Just as they have stomped all over the face of cinema for the past decade, Marvel Comics' screwed-up superheroes now look set to takeover internet TV.

Daredevil - the everyday, extremely violent story of a blind New York lawyer with Catholic guilt, who spends his evenings beating up and getting beat up in return as a masked vigilante - is the first stage in a potentially momentous team-up between the comic book behemoth and the kingpin of streaming TV, Netflix.

Across the next year, it will be followed by another three Marvel adaptations, all set around the same darkly funky Hell's Kitchen neighbourhood Daredevil patrols: Jessica Jones (traumatised superhero turned detective); Luke Cage (badass hero for hire); and Cage's frequent partner in mayhem, Iron Fist (mysterious uber-ninja).

The vision is ambitious. Already, in Daredevil's first few episodes, comics fans will spot references suggesting how the four series will intertwine. Indeed, the plan is for the protagonists of the individual shows to eventually get together for one epic mini-series rumble of a finale, as The Defenders. Add to this the potential to hook up with Marvel's other, squarer current TV series, Agents Of SHIELD, and the ever-expanding movie franchise, and things could get almost as complicated as they have been in the comics themselves for the past 40 years.

How - and whether - it will all come together remains to be seen, but judging by Daredevil's first few episodes, it will be brutally good fun finding out. Marvel has judged 12 years is enough time for fans to have forgiven the Ben Affleck Daredevil movie and agree to try again.

The character first appeared in comics in the early 1960s, when things were more swinging, but the series takes as its Bible the 1980-90s incarnation, when writer-artist Frank Miller was in charge and, as he famously did with DC's Batman, rebooted things to his own scuzzy, vicious, psycho-noir worldview.

The set-up is, of course, daft: as a kid, young Matt Murdock, son of an unlucky boxer, is splashed with radioactive acid-stuff that blinds him but enhances his other senses to uncanny degrees. (Seeing by radar, he's far more a bat-man than Batman.)

A few years' intensive training with a Kung Fu-style mystic later, and he is ready to prowl rooftops smashing evildoers by night, while fighting the good fight as a lawyer by day.

The TV series leaps into this craziness with an admirably straight face. It's smart, but doesn't try to appear knowing. The result is not only far grimmer than the 2003 film, but darker, grungier and streetier than anything else in Marvel's screen spin-offs.

The punch-ups are physical bone-crunchers in the post-Bourne style (episode two climaxes with a long, fantastic pile-up of people punching themselves into exhaustion); and, sometimes, when faced with a particularly evil evildoer, Daredevil goes into full-on, not-right torture mode.

The show benefits from surprisingly effective flashbacks to his childhood, but we spend most time with the adult Murdock (Charlie Cox) as he sets out on his life of crime-fighting. As luck would have it, he's setting up just as an as-yet-unseen new crime overlord sets sights on Hell's Kitchen. (Fans will know the mystery man is Kingpin, the massive bald gangster who is one of Marvel's most vivid baddies, due to be played by Vincent D'Onofrio.) It's state-of-the-art pulp: the closest any Marvel screen adaptation has yet come to the experience of reading the comics. All that's left for us to do is phone for pizza.