LADY BULLSEYE

Lady Bullseye arrived in New York working for the Hand's Lord Hirochi, with orders to keep Matt Murdock from interfering while the Hand tested the heroes on its list. In her first appearance, Daredevil Vol. 2 #111 (2008), she went well beyond those orders: she slaughtered a group of street thugs herself and deliberately left a single survivor, coaching him to tell police and press that Daredevil was the murderer.

The frame was a distraction engine, not an end in itself. While Murdock woke to headlines branding him a killer, Lady Bullseye — in her civilian guise as attorney Maki Matsumoto — was manoeuvring around his life from the inside, including the custody fight over his institutionalised wife Milla. Hirochi scolded her for the stunt, warning it would alert the hero; she calmly promised Murdock would be ready for the Hand's gift when the time came.

That gift was the point of the whole campaign. The tests, the frame and the pressure on Murdock's family were all preparation to push Daredevil toward accepting leadership of the Hand itself. Her debut murder-frame was never really about the dead men in the street — it was the first move in grooming their supposed victim to become her master.