DAREDEVIL

Matt Murdock grew up believing his mother was dead. She was alive, in a convent, watching from a distance. Margaret Murdock — Sister Maggie — had married the boxer Battlin' Jack Murdock and given him a son, then, in the grip of postpartum depression that convinced her she was a danger to her own child, she fled the family. She found her footing in religion, took vows, and spent her life working missions among the poor while Jack told young Matt that his mother had died.

Mother and son finally collided in the wreckage of Frank Miller's Born Again, beginning in Daredevil #227 (1986). The Kingpin had learned Matt's secret, frozen his accounts, destroyed his home and left him beaten and wandering. The broken man who washed up in Maggie's care was nursed back toward life by a nun whose tenderness carried a weight the story lets readers feel long before anyone states it outright: this stranger had been keeping an eye on him, in secret, for years.

Marvel's own character history fills in the frame around that reunion: Maggie never stopped following her son's life from afar, and in his darkest nights she became his confidant and confessor — the one person who could talk the Devil of Hell's Kitchen back toward faith in himself. The mother he mourned as a boy turned out to be the adult who saved him at his lowest point.