Elektra (character)

• 1. Introduction

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  Elektra Natchios first appeared in Daredevil #168, a Marvel Comics issue dated January 1981, and her creator never planned for her to return. Frank Miller wrote that issue as essentially a filler story. He meant it to be her only appearance. Instead she became a recurring villain in Daredevil, and then a character who refused to stay gone. She has been an assassin, a lover, an adversary, and an ally. How did a throwaway debut grow into decades of stories? What sort of person is Elektra, when her own writers admit she is hard to pin down? And what happens to a character whose past keeps being rewritten?

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• 2. Borrowed Faces

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  Lisa Lyon, a female bodybuilder, supplied the physical model for Elektra when Frank Miller designed her. Miller and Janson also sometimes drew on the actress Bo Derek for her appearance. The name points to a different source. Miller has said he built the character around Electra, a figure in Greek tragedy, and around the Electra complex theorized by Carl Jung.

  Sand Seref, a femme fatale in Will Eisner's series The Spirit, was another source. Miller says he adapted her first appearance but made it harsher. Critics have reached for other comparisons too. Some set Elektra beside Catwoman, whose bond with Batman is similarly ambivalent, though Elektra is portrayed as far more dangerous and violent. The scholar Daniel Binns compares her to Wonder Woman. Both have heavily revised backstories and ties to Greek mythology. Both also mix strongly feminine traits with activities traditionally seen as masculine.

  Miller explained Elektra's violence through her father. In his words: "She was a young woman who had her sexual interest centered on her father, and just as she was transferring this to another man, her father is killed." He argues that this early anger was then corrupted by the Hand and the Kingpin. In his view she is not essentially good. She is, as he puts it, "one of the villains who's got a weak streak in them."

  The scholar Paul Young lists her defining early traits as terse speech, an "athletic, eroticized body," a father complex, and lethal weapons paired with fighting prowess. He notes that another critic, Larry Rodman, once called her a "psychotic swimsuit model." Young also observes that she blends the femme fatale of film noir with the chopsocky martial arts film. She shows few qualms about killing her enemies, and in some stories she kills innocent people. Yet she keeps a strong affection for Matt Murdock and, later, for others she admires.

  Comics scholar P.L. Thomas sums up the trouble this causes. He says Elektra "presents many problems for a unified Marvel Universe because her origin and existence have been refashioned often despite her minor status."

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• 3. Killed And Returned

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  Issue #181, dated April 1982, ended Elektra's first run when the assassin Bullseye killed her. He stabbed her with one of her own sai during a fight over which of them would serve as the Kingpin's assassin. Elektra crawled to Daredevil's house and died in his arms.

  Members of the Hand then stole her body in an attempt to resurrect her. Daredevil, helped by Stone, a member of Stick's order, defeated the ninja. Daredevil then tried to revive Elektra himself. The attempt failed, yet it purified her soul. Her body disappeared, and so did Stone. Elektra was soon found alive, resurrected by Stone and living on the Chaste mountain, where she claimed to have found peace. A narrative note in that story insisted that Daredevil must never encounter her again. The Hand, meanwhile, created a double of Elektra named Erynys from the darkness Murdock had purged. Elektra and Daredevil destroyed Erynys, and the darkness returned to her soul.

  Marvel editors had promised not to continue the character without Miller's permission. In January 1994, the Daredevil story line "Fall from Grace" broke that promise. It ran through issues #324-327, with art by Scott McDaniel. Writer D. G. Chichester says he and editor Ralph Macchio had discussed bringing her back several times. Neither wanted it to be a gimmick. Then Macchio asked, out of the blue, "What about bringing back Elektra?" Chichester calls it the missing piece that made the whole story click. "In my mind, it's always been her to whom the title refers," he says. Miller was upset, claiming Marvel had promised him she would never be used again.

  A four-issue Elektra miniseries followed from March to June 1995, with the cover subtitle Root of Evil. Chichester and McDaniel produced it, and it was not particularly well received.

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• 4. Miller's Experiments

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  Elektra: Assassin ran from 1986 to 1987 and paired Miller with the artist Bill Sienkiewicz. Editor Mary Jo Duffy, who started the project, chose Sienkiewicz for "the fine drafting, the loony caricatures, and the high-style infusion of sex-and-drugs-and-rock'n'roll." In the story, Elektra learns that a US presidential candidate plans to launch a nuclear war. Opposing him, she enters a complex and ambiguous relationship with John Garrett, a S.H.I.E.L.D. cyborg. The candidate wins the election, but another character with unclear motives replaces his mind.

  The critic Stefan Hall writes that "Sienkiewicz uses collage, oil painting, mimeograph, and other artistic forms generally uncommon in comic books and graphic novels." Hall traces the mixed-media approach to Robert Rauschenberg and the caricatures to Ralph Steadman. The series appeared in the same year as Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, and Hall sees both works stressing the violence of the Cold War. Assassin is also a satire of American culture and politics. Its idealistic justifications for US policy hide motives of dominance, lust, and self-destruction. Its violence is hyperbolic enough that Hall compares it to Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange.

  In 1990, Miller published Elektra Lives Again, an avant-garde story set outside normal Marvel continuity. It won an Eisner Award for "Best Graphic Album: New." Daredevil is haunted by dreams of Elektra's past, her death, and her possible resurrection. Most of the story unfolds in dreams, and it has been described as surreal. Its look also anticipates Miller's later work in Sin City.

  The 1993 miniseries Daredevil: The Man Without Fear went back to the time before Murdock became Daredevil. Miller's 1980s stories had shown a young Elektra as innocent. Here she is aggressive and unhinged even during her first romance with Murdock. This miniseries is also where the character is most strongly associated with hypersexuality.

  Later, Chichester's Daredevil stories declared that Assassin was a hallucinatory distortion, shaped inside Garrett's mind, of events in which Elektra had really taken part.

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• 5. Series After Series

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  Wolverine #100-106, published from April to November 1996 and written by Larry Hama, gave Elektra her first heroic role. In that arc, Stick has retrained and rehabilitated her, so she is now morally good, though still unusually ruthless. A spin-off ongoing series launched the same year and lasted nineteen issues. Hama and Peter Milligan wrote it, and Mike Deodato Jr. drew it. It establishes that the Chaste, the adversaries of the Hand, resurrected her. The tone is much lighter, at times parodying romance comics. A narrator declares, "She was once a wild-eyed assassin... of course, she's a completely different person now." She still struggles with relapses into indiscriminate violence. She also briefly resumes her relationship with Daredevil, who is unfaithful to his girlfriend of the time, Karen Page.

  A second ongoing series ran 22 issues from 2001 to 2003. Brian Michael Bendis began it, and Greg Rucka wrote most of it after issue #6. It ignores the Milligan series and returns Elektra to her morally ambiguous, tormented self. In 2002, Rucka also wrote the novella Elektra and Wolverine: The Redeemer, with extensive illustrations by Yoshitaka Amano. Because it is prose rather than a graphic novel, its place in Marvel canon is unclear. Rucka says her allure comes from her mysterious, enigmatic nature, which makes her very hard to write or to identify with. He calls it a compelling emotional detachment and contrasts it with the warmer Wolverine.

  Ultimate Spider-Man #51, from February 2004, introduced an alternate Elektra as a recurring adversary in Bendis's reinterpretation of Spider-Man. That October, this version starred in her own five-issue miniseries by Mike Carey and Salvador Larroca, with Daredevil in a supporting role. Also in 2004, Mark Millar's Wolverine storyline "Enemy of the State" made her a leading figure. John Romita Jr. drew it, and he had also drawn her in The Man Without Fear a decade earlier. In it she works with S.H.I.E.L.D. to help Wolverine fight the Hand.

  Haden Blackman wrote a third ongoing series from 2014 to 2015. Its surreal, psychedelic look recalls Sienkiewicz's work from the 1980s. Artist Mike del Mundo affirms that his approach is an homage to Elektra: Assassin. The critic Leah Bernstein acclaims it as the best of the Elektra series. Blackman admits the character is hard to write because it is difficult to escape "the stigma of being 'Daredevil's dead girlfriend.'" Even so, he concludes it is the story and character he is "most proud of writing."

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• 6. Backstory In Pieces

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  Elektra was born in Greece to Hugo Natchios and his wife Christina, and she had an older brother named Orestez. Christina was murdered by terrorists but gave birth prematurely to Elektra just before dying. Stories disagree on who was responsible. In one version Orestez hires assassins to kill their mother, and in another she dies during the Greek Civil War. Hugo hired a sensei to teach his daughter martial arts, and she earned a black belt in karate at age 12.

  One story suggests that Elektra remembers childhood sexual abuse by her father. Years of counseling and medication convinced her the memory was false, though doubt lingered. That theme disappears from later stories.

  Hugo later served as a Greek ambassador to the United States. Elektra, at nineteen, attended Columbia University in New York City, where she began dating a classmate named Matt Murdock. A year later, terrorists kidnapped her and her father. Murdock's rescue attempt went wrong, and Hugo was gunned down. Elektra lost faith and hope. She quit Columbia and fled to China to study martial arts. There Stick, a member of the benevolent Chaste, tried to train her himself. She ultimately sided with the Hand, a sect of mystical ninja, who trained her as an assassin.

  She later broke away and worked as an independent agent. She met Murdock again after he became the costumed Daredevil. They fought the Hand together, yet they also clashed. Soon she became chief assassin for the Kingpin, New York City's premier crime lord. She stabbed Ben Urich, a journalist friend of Daredevil, and nearly crippled Daredevil by trapping his foot in a bear trap. The Kingpin then ordered her to kill Franklin "Foggy" Nelson, Matt's partner. Nelson recognized her as Matt's college girlfriend, and she could not do it.

  Her training left her with the martial arts of China, Siam, and Japan. The Okinawan sai is her usual weapon, but she is also skilled with the katana, daggers, a three-section staff, and shuriken. Miller explains that the sai amplifies the power of karate blows and extends the reach of a smaller fighter. She is an Olympic-level athlete in gymnastics and swimming, resistant to pain and to extreme heat and cold. She can move so fast and quietly that she stays unseen even in daylight.

  Her mind is a weapon too. Elektra can mesmerize people into seeing illusions, and she can "throw" her mind into theirs. That is how she tracked down her enemy Ken Wind, by temporarily borrowing other people's minds. She can speak telepathically with disciplined minds such as the Chaste, and she can shield her own mind. Her Hand training linked her mentally to the Beast, the demigod of the Hand. She also glimpses future events in precognitive visions.

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• 7. The Second Daredevil

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  When S.H.I.E.L.D. hired Elektra after the Hand brainwashed Wolverine, she feigned an alliance with the Hand. To keep the deception believable, she crashed a S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier and killed many agents. She then joined forces with Wolverine and taught him to reject his conditioning, as she had learned to do. Earlier, Stick had sent her to help a bestial, regressed Wolverine, and she brought him to her childhood home in Greece. She also assembled a team to fight the Snakeroot, an offshoot of the Hand, and afterward visited her father's grave.

  In 2007, in Bendis's Secret Invasion storyline, Skrulls kidnapped Elektra and replaced her with a shapeshifting double. The double rejoined the Hand. The Skrulls tortured the real Elektra and experimented on her to learn how she had risen from the dead. She escaped, her double was killed, and Norman Osborn briefly jailed her. Zeb Wells followed up in 2009 with the miniseries Dark Reign: Elektra.

  In Andy Diggle's Shadowland series of 2010, the Hand corrupts Daredevil, and he builds a fortress called Shadowland. Elektra pretends to join him and infiltrates it. She ultimately helps Murdock break free of the Hand's demon. Afterward she joined the Thunderbolts, a team assembled by Thunderbolt Ross, alongside Flash Thompson, the Punisher, and Deadpool. She began a romance with the Punisher. She also learned that her brother Orestez, whom she thought dead, was a terrorist leader. When Elektra could not execute him, the Punisher did. In 2019 she joined the Savage Avengers with Wolverine, the Punisher, Venom, Brother Voodoo, and Conan the Barbarian.

  The Purple Children used magic to erase the world's knowledge of Daredevil's secret identity. As a result, Elektra came to believe that Daredevil and Matt Murdock were two separate former lovers. Chip Zdarsky's long arc began in Daredevil (2019) #10, dated July 2019. When Daredevil was jailed, Elektra resolved to prove her commitment to protecting the innocent in Hell's Kitchen. She made a modified version of the original costume and became a new Daredevil. Later she teamed up with the original, and they worked together until Zdarsky's series ended with issue #36 in February 2022.

  The three-issue miniseries Daredevil: Woman without Fear began in March 2022, with Elektra fighting Kraven the Hunter. The Devil's Reign event, which she and Daredevil co-starred in, concluded in May 2022. Their next series ended in April 2023. In 2021, the miniseries Elektra: Black, White and Blood offered horror-flavored stories largely outside regular continuity. Each issue had a different writer, among them Charles Soule, Peter David, Ann Nocenti, Peach Momoko, and Kevin Eastman.

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• 8. Echoes And Screens

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  J. Andrew Deman calls Elektra "an iconic Marvel warrior woman." In 1989, the X-Men's Psylocke took on a similar costume and fighting style, and the Hand trained her as a ninja assassin too. Elektra was also among the primary inspirations for the Bad girl art trend of 1990s American comics. Doug Petrie, a writer for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, credits her as the model for Faith. "In a different, teen, punkier context, Faith is so much like Elektra," he says.

  Marvel has also told what-if versions of her life. In "What If Elektra Had Lived?", Miller imagines her surviving Bullseye. The story ends with Elektra and Daredevil running away together. In "What If Daredevil Died Saving Elektra?", Matt dies protecting her and her father in their college days. Elektra becomes a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent and is later forced to fight and kill Matt, whom the Hand has resurrected as "The Advocate." The PunisherMAX series offers a more "realistic" Elektra who is Japanese. The Hand lends her services as a bodyguard to the Kingpin, and she becomes his lover. Vanessa, the Kingpin's ex-wife, secretly hired her to assassinate him, and the Hand eventually kills her.

  Élodie Yung plays Elektra in Marvel's Netflix television series, with Lily Chee as a younger Elektra in flashbacks. In the second season of Daredevil, from 2016, Stick trained her from childhood until the Chaste judged her too dangerous. He then had Hugo and Christina Natchios adopt her. She learns she is destined to become the Hand's leader, "Black Sky," and later sacrifices herself to save Murdock. In The Defenders, from 2017, she is revived as a brainwashed Hand assassin. She later kills Stick and the Hand's leader, Alexandra Reid. Murdock stays behind in the Hand's headquarters to reach her, and they share a kiss before disappearing in an explosion. Murdock survives, but Elektra's fate is left ambiguous.

  Elektra has appeared in many video games. In Marvel: Ultimate Alliance she is voiced by Gabrielle Carteris. In Lego Marvel Super Heroes, Laura Bailey voices a version who works for the Kingpin. She also appears in Marvel Snap. Beyond games, she appears in the Marvel Comics Super Heroes collection of commemorative postage stamps and on a Marvel-licensed slot machine.

  Jennifer Garner played Elektra in the 20th Century Fox film Daredevil in 2003. That version is the daughter of the billionaire Nikolas Natchios, and she dies in Murdock's arms after Bullseye stabs her. Garner returned for the 2005 spin-off Elektra, in which the character was once a martial arts prodigy called the "Treasure." She protects Mark Miller and his daughter Abby from the Hand. The film rights reverted to Marvel Studios in 2014. Garner reprised the role in the 2024 film Deadpool & Wolverine, where the Time Variance Authority banishes Elektra to the Void. There she joins a group called the "Resistance" in rebelling against its ruler, Cassandra Nova.

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