Daredevil: Was Elektra Not Actually Created to Die?

Summary

• Miller borrowed heavily from Will Eisner’s Spirit comic for the creation of Elektra
• Elektra was not originally intended to exist past her first appearance in Daredevil #168.
• Frank Miller had no overarching plan for Elektra in his Daredevil run when he introduced her.

Welcome to the 928th installment of Comic Book Legends Revealed, a column where we examine three comic book myths, rumors and legends and confirm or debunk them. In the first legend of this installment, learn what Frank Miller’s surprising plans for Elektra were.

Recently, I wrote about how I think that there is a significant difference between killing off a character that you created yourself versus killing off an established character that existed before you wrote a comic book. In that piece, one of the examples I gave was Frank Miller and Elektra, the famous character that was introduced in Miller’s first issue as the writer and artist on Daredevil (following an acclaimed stint as the artist only on the series).

Even with characters like Elektra, who were NOT created to die, since she was a Frank Miller creation, I think that Miller should be given a lot more leeway over deciding what to do with his own creation. The way I look at it is this – when it comes to a character’s death, so much of the impact of the death relies on the character itself. For instance, if you don’t care about a character, you typically don’t care that much about the character’s death. Well, when you DO care about the character’s death, why is that? It’s because the creator did a great job MAKING you care about the character by developing them, and so if part of the story by that same creator involves taking that character OUT of the book, then I think you should respect that.

My pal, Garth G., wrote to me to ask if it was true that Elektra was not actually intended to die when Frank Miller created her. She was not, but get this, it’s even weirder than that, as I’ll detail in this legend, as she wasn’t even created to exist past her first appearance!

What were Frank Miller’s initial plans for Elektra?

As you may or may not have heard (it’s common enough that I never did a legend on it, maybe that was a mistake?), Frank Miller borrowed HEAVILY from Will Eisner’s Spirit comic story that introduced Sand Serif for his own introduction of Elektra in Daredevil #168. Sand Seref was perhaps the most famous of the Spirit’s femme fatales, a common theme in Eisner’s Spirit. Like Elektra and Daredevil, Sand and Spirit knew each other in the past, but were then swept into different sides of the law due to tragedy. In the previous story (which also has a great, if a bit more subdued, title page, one that Matt Wagner noted was a particular favorite of his back in 2015), we learned of their past and the fact that Spirit had to bring her in…

This led to the second part, which has one of the all-time greatest Spirit splash pages, which I noted in a bit years ago.

There is so much going on in this title page; after all, there is a good reason it is regarded as one of the very best Spirit splashes of all-time. The most interesting thing about it, though, is that this was originally a splash for a whole other character! Will Eisner had tried out a new comic hero named John Law, and this splash (and Sand Seref period) were originally part of a John Law story that Eisner just edited into a “Spirit” tale.

In any event, when Miller was first allowed to write Daredevil, he wasn’t sure if he would be allowed to do it full-time, so when he started, he came up with some, in effect, “filler stories.” You know, done-in-one arcs, and one of those ideas was the introduction of Elektra…

The flashback sequence of Matt’s time with Elektra, contrasted with his decision to bring her to justice in the present is about as blatant of an homage to the Spirit story as you could get…

So when he introduced Elektra in Daredevil #168, it was only meant to be a one-off story, so he didn’t give any thought to the character beyond that.

Did Frank Miller have an overarching plan for his Daredevil run?

As Miller noted to David A. Kraft in Kraft’s iconic magazine, Comics Interview (the second issue):

I’m not uniformly proud of my work on Daredevil. I gave it a sincere effort, straight through – but it was sort of a chaotic experience. I came into the book thinking I was doing a couple of fill-ins on the writing. I ended up taking over the series, had a character who was only supposed to appear for an issue take over the series on me – Eleektra. A story came out of that that was very involved, but it wasn’t all planned in advance, and it wasn’t as carefully constructed in advance as the Ronin book is.

It really is amazing how much amazing work can come out of unplanned stuff like this. Like Thanos debuting in an issue of Iron Man, for instance. Great creators come up with greatness out of the strangest places.

Thanks to the late, great David A. Kraft (as well as Frank Miller, of course) for the information!

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