While many fans believe that Kingpin, had a natural rise to power through his brilliance and success within the criminal underworld, his secret origin proves that common belief to be false. Though it may seem like a betrayal to the Kingpin’s character, his alternate backstory is actually the perfect change to Marvel lore, that is, if it’s even real.
While MCU fans will be familiar with Kingpin's origin in Netflix's Daredevil, his comic roots are much different. Kingpin’s first appearance in Amazing Spider-Man #50 by Stan Lee and John Romita Sr actually coincides with the iconic “Spider-Man No More” storyline in which Peter Parker walks away from being Spider-Man seemingly for good. The Kingpin, who was at that time just the leader of a small group of criminals, used the opportunity Spider-Man’s absence gave him to rise in power. Without Spider-Man around to stop him, Fisk was free to gather every existing criminal enterprise and step up as their leader in order to run crime in the city like one giant business, with Fisk himself as the ‘CEO’.
The Kingpin’s origin as shown in Amazing Spider-Man #50 is completely flipped on its head in the comic Bullseye: Greatest Hits #4 by Daniel Way and Steve Dillon. In this issue, Bullseye has been apprehended by the NSA after he stole and stashed away a dangerous amount of plutonium. While the agents question him, Bullseye decides to toy with them by telling them a number of stories about his past -- some true, some half-true, and others just flat-out lies. One story he told was that of Wilson Fisk and how he ‘actually’ earned his title as the Kingpin. According to Bullseye, Kingpin was put in place by the government as a way for them to control the world’s most powerful crime syndicates due to the rise of supervillains. Once the power was his, Kingpin fully became what he was pretending to be. As the one villain Kingpin fears, Bullseye was hired to kill all of Fisk's government handlers and destroy the paper trail of files that detailed the operation he was a part of.
The only problem with this story is that, moments after Bullseye tells it, he says it was all a lie. Even Daredevil fears Bullseye with how unhinged the villain is, so he's difficult to read. In the very next issue, Bullseye tells the NSA agents exactly where he stashed the plutonium only to tell them the location he just revealed was a lie, but in fact, it turned out to be true. In Kingpin’s case, Bullseye actually did burn down a government facility where his secret agent files would be kept and he also actually did kill a number of government agents just as he claimed. While it is unclear if he did these things to cover up the Kingpin’s secret origin, it is clear that he did those things, so he could very well be telling the truth about Fisk’s hidden past.
If Bullseye was telling the truth about the Kingpin, it would be the perfect change to Marvel lore as it would add an additional layer to the Kingpin as a character. Rather than just being some brilliant tough guy from Hell’s Kitchen who rose in the ranks and took power the moment the opportunity arose, he becomes a criminal mastermind who could believably stand up to the likes of the Avengers as his first-ever villainous plot was outmaneuvering the U.S. government. Daredevil’s greatest villain has always been ruthless, but this story makes the Kingpin one of Marvel's greatest villains ever, and while its validity is left ambiguous, it could very well be (and should be) his official origin in Marvel lore.
