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What an Accurate DAREDEVIL Costume Would Look Like

Matt Murdock fights without sight. Blinded in an accident, the hero known as Daredevil relies on his other, superhumanly heightened senses to get around…and beat ass in Hell’s Kitchen. But there’s something wrong with his costume. If he is using a combination of echolocation and proprioception, then an outfit that covers your ears in thick leather will be a hindrance. And if Murdock’s echolocation is anything like a bat’s, then…let’s make a few quick alterations…

There we go:

Darebat_PICClick to enlarge…the ears.

Bat ears, and the brains that process the sounds they take in, are wonders of acoustics. The animals send out high-pitched clicks — produced in such a way that they make more information rich echoes than you or I ever could — and wait for the reflections. The time between click and echo gives the bats distance, and the richness of the echo gives shape. Bats use this information to hunt tiny bugs on pitch black nights, while millions of neighbors make a cacophonous clickphony around them.

A bat’s Daredevil-like powers don’t come without evolutionary shaping. Bats have ginormous ears relative to their small bodies; they look like satellite dishes stuck onto a field mouse. If Daredevil heard sound in the same way, he too would need ears (or at least a costume with ears) that dwarfed his head. (The photo above does actually show the exact proportions the hero would need if he had bat ears. Silly, I know. It’s my job.)

The comic book explanation for his embarrassingly small ears is that Matt Murdock’s senses were heightened to compensate for any morphological changes — it’s not just that he can echolocate now, his hearing is just that much better. And it is possible for humans to learn how to echolocate like bats do. Blind people have gotten close enough to Daredevil to ride bicycles without assistance. However, the kind of auditory resolution Daredevil needs to dodge a punch or run down a flight of stairs means bat ears or a bat-like brain.

Or he could grow a bulbous mass of flesh on the front of his face to focus an echolocation beam like dolphins do. That photoshop is going to take me a bit longer, though.

Images: Netflix/Marvel/Jesse McKeil

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