Daredevil has been a huge success in terms of bringing the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen to life—but if there’s one sore point for a lot of fans, it’s the final costume, built up to over the course of the first season. But as Josh Nizzi’s fantastic concept art shows, the final suit could’ve been a lot closer to Daredevil’s classic red spandex.
Nizzi, who has done concept work for Age of Ultron, Transformers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and many more movies, recently shared two pieces of early concept art he did for Daredevil—his first version is definitely a lot closer to a “modernized” take on superhero spandex, keeping a lot of the comic book’s look but giving it some texture typical of Marvel’s other comic-to-screen translations:
The design was iterated on again and again, evolving further away from the comic book original—until there was something that only vaguely resembled Daredevil. Here’s Nizzi’s “version 8" take on the design:
This is a lot closer to what we ended up seeing on the show, but it’s also quite different from what you’d think of as Daredevil. You can also see where a lot of the elements from the comic design that were lost in the creation process were brought back to give us the look we saw in the series: The final suit has more more color, it ended up having horns as well as a larger faceguard.
Although some fans think the show didn’t go far enough in creating Daredevil’s comic book look, it’s interesting to see how far away the concepts strayed while in development.
Image Credits: Josh Nizzi/Marvel. Images used with express permission of the artist.