Daredevil fought a vacuum cleaner and learned a profound lesson
It’s a scorcher in New York City. The blacktop shimmers and sticks as the sun beats down upon Spider-Man, the Avengers, the Fantastic Four and the X-Men as they defend the city against demonic forces intent on bringing hell to Earth. This is Inferno, the backdrop of 1989’s Daredevil #262, by untested Marvel editor Ann Nocenti and star-artist-on-the-rise John Romita Jr.
And on that sweltering hot day, Daredevil fights a vacuum cleaner. And he loses. And it’s great.
It shouldn’t work. This should be an entry in some “Top 10 Silliest Fights In Marvel History” list. Yet, there’s a deadly seriousness to the issue that elevates a lowly household appliance into something transcendent. The reader is forced to sincerely confront the question: Who will win? Daredevil … or a demon-possessed vacuum cleaner?
At the time the book was published, Nocenti was a year into a run that was never meant to be. A Marvel editor best known for overseeing Chris Claremont’s epic tenure on Uncanny X-Men, she had jumped into the book as a fill-in writer and never really left, fitting herself into the enormous chair left by Frank Miller.
Nocenti, whose career at Marvel started by replying to an ad in The Village Voice that she’d mistaken for a job in writing smut, wasn’t a traditional fit for comics. Still, she became a quick advocate for the medium, saying, in one intervew, “I sincerely lied [...] pretending I knew what a comic was. Once inside the citadel I was stunned by the incendiary energy [...]. The whole thing seemed subversive. Why was all this psychedelic power crammed into such tiny, badly-printed packages?”
Her partner on the book, John Romita Jr., came from a more prestigious pedigree. His father-slash-namesake was a comics legend, the
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