Important Kingpin Facts You Need To Know Before 'Daredevil: Born Again'

When Peter Parker "came out" as Spider-Man during Marvel's Civil War event, his life changed. For one thing, the world knew who he was, and that included Wilson Fisk. The Kingpin ordered Parker's death, but the assassin's bullet found a different target when Aunt May was shot in Peter's place. Mr. Parker didn't take this very well, so he went to the prison Fisk was being held in, and he challenged him - as Peter Parker, not Spider-Man.

In their fight (if you want to call it that), Peter beat the ever-living snot out of the Kingpin. He did it publicly and in front of everyone else in the prison. He beat him so severely, Fisk couldn't stand by the end. Pete was able to do this because he'd always held back in their prior interactions. Spider-Man didn't want to punch the man's head off, but a pissed-off Peter is something different, so he made Fisk pay by taking him down in the eyes of the criminal underworld... it was probably pretty cathartic, as well.

These days, ankle monitors are relatively common. Hopefully, you don't have any personal experience with them, but even if you don't, you likely know all about them thanks to TV series and movies over the past 40+ years. That's because they've been around since the early 1980s, and oddly enough, they owe their existence to none other than Wilson Fisk.

In a Spider-Man comic strip, the Kingpin plants a tracker on Spider-Man so he can easily locate him. This strip was read by a judge named Jack Love, and he thought it was a pretty good idea. The judge felt that prison overcrowding could be minimized if certain criminals could be tracked on the outside, so he put his idea into motion.

Judge Love was able to get an electronics salesman named Michael T. Goss to build an ankle monitor that could be tracked via a radio signal. It took a few years, but Love finally put his idea into motion. He personally placed several criminals on house arrest, and he did so with ankle monitors. Would they have been invented had Judge Love not read the comic? Maybe, maybe not... but the reality is, he read the comic and ran with the concept.

Upon first glance, the Kingpin is not a slender man. Some might call him overweight or obese, but neither of these adjectives is appropriate for Wilson Fisk. The thing about Fisk that Spider-Man didn't know upon first meeting him is that, while he appears fat, the man has almost no fat on his body. Instead, that's all densely packed muscle, and the Kingpin is incredibly strong.

For whatever reason, packing on the muscle didn't result in the more desired look that many of the superheroes in Marvel Comics sport, and the Kingpin looks more rounded-out than others. Rest assured, that's all muscle, and Marvel Comics has him listed as having "Peak Human Strength," which is also how Captain America is classified.

He's classified as an Olympic weightlifter who can press around 650 pounds. Essentially, he's as strong as a human without superpowers can be, and he's lifted or thrown objects that no mere mortal can even move. He's been known to throw heavy wooden desks, and in one instance, he chucked a 1,500-pound barbell. He can also crush a man's skull in his hands and fight the likes of Spider-Man if he has to.

When the Kingpin made his return to live action via Hawkeye, fans were happy to see Vincent D'Onofrio return to play the character, but that wasn't the only thing that made them happy. He was sporting a fancy cane, which is a signature look for the character in the comics, and has been since he first appeared all the way back in the 1960s. That cane is far more than a simple accessory, and it even has an awesome name - the "Disintegrator Cane."

In most cases, he'll use the cane as a bludgeoning weapon, and he can hit pretty hard with it. There's more to it than that because the cane hides a laser in the tip, and it's powerful. The Disintegrator has been used to disintegrate a handgun in the comics, so it's not your run-of-the-mill accessory. The Kingpin has also used the Disintegrator to fire off sleeping gas at someone, so the cane's utility is pretty much anything the story calls for. After all, he doesn't need it to walk, so anyone who sees it may misjudge what it's there for, and that can lead to their downfall.

Wilson Fisk may be the Kingpin of Crime in the Marvel Universe, but that's not necessarily his primary identity. After all, if the world knew of his criminal enterprise, the feds would bust him long before superheroes like Spider-Man and Daredevil came along. As it happens, for the vast majority of the people in the Marvel Universe, Wilson Fisk is a businessman - a very successful and eccentric businessman, but a businessman nonetheless.

He accomplishes this via a plethora of legitimate businesses and fronts designed to mask his criminal enterprise. One such front is the Truck-A-Bro moving company featured in Hawkeye. The business is technically legit, though it conceals the illicit dealings of the so-called "Tracksuit Mafia." That is just one of many fronts used by the Kingpin to ensure the public believes everything Fisk is doing is on the up-and-up... it isn't.

Kingpin may have debuted in the pages of Spider-Man comics, but the man has become the primary nemesis to none other than Matt Murdock, AKA Daredevil. Thanks to some books Frank Miller put out in the 1980s, the two have become true enemies, and they've gone up against one another too many times to count. Daredevil always gets the upper hand in the end, defeating his enemy until he can muster enough strength to come at him once more.

Of course, comics would be boring if the hero won all the time, and in Daredevil #227-230 (Some of Frank Miller's best work on the series), the hero loses... big time. In that run, Fisk learns that Matt Murdock is Daredevil, but he doesn't have a sniper take him out or anything so mundane. No, he destroys the man. Through his machinations, he gets Murdock's law license revoked, he drains all of his finances, and he set him down a path of utter ruin. The icing on the cake comes when he takes advantage of Murdock's distracted state and beats him within an inch of his life. In the end, Murdock recovers, but the Kingpin had the upper hand for a while.