The character debuted in Daredevil #1 (in April 1964), created by writer-editor Stan Lee and artist Bill Everett, with character design input from Jack Kirby, who devised Daredevil's billy club. When Bill Everett turned in his first issue pencils extremely late, Marvel Comics' production manager Sol Brodsky and Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko inked a large variety of different backgrounds, a « lot of backgrounds and secondary figures on the fly and cobbled the cover and the splash page together from Jack Kirby's original concept drawing ».

Jack Kirby designed the basic image of Daredevil's costume, though Bill Everett modified it. The character's original costume design was a combination of black, yellow and red, reminiscent of acrobat tights. Wallace Wood pencilled issues #5-8, introducing Daredevil's modern red costume in issue #7. When John Romita Sr. left to take over The Amazing Spider-Man, Stan Lee gave Daredevil to what would be the character's first signature artist, Gene Colan, who began with Daredevil #20 (in September 1966). He pencilled all but 3 issues through #100 (in June 1973), plus the 1967 Annual.

The first issue covered both the character's origins and his desire for revenge on the man who had killed his father, boxer « Battling Jack » Murdock, who raised young Matt Murdock in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. Jack Murdock instills in Matt Murdock the importance of education and nonviolence with the aim of seeing his son become a better man than himself. In the course of saving a blind man from the path of an oncoming truck, Matt Murdock is blinded by a radioactive substance that falls from the vehicle. The radioactive exposure heightens his remaining senses beyond normal human thresholds, enabling him to detect the shape and location of objects around him. In order to support his son, Jack Murdock returns to boxing and when he refuses to throw a fight, because his son is in the audience, is killed by gangsters. Adorned in a yellow and black costume made from his father's boxing robes and using his super-human abilities, Matt Murdock confronts the killers as the super-hero Daredevil, causing the Fixer to have a fatal heart attack. Daredevil would embark on a series of adventures involving such villains as the Owl, Stilt-Man, Gladiator and the Enforcers. Several sub-plots involved romantic triangles and cases of mistaken identity. Matt Murdock reveals his secret identity to his girlfriend Karen Page in Daredevil #57, although she leaves the series after the revelation proves too much for her. During this period, he meets Spider-Man, a character who would later be one of his greatest hero friends. Then Daredevil moves to San Francisco for a time to live with the spy and super-heroine, the Black Widow, and enters into a romantic relationship with her. The front cover of the comic-book is even retitled to « Daredevil and the Black Widow », but she soon ends the relationship, fearing that playing « sidekick » to Daredevil is sublimating her identity. Matt Murdock returns to Hell's Kitchen.