KINGPIN

Wilson Fisk raised Maya Lopez. Her father, one of his enforcers, was murdered on Fisk's own orders, and the Kingpin took the deaf little girl in, funded her gifts, and let her call him family — while quietly telling her that Daredevil was the man who killed her father. Grown into Echo, a fighter with photographic reflexes who could copy any move she saw, Maya hunted Daredevil across Daredevil Vol. 2 #9–15 (1999–2000), David Mack and Joe Quesada's "Parts of a Hole," and fell in love with Matt Murdock along the way.

Then she learned whose hands were actually bloody. In Daredevil Vol. 2 #15 (2000), Maya confronted the man she had trusted as an uncle and shot him point-blank in the face. Fisk survived the unsurvivable — but the bullets took both of his eyes. The most feared man in New York, the archenemy of a blind hero, woke up in the same darkness Matt Murdock had navigated his whole life, except Fisk had never learned to live in it.

Blindness accomplished what Daredevil and Spider-Man never quite had: it broke the empire's centre. Fisk wallowed, his grip on organised crime slipped, rivals circled the throne, and the Kingpin eventually withdrew to Europe until an eye transplant restored his sight. He returned to New York seeing again — but the stretch in the dark stands as the one defeat no lawyer, bribe or strongman could negotiate away, delivered by the daughter his own lie created.