The contrast is the whole appeal: Peter cracks jokes to keep the fear at bay; Matt is a devout Catholic who feels every blow as penance. Spidey's wisecracks bounce off Daredevil's grim resolve, and somehow the pairing clicks. They even share an enemy — Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin, who began as a Spider-Man foe before becoming Daredevil's greatest nemesis, so the two heroes keep colliding over the same crime empire.
Spider-Man and Daredevil first met in The Amazing Spider-Man #16, "Duel with Daredevil!" (Sept. 1964), by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko — only months after Daredevil's own title had debuted (Daredevil #1, April 1964). Both heroes had independently come to investigate the Ringmaster and his Circus of Crime, who were hypnotizing paying audiences en masse and robbing them. Spider-Man fell under the Ringmaster's hypnotic spell, but Daredevil — immune because of his blindness — snapped him out of it, and the two crime-fighters cleaned up the Circus of Crime together. It established the template for their relationship: two working-class New York street-level heroes with instant professional respect and a bit of banter.
Spider-Man and Daredevil remain two of Marvel's closest street-level allies — both New York natives, both defined by guilt and responsibility, with a long history of mutual respect and gallows-humor banter. For years Matt Murdock knew Peter Parker was Spider-Man, but the mystical reset of "One More Day/Brand New Day" (2007-08) scrubbed Peter's secret identity from the world's memory, including Daredevil's, complicating what had been an open secret between them. They nonetheless kept crossing paths through Mark Waid's Daredevil run and the 2012 "Devil and the Details" crossover. Most recently, Chip Zdarsky's Devil's Reign (2021-2022) — in which Wilson Fisk, as elected mayor of New York, outlawed all masked vigilantes — put Spider-Man squarely among the heroes in Daredevil's orbit resisting the Kingpin. Their bond is enduring: allies who trust each other's judgment on the city's darkest cases, even as Matt's Catholic conscience and Peter's wisecracking optimism pull in different directions.
As a boy in Hell's Kitchen, Matt Murdock shoved a stranger clear of an oncoming truck — and took its cargo of radioactive material across his eyes. It cost him his sight, but supercharged everything else: hearing, smell, taste and touch sharpened past human limits, plus a "radar sense" that maps the world around him in the dark. Trained by the blind sensei Stick, he became a peerless acrobat and martial artist.
By day he's a defense attorney fighting for justice in a courtroom; by night he hunts it across the rooftops. Blind, fearless, and impossible to sneak up on — the irony that Marvel's most perceptive hero can't see is the heart of the character.