Vanessa Fisk - Fictional Character Biography

Fictional Character Biography

Little is known about Vanessa Fisk's personal life and early years. As the wife of Wilson Fisk, the "Kingpin" of New York's criminal underworld, Vanessa was largely kept in the dark about her husband's criminal activities until her son Richard Fisk became involved in a plot to overthrow his father's criminal syndicate in order to punish his absentee father.

The revelation led to Vanessa and Wilson becoming estranged and ultimately her forcing an ultimatum towards her husband, after she caught him engaging in hand-to-hand combat with Spider-Man: his criminal empire or their marriage. Fisk chose his wife and spared Spider-Man as a result.

The two went into retirement in Japan. Kingpin prepared to settle his remaining business with his fellow mobsters by cooperating with the authorities and leave the world of crime forever. This infuriated one of Kingpin's closest advisors, Lynch, who believed that Vanessa was a liability and had turned the once mighty Kingpin into a henpecked husband. When Fisk's former lieutenants in New York caught wind of the his plans to sell them out in exchange for immunity, they kidnapped Vanessa, who was in town to secure the legal services of Matt Murdock and Foggy Nelson.

Fisk fell back to his old ways and started a gang war against the mob in New York. The mob bosses attempted to ransom Vanessa off in exchange for the evidence against them Fisk had intended to turn over to the authorities, but during the exchange, Kingpin used a sonic device to stop the criminals, and found her bound and gagged in a building. However Lynch fired an explosive at Vanessa, in an attempt to deprive Fisk of the thing that kept him retired and bring him back as the Kingpin of Crime. However, Vanessa didn't die. Instead, she was buried alive in the rubble and presumed dead. As planned, this drove Kingpin back into the world of crime, although he found out Lynch was behind the explosion, partially due to a headache he gained, and took revenge by murdering his traitorous advisor. He then forced the remaining mob leaders to confess to hiring the assassin Bullseye to kill several of Fisk's men.

Weeks later, Matt Murdock's alter ego, Daredevil, found Vanessa in the sewers. Being buried alive had left Vanessa amnesiac and mentally unstable, and she ended up taken in by a grotesque mutant who lived in the sewers. Daredevil ultimately used her as leverage to force Kingpin to order his puppet Randolph Cherryh, newly elected to the office of mayor, to resign and to confirm to the media that he was indeed a mob puppet. After reuniting with her, Kingpin had his now catatonic wife shipped off to a sanitarium in Europe in order to have her regain her sanity. This would take years, as Vanessa's husband's organized crime empire would fall and be rebuilt during the period that Vanessa was institutionalized.

Ultimately Vanessa would recover, and she would remain in Europe. But when her husband was the victim of an assassination attempt orchestrated by her son, Vanessa arranged for her husband to be shipped out of the country to recover from his injuries, and to cut a deal with his fellow mob bosses to divide up Fisk's recently rebuilt crime syndicate in exchange for a truce. Vanessa then took the final, brutal step of personally murdering her own devoted son, who admitted to Vanessa that his motivation was to rid the family of his father, who he blamed for his family's troubles.

The act of murdering her own beloved son caused a horrific physical toll on Vanessa, causing her to slowly lose the will to live, which along with the injuries she sustained when she was buried alive, culminated in her body undergoing terminal organ failure. Blaming both her husband and Matt Murdock, who had recently been revealed to be Daredevil, for the endless cycle of violence that had consumed her family, Vanessa faked the death of Foggy Nelson in an attempt to provoke Murdock into killing Fisk while they were both in prison. When that failed, she manipulated the super-hero Iron Fist into posing as Daredevil, which ultimately drove Matt to break out of prison to find Foggy's murderer and the identity of the man impersonating him, culminating in her confronting Matt with an offer to clear his name in exchange for him clearing Kingpin, so that the two would be free to try and kill each other anew.

Though Daredevil refused this deal, Vanessa went ahead and arranged for the murder of Leland Drummond, the corrupt FBI director who outed Matt in order to advance his own career within the FBI. To discredit his outing of Daredevil, the murder was made to look like a suicide and a false and highly damning suicide note was planted at the scene, claiming that Drummond took his own life after it became apparent that his scheme to frame Matt Murdock was about to be exposed. Shortly afterwards, Vanessa died and Murdock found himself morally guilted into serving as the Kingpin's lawyer, getting the charges dropped on the grounds that the evidence was too tainted to bring him to court. But Daredevil would exact his own form of Faustian bargain with Kingpin, as he forced the crime boss to renounce his American citizenship and leave the country forever in exchange for his nemesis's legal services, stating that any attempt to continue their vendetta would be an insult to the memory of the good woman Vanessa had once been. Wilson Fisk was later seen at her grave where he emotionally broke down. She has since been talking to Wilson as a ghost taunting him about that he'll never regain his former power. However this is all in the Kingpin's head, showing the death of his wife is still greatly affecting him.