I’m both a lifelong superhero fan and a born and bred New Yorker, which means that as this week’s Daredevil: Born Again rolled out its version of Wilson “The Kingpin” Fisk’s rise to the office of mayor of New York City, I wasn’t thinking about what this would mean for Matt Murdock. Instead, I was doing mental math on how Wilson Fisk’s candidacy fit into New York City’s electoral processes.
See, in New York, we do ranked choice voting, which might imply there were other candidates more extreme than Fisk on both ends of the spectrum. And if Staten Island voted heavily for him, as one line of dialogue suggests, he probably ran as a conservative Independent or a Republican. And if he’s the 112th mayor of New York in a special election, that would imply that Eric Adams’ successor leaves office in an unexpected way.
All I can say is: At least Marvel is letting us have someone between Adams and Fisk. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but New York City has its own embattled mayor at the moment. Adams faces five federal charges spanning conspiracy, wire fraud, bribery, and solicitation of contribution by a foreign national — or he will unless he complies with our current president’s policy goals. Recent polling shows a majority of the city thinks he should resign and less than 20% think he is trustworthy.
These are the national headlines Adams is making, which can obscure many of his weirder, relatively more minor statements, actions, and scandals, much in the way that a popular TV adaptation of a comic book character can obscure many of their lesser-known stories and characteristics. So, in the spirit of educating any non-New York City-adjacent readers out there about both comic books and New York, here’s a little game.
I’ve prepared a list of things Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin, has done, said, or had a scandal about; and things Eric Adams, the actual mayor of the real New York City, has done, said, or had a scandal about. I may have also tossed in a few fake things here and there, just to keep it spicy. I’ll reveal the answers at the end of this post, and you can see how many you were able to get right.
I must apologize for lying: In the end, I did not actually make any of these up, and they are all real. I’m sorry, but I’m also not sorry. I live here. In New York City. And there’s never been any scandal about whether I do.
I hope you’ve found all of this informative, amusing, alarming, or all three. I’ll be here, counting the days until the mayoral primary in June.
