in #189 a week before they're due to be married, drunk and upset, he notices the alcohol but doesn't seem to register her emotional state, or to care. Natasha is around to witness the scene, but when she tries to bring it up to Matt afterward, she barely has a chance to get a few words out before he abruptly shuts her down.

Daredevil vol. 1 #189 by Frank Miller, Klaus Janson, and Joe Rosen

This, in itself, is interesting because it speaks to that avoidance—the compartmentalization mentioned earlier—but also to a degree of self-awareness. Does Matt not want to talk about Heather with Natasha because it's just an uncomfortable subject? Or does he recognize that what he is doing is wrong? Natasha is disturbed enough by what she has seen that she goes to Foggy about it, and together they hash out...possibly one of the worst plans that has ever been made in the history of the Marvel Universe. But their commentary on the situation is right on the money, and within it, we see that Foggy, too, has been monitoring and thinking about his best friend's "scary, mean" behavior towards Heather:

Daredevil vol. 1 #189 by Frank Miller, Klaus Janson, and Joe Rosen

Natasha and Foggy's hearts were, of course, in the right place. Their impulse to do whatever possible to help Heather to escape from this nightmare marriage, and from Matt's influence as a whole, was a noble one. But it was still a terrible plan that failed to take into account a key aspect of the situation: the fact that Matt had already won. He truly was all that Heather had left by this point. And now, she was being told that even after all of that, after everything he had put her through to win her, he'd decided he did not want her anymore. If they hadn't acted so quickly and desperately, if they had actually taken the time to examine the nuances of the situation, they might have anticipated poor Heather's inevitable reaction.

Daredevil vol. 1 #189 by Frank Miller, Klaus Janson, and Joe Rosen

Heather reappeared six issues (and, we're told, six weeks) later, visibly struggling. Her casual partying and social drinking, once just a fun pastime, had begun to morph into alcoholism. While drunk at a party, she accidentally revealed Matt's secret identity to a dangerous member of the police department. When she showed up at the law office the next morning to warn Matt and beg his forgiveness, he was downright nasty to her.

Daredevil vol. 1 #195 by Denny O'Neil, Klaus Janson, Glynis Wein, and Joe Rosen

"You should be happy, Matt. I've proven you were right. I've shown you I'm the brainless little loser you claim I am. What are you going to do about it? Kill me?" Ohhh, her fury is bitter and righteous. It's heartbreaking to see her like this but also satisfying to see her use his words against him. In spite of everything, she still cares about him enough to step back into his orbit and warn him that he is in danger, but she's also no longer afraid of showing him exactly how much he hurt her.

Matt moved on. Sixteen issues after his engagement to Heather ended, he met Glorianna O'Breen, Foggy's niece by marriage, visiting to escape the danger back home in Ireland. By the time Glori and Matt got together, he had healed enough from Elektra's death to be back to his normal self, and their relationship was, at least initially, healthy and happy. Meanwhile, Heather vanished from the comic. She only appeared one more time—in Daredevil #220, an issue titled "Fog". One of the most haunting DD stories ever published, it begins with Heather alone in her apartment, drunk and crying. She calls Matt for help and he comes, but when he realizes that she isn't in actual danger, he chastises her and storms out. Heather desperately calls him again, and when he does not come back, she follows her in her father's footsteps and takes her own life.

"Fog" is a gorgeous, brutal, deftly-crafted issue, and Heather's death, in all its tragedy, is a death well-told and with lasting power. It's easy to compare it to Glori's death a hundred issues later, which feels much more random and designed for shock value. This issue sits with its tragedy, forces the reader to feel the weight of it; the fog that blankets the city throughout, gorgeously rendered by the art team of David Mazzucchelli and Christie Scheele, creates an eerie, somber tone, a kind of visual silence, or like a dream you can't quite wake from. Everything that happens in this issue, as well as the several issues that follow it, takes place under the heavy cloud of Heather's death.

Daredevil vol. 1 #220 by Denny O'Neil, David Mazzucchelli, Christie Scheele, and Joe Rosen

As I mentioned above, Matt's journey in this issue bears faint echoes of his response to Elektra's death, the catalyst that led to this new tragedy. He doesn't have a massive mental breakdown that leads to grave-digging the way he did after Elektra died, but he still finds himself a mission and clings to it as a respite. In this case, he uncovers evidence that maybe Heather didn't kill herself; maybe, in fact, she was murdered. He lunges desperately toward this idea because it offers two things: a call to action that gives him an outlet for his grief (avenging Heather; he vows to find her killer and "break him"), and an escape from the guilt bearing down on him at the thought that her death was his fault. But if course, O'Neil won't allow him that escape hatch, not entirely. When Matt finally tracks down and interrogates one of the people who broke into Heather's apartment, he is forced to confront the reality of what happened: yes, they did steal from her, but she was already dead when they arrived. This is a guilt that Matt cannot avoid carrying. He did this, and there's nothing he can do about it now.

Nevertheless, he hurls himself into investigating, tracking down, and destroying the group that stole from Heather, a crusade that takes him all the way to Italy and very nearly costs him his life. But the completion of this revenge quest does not give him the closure he'd hoped it would. On his return home, he pays his respects to Heather and tries to come to grips with the guilt he still feels.

Daredevil vol. 1 #221 by Denny O'Neil, David Mazzucchelli, Christie Scheele, and Joe Rosen

"I did it for you...No, for me."

People like to say that Matt is a character constantly burdened with guilt, and I'm always a bit skeptical of that because I have not observed it myself. The Matt Murdock I know is great at justifying, compartmentalizing, and basically lawyering himself into feeling okay about things. Every time he quits being Daredevil, for instance, because of some harm he's done as a result of his double life, it does not last long. He always finds a way to cope and put whatever was plaguing him behind him. If Matt (especially modern Matt) is burdened by anything, it is cumulative grief, but not necessarily guilt.

I mention this because his rumination throughout these issues on how guilty he should feel regarding Heather's death is striking. He feels terrible and unsettled, which throws him into a lingering depressive state (which is not helped by the events of the following issues, which continue to dig directly into themes of death, loss, and suicide), but his pain is mostly tied to a sense that he didn't do enough to help Heather. In one issue, during a private conversation with Foggy about Matt's erratic behavior, Glori comments in her typical no-nonsense manner that Matt seems "sorrier for himself than for [Heather]," which feels...not wrong? At one point, Matt even ponders whether Heather's fate was inevitable because of who she was as a person. Obviously, this is all him trying to cope, seeking ways to think about the situation that will allow him to stop feeling bad about it, but it's also a reading experience that makes you want to grab him by the shoulders and shake him, because despite all of the regret he feels for "not being there for her", he never once acknowledges the actual details of what happened, which is that he intentionally, maliciously destroyed her life. (Someone might suggest that this disconnect could be due to the creative team switch; that Denny O'Neil was the one who didn't realize or remember those details. But O'Neil edited the Miller/Janson run, so I don't think that's it.) What is more interesting to me is the idea that, having emerged from the fog of grief surrounding Elektra's death, Matt genuinely lacks an accurate memory of the way he behaved toward Heather beyond a vague sense that he "treated her badly" and "didn't love her enough". Was that whole nightmare period—not just the manic issue immediately following Elektra's death, but the whole dang story arc—symptomatic of Matt experiencing a break from reality? It would not be his first one, nor his last (in fact, these issues lead directly into the mental health nightmare of the "Born Again" arc, in which the lingering tragedy of Heather's death is absolutely still a factor). Has he—either intentionally or otherwise—suppressed those memories? In all of the decades since, we have never received Matt's direct perspective on what he did to Heather, leaving us as outside observers—like Foggy, like Natasha, like Becky and Glori—to try to make sense of it.

I'll just end this with a quick jump into the future—specifically, to Daredevil volume 2 #46. In this issue, Matt is trying to fend off accusations in the press that he is Daredevil, he has just avoided being a murder suspect, his life is unraveling, and Karen Page is recently dead. In the midst of this, Milla Donovan walks into the Nelson & Murdock offices and accepts Matt's offer for a second date.

Daredevil vol. 2 #46 by Brian Michael Bendis, Alex Maleev, Matt Hollingsworth, and Cory Petit

This zoom-in on Foggy's side-eye is fully open to interpretation, and there is a lot for him to be side-eyeing Matt for in this run. Possibly because of who I am as a person (as Matt might say), I always see Heather in it. Foggy is once again watching Matt fling himself into a relationship while grieving the loss of someone he deeply loved, as his life is falling apart. How could Foggy not be thinking, at least a little bit, of Heather? Much later, after Milla has been hospitalized from a supervillain attack, Matt acts in a way that feels all too familiar: he becomes angry, unreasonable, and erratic, and refuses to let Milla go despite the urging of everyone around him and the potential damage to her health. While Matt has never again reached the abusive low he hit in the Miller/Janson run, that tendency still exists within him, and Foggy knows it.

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