If you only know Vanessa Fisk from the comics or TV shows (Netflix’s Daredevil or the newer Daredevil: Born Again on Disney+) you know her as Wilson Fisk’s wife. She’s the elegant woman standing beside the most dangerous man in New York City. Maybe you’ve seen her pull the strings behind the scenes. Or maybe you’ve noticed Kingpin seems a little more human whenever he’s around her.
Over decades of comics, Vanessa forced Kingpin to spare Spider-Man’s life. She manipulated Daredevil, Marvel’s blind vigilante/lawyer, from her deathbed. She killed her own son to protect her husband. She ran revenge campaigns from overseas. She was, in every sense, extraordinary.
But Marvel Comics kept killing her, only to bring her back just to kill her again. Despite Vanessa’s potential as antagonist, she was never allowed to evolve beyond being a plot device for her husband.
A Quick Note for New Readers
If you’re new to Marvel comics, here’s a brief overview before we continue.
Wilson Fisk (Kingpin): He’s Marvel’s top crime boss. Wilson is big, intimidating, and highly intelligent. He’s been a major villain in Daredevil and Spider-Man for decades. In the MCU (the shared universe of Marvel movies and shows), he’s played by Vincent D’Onofrio.
Daredevil (Matt Murdock): A blind lawyer by day, a masked vigilante by night. He fights crime in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood using his super-enhanced senses. He and Kingpin have been enemies for years.
The Hand: An ancient, secretive ninja cult that dabbles with dark magic and can resurrect the dead. They’re mysterious, and very dangerous.
The Jackal (Ben Reilly): A villain from the Spider-Man comics with the ability to clone people. Yes, really. Comics are wild.
The MCU vs. the Comics: The shows and movies sometimes stick to the comics, but often take creative liberties. For example, in the Netflix series and Daredevil: Born Again, Vanessa is more assertive and more villainous than she was in the comics.
Okay, now we’re ready.
Vanessa’s First Death
Vanessa’s story has a dark start in the comic Daredevil: Love and War by Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz. She’s a teenager with amnesia who enters Wilson Fisk’s criminal world as a victim of trafficking.
Instead of selling her, Fisk spares her. He’s drawn to her in a way he doesn’t understand, and they build a life together. They fall in love, get married and have a son named Richard. Once Richard is old enough, the Fisks send him to school in Switzerland to keep him away from the violence of their New York life.
Vanessa is the one of the few, if not the only person who can reign Fisk in him. At one point, she gives him a choice: leave his criminal enterprise behind or lose her. He nearly walks away. He even spares Spider-Man’s life because of her. That kind of influence over someone like Fisk is significant but it has its limits. Her role is tied almost entirely to how she affects Fisk. If she’s featured in the story it’s to influence her husband’s arc in some way.
By the time she’s dying of illness, she’s already been through the ringer. One moment that defines her is when Richard turns against Fisk and orchestrates an attack that nearly kills him. Vanessa returns to New York City to take control, and hunt down the ones responsible for attacking her husband. When she finally confronts Richard, she kills him.
She leaves before Fisk wakes up, knowing he won’t forgive her. She goes into exile as her health declines. But even at the end, she doesn’t step back. She blames both Fisk and Daredevil for the direction her life went and wants revenge. She fakes Foggy Nelson’s death in an attempt to push Matt Murdock into breaking his no-kill rule, hoping he’ll finally take Fisk out.
It doesn’t work, so Vanessa makes one final move before she dies. She confesses everything to Daredevil and trades information in exchange for Fisk’s release. Matt agrees, and Fisk walks free.
Even when she’s at death’s door, Vanessa is calculating and influencing events behind the scenes. And even that gets reduced to advancing the story for other characters.
Resurrected by the Hand
Years after Vanessa’s death, the Hand recovered her body and brought her back to life. But she wasn’t truly Vanessa. She was between life and death, a revenant molded into a weapon and aimed straight at her husband.
The resurrection was part of a test. The Hand wanted to see whether Wilson Fisk was still worthy of being their leader. Could he kill his wife if they asked him to? Fisk tried to reach her, begging for a sign she was the woman he’d lost. But she kept attacking. In the end, he fought back and killed her.
It wasn’t until after Vanessa died, did he realize she hadn’t been attacking him. An assassin was approaching Wilson from behind, and she was trying to save him. Her final act was one of loyalty and it cost her life. Again.
Vanessa Gets a Clone
The next time Marvel brought Vanessa back, it was actually worse than when the Hand resurrected her. At least with that storyline, she came off as being somewhat heroic.
During the Dead No More: The Clone Conspiracy storyline, the Jackal, who’s a corrupted clone of Spider-Man, developed cloning technology capable of bringing dead people back to life. He used it to offer grieving individuals the chance to reclaim their loved ones…for a price, of course. One of his “clients” was Wilson Fisk, to whom he presented a clone of Vanessa.
The goal was to use Vanessa’s clone to manipulate Kingpin into funding his company, New U Technologies. But the scheme when the clone mentioned their son, Richard, could be revived as well. Fisk snapped her neck on the spot, declaring that she was a worthless abomination that tainted the memory of his wife.
On one level, you can see what that moment was going for. Wilson showing that he can’t be bought, even with grief. But in doing so, the story reduced the Vanessa clone to something that can be easily disposed of. She was around long enough to die at the hands of her husband, again.
And Then They Used Her Soul
In later stories, a mysterious villain named Kindred emerges with the news that he’s in possession of Vanessa’s soul. Kindred uses her soul as leverage to force Mayor Fisk to abandon his plan to have someone killed.
By that point, Vanessa had been killed and resurrected multiple times. A character who was central to preserving what’s left of Wilson Fisk’s humanity was stripped of her agency. She didn’t even have a body, yet was being used as a bargaining chip.
What makes that frustrating is how much potential her story always had. Each twist from her resurrection by the Hand to her soul held hostage could have been a chance to explore who Vanessa really was. What would it mean to come back to life, only used as a weapon against someone you love? What kind of identity crisis would a clone experience, rejected for existing? Instead, these storylines were used to further Wilson Fisk’s arc.
This fits what Gail Simone called “women in refrigerators,” the habit of sidelining or killing female characters to give a male character motivation. Vanessa’s story follows a similar pattern of propelling someone else’s story instead of her own.
Netflix’s Daredevil and Daredevil: Born Again finally broke that pattern. They gave us a Vanessa who is capable of running her husband’s empire and acts on her own ambitions. That version of her, pragmatic and ruthless, is the one the comics should have embraced a long time ago.
So What Happens Now?
As I’m writing this, season 2 of Daredevil: Born Again has aired episode 4, “Gloves Off”. At the end of the episode, Bullseye (Kingpin’s trained assassin and former pawn of Vanessa’s) launched a devastating attack during a public boxing match. A shard of glass ended up in Vanessa’s head. She was left looking lifeless, with viewers waiting to find out what happens next.
I’m hoping that if Vanessa survives, it’s because the show acknowledges she’s an important character, not because Wilson needs a moral compass. And if she does die, her death is treated as the end of her story, not the beginning of Wilson’s.
Wilson Fisk has long been defined by his love for Vanessa. Maybe it’s time we see Vanessa defined by something other than him.
I think she’s earned that. Don’t you?
Reading List
- Daredevil: Love and War (1986), by Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz explores Vanessa’s early relationship with Wilson Fisk and establishes their dynamic
- Daredevil #297–300 (1991), by D.G. Chichester and Lee Weeks depicts Vanessa’s first canonical death, as well as the events leading up to and taking place before she dies
- Daredevil (Vol. 2) #116–119 (2009), by Ed Brubaker and Michael Lark features the Hand’s resurrecting Vanessa
- The Clone Conspiracy #1–5 and Amazing Spider-Man (Vol. 4) #17–20 (2016–2017), by Dan Slott and Jim Cheung
- The Jackal creates a clone of Vanessa to manipulate Fisk; Fisk kills the clone when she suggests resurrecting their son.
- The Amazing Spider-Man (Vol. 5) #50–55 (2020–2021), by Nick Spencer and Patrick Gleason has Kindred using Vanessa’s soul to pressure Fisk into abandoning his plans, reducing her to a bargaining tool even after death.
