Marvel Studios Head of Visual Development Ryan Meinerding dreamed up the Man Without Fear's costume for Netflix's Daredevil series, and that may go some way towards explaining why the design appears to have carried over to the MCU.
Despite boasting a new colour scheme, what we've seen from She-Hulk: Attorney at Law suggests the costume will remain largely the same. Whether the red and yellow is a one-off or the plan for Daredevil moving forward is unclear, but Head Writer Jessica Gao has now confirmed that the redesign was a Marvel Studios mandate.
"Usually how they do it is they kind of let us propose what we want to do rather than give us guidelines," she explained in an interview with Lifehacker. "When they first told us that [Daredevil] was a possibility we just couldn’t believe it. And as we were coming up with story and what we wanted him to do, the fact that they kept not saying no was shocking to us."
"The one thing that I didn’t have control of was the suit," Gao confirms. "They knew exactly what they wanted the suit to look like."
This suggests that there is a specific reason for heading down this route with the costume, and it might be a way of differentiating this Daredevil from the Variants previously seen on the big and small screens. Either way, it sounds like this Matt Murdock will be a little different to whatever we end up seeing in Echo and Daredevil: Born Again.
"Because we have a very specific tone we’re able to pull these characters like Daredevil, like Abomination, like Wong who normally you’ve seen in very dramatic, very heavy, very serious projects, and bringing them into our world and letting them kind of play around in She-Hulk’s tone, so that it’s not completely changing the character but you do get to see a different side of them."
"You get to see a lighter side of them and part of that is because the universe isn’t in danger, it’s just a regular day for them, it’s a normal day. So you kind of get to see these people when they’re not worried about saving all humanity, they get to just deal with everyday stuff. It’s kind of like they get to take a comedy vacation in our show and then they can go back and do their serious stuff again."
Gao's comments are very interesting, but anyone fretting over the possibility of a comedic take on Daredevil needs to go and read some comic books! Given the unique tone of the MCU, don't be surprised if what we see from 'ol Hornhead in future is less Frank Miller and more Mark Waid.
The first episode of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is now streaming on Disney+.