Daredevil as Legal Emblem

Abstract

This article draws together two trajectories of legal scholarship: the turn to the visual in legal studies and the emergence of the subfield of law and comics, or ‘graphic justice’. It does this via an analysis of superhero comics as fitting within a particular genealogy of the ius imaginum, or law of images. This is not to argue simply that superhero comics are dominated by narratives of law, justice and legality—they are—but rather that the very theatrical figure of the superhero and its encompassing of a dual persona is a presentation of a particular political theology of the image. The article analyses the way in which this political theology is rendered visible in Charles Soule’s Daredevil: Back in Black, highlighting the image of the superhero and its connection to both sovereignty and the biopolitics of personhood.

Keywords

• daredevil
• law of images
• legal emblem
• law and the visual
• graphic justice
• law and comics