Updated Mar 18, 2025! The Elektra comic books definitive issue-by-issue collecting guide and trade reading order for omnibus, hardcover, and trade paperback collections. Find every issue and appearance! Last updated March 2025 with titles scheduled for release through September 2025.
Elektra is arguably Marvel’s most-recognizable female villain, with only Mystique to challenge her for the title.
Except, she was never really a full-fledged villain. She was introduced as an assassin, but she was no more evil than Wolverine. Like Logan, she was simply the best at what she did. And, as with many great Marvel villains, as fans demanded more and more of her, she was eventually made into a hero – or, at least, a noble protagonist who still killed people.
You can think of Elektra’s continuity in two unequal halves.
The first half is entirely written by Frank Miller. Miller used Elektra for less than two years in his run on Daredevil, but his operatic arc of her love and death made her an indelible icon.
Miller was clearly as enamored with the character as her fans were. He returned to her three more times – in the limited series Daredevil: The Man Without Fear and Elektra: Assassin, and in the graphic novel Elektra Lives Again.
By most accounts, Marvel had a gentleman’s agreement with Miller to leave Elektra alone until he was ready to resurrect her. Dardevil’s mid-90s writer D. G. Chichester was the one who broke the embargo, and so began the second half of Elektra’s Marvel career – as a reluctant ally to heroes.
Despite a string of limited and ongoing series, and even a movie to call her own, Elektra has the distinction of being relatively underexposed within the Marvel universe. She had never interacted with a hero other than Daredevil on the page until her run with Wolverine in 1996! Though many characters knew her by reputation, few had actually encountered her prior to the resolution of Secret Invasion over a decade later in 2008.
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The debut of Daredevil in 1964 from Stan Lee and Bill Everett took the Marvel method of superheroes to a whole new level. Everett was the creator of one of Marvel’s first heroes – Namor, The Sub-Mariner!
The concept of this unofficial team of heroes originated with the cancellation of Dr. Strange’s 1968 series, itself an outgrowth of Strange Tales. When a multi-part story teaming up the Doctor with Namor and Hulk was slotted to begin in what turned out to be his final issue (#183), the remaining chapters wound up running in Sub-Mariner (1968) #22 and Incredible Hulk (1968) #126.
