Daredevil's Big Twist Throws Marvel Comics Rumor Mill a Curve

In the wake of October's Susan G. Komen Foundation-branded pink variant covers, rumors began to swirl that Marvel Comics would take their relationship with the cancer research charity to the next level by actually infecting a Marvel character with cancer and dealing with the repercussions of that in-story. The going theory seemed to be that the character in question would be one of Marvel's female heroes, with breast cancer being the obvious affliction, particularly because the publisher's relationship with Komen would presumably provide them with some expert advice on keeping the story grounded in some semblance of medical reality. Names like She-Hulk, Invisible Woman and Captain Marvel were bandied about (although Captain Marvel seemed unlikely given that one of her supporting characters is already a cancer sufferer and twice in one book seemed like it would have been a difficult sell).

Well, this week's issue of Daredevil has thrown all of that for a bit of a loop: Foggy Nelson, by far the most recognizable supporting character, revealed that he's waiting on final test results, but that it seems evident he has cancer. Assuming it's something Waid wants to follow through on, which seems likely, the question now becomes whether this is the same character that the rumors have been circulating around, an unrelated coincidence or even something that occurred to Waid when the talk started. Certainly the assumption that it would be a female character contracting breast cancer was a rather specific rumor, leaving some room for both Foggy and another character to be undergoing similar challenges at the same time--but high-profile characters don't often contract cancer in mainstream superhero comic books. It would be a pretty substantial coincidence to have two of them happening at the same time.