Daredevil Villains #74: Rotgut
DAREDEVIL #239-240 (February/March 1987)
Writer: Ann Nocenti
Artist:Louis Williams
Inkers: Al Williamson & (#239 only) Geoff Isherwood
Colourists: Christie Scheele (#239), Bob Sharen & Petra Scotese (#240)
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Editor: Ralph Macchio
We’ve skipped another couple of issues. Issue #237, as I mentioned last time, is the one issue that Steve Englehart wrote before quitting, and appears under his “John Harkness” pseudonym. It features Klaw as the guest villain, so it doesn’t concern us. Issue #238 is the official start of Ann Nocenti’s run (since issue #236 was meant to be a fill-in), but it’s a Mutant Massacre tie-in, and the guest villain is Sabretooth.
So that brings us to this two-parter, where Nocenti starts to get into her stride. She’ll be working with rotating artists for the first year or so, until John Romita Jr finally comes aboard with issue #250. The most frequent contributor is Louis Williams, who also drew the Englehart issue, and returns for another two-parter in issues #243-244. Daredevil was his first work at Marvel, and his other credits seem to be fairly limited. I’m not sure why – he was certainly up to the job. He’s a good fit for this story, with plenty of atmospheric detail and suitably seedy and horrific qualities to his work.
Charts – 6 March 2026
Okay, we’re into March and the singles chart is finally starting to pick up a bit.
1. Sam Fender & Olivia Dean – “Rein Me In”
Three weeks. “Rein Me In” has been on the top 40 for 37 consecutive weeks, and it’s not that unusual for big tracks to hang around that long. But it’s actually growing – this is as big a weekly score as it’s ever had. It’s still only number one because “Man I Need” is on ACR, but even that is now marginal.
3. Alex Warren – “Fever Dream”
The previous Alex Warren single, “Eternity”, also entered at number 3. This is certainly a change of tack from his previous singles, since at least it’s an upbeat track. The video is very much Trying Too Hard, but the single itself is acceptable in a Maroon 5 kind of way. “Ordinary” is still hanging around at number 16, which is insane.
The X-Axis – 4 March 2026
X-MEN #26. (Annotations here.) Part 1 of “Danger Room”, which seems to be basically O*N*E sending Beyond after the X-Men. Which isn’t all that interesting as a high concept, but Jed MacKay adds more to it by picking up the thread of Psylocke and Greycrow’s relationship now that Psylocke has been cancelled, and gives us a lovely little subplot of Glob Herman and his fruit stall. The splash page of the sun setting over Merle is beautiful, and much more effective than actually showing the gunman firing on Glob. (It also leaves open the question of whether he missed, though it’d feel a bit anticlimactic if he did.) But Netho Diaz really does do some nice stallholding scenes. For whatever reason, Kid Omega doesn’t go on any of these missions – is this going to be the “Quentin, Ben and Jennifer save the day” arc? I’m still not especially interested in putting the X-Men against the Beyond Corporation, certainly the Amazing Spider-Man version where they’re basically just an evil conglomerate with some weirder than usual technology, but there are a lot of other things here adding to that.
WOLVERINE #17. (Annotations here.) More of the New Morlocks, and this feels a little bit as if we’re marking time until the Adamantine get here. The New Morlocks finally show up in enough numbers to feel like some sort of community, which really should have happened a couple of issues back, but the actual plot here is some sort of insect parasite attacking one of the kids because… well, because he was passing, I guess? I suppose it might play into something later, but it’s not presented that way, and just feels like an arbitrary event to spin things out. I don’t really get the point.
Wolverine #17 annotations
WOLVERINE vol 8 #17
“Cold and Alone”
Writer: Saladin Ahmed
Artist: Martín Cóccolo
Colour artist: Jesus Aburtov
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER: Wolverine and Silver Sable in the woods.
WOLVERINE:
He’s still dutifully training the New Morlocks when he isn’t sleeping with Silver Sable. His narration calls this a “comfortable” relationship which he believes neither of them sees as a particularly deep one; he sees Sable as a fellow warrior who understands him.
SUPPORTING CAST:
Silver Sable. Still hanging around with the New Morlocks and sleeping with Wolverine.
Other mercenaries are aware on the rumour mill of what she’s up to.
The New Morlocks. The group have moved on from their last camp after the encounter with Department H and have found some abandoned houses. We see an awful lot more of them this time, most of whom look like fairly ordinary people. The vast majority of them look human. At least some are actual humans who just happen to have a mutant in their family. Logan claims that they’re there because “there’s nowhere left for mutants to run to”, which doesn’t really make sense in terms of the rest of the line; Exceptional X-Men and NYX both seemed to have mutants living fairly openly in major cities. Maybe he means specifically in Canada, this being the Marvel Universe and all.
Wolverine clearly still doesn’t much rate their skills. When asked to organise a manhunt for the missing Tushar, he basically assigns everyone else busy work and then goes off to find the kid himself.
Deepfake. She’s a teenager (which is apparently meant to be obvious from her appearance). She claims that her parents died in a car crash a year ago and her powers emerged when she learned the news; she ran away instead of going to “some creepy foster home for mutant teens”, whatever that means.
Her eyes are apparently sockets full of energy, and she has to be able to see her energy duplicates in order to keep them in existence; shoving a bag over her head is enough to disrupt them.
Like Chowdown in issue #15 she’s torn between appreciating Wolverine’s training and finding it all a bit much.
Ape. As in issue #15, he tells Deepfake that something bad happened to the original Morlocks but avoids going into any detail – it’s not entirely clear whether he’s trying to shield her from the details or just doesn’t want to talk about it.
Chowdown. He’s there among the New Morlocks.
Tushar. A very young mutant from Vancouver who apparently has the power to fix things just by touching them. He gets abducted by Coldbug and rescued.
VILLAINS:
Coldbug. First appearance. Wolverine initially calls him a mutant, but he then turns out to be an insect parasite inside a human-looking body – so it’s not clear whether the mutant is the insect, the host, or both. Coldbug himself is an insectoid who apparently possesses hosts and eventually consumes their bodies. He fires a venom that slows his victims down and saps their will. The toxin is apparently linked to him psychically, because its effect immediately wears off when Wolverine kills him.
He speaks in basic broken English. When Wolverine finds him, he claims to be “feeding” and “hungry”, though it’s not entirely clear what the feeding involves – is he going to take him as a new host?
On the face of it, Coldbug is simply a random passing monster – there doesn’t seem to be any wider reason for his attack here.
The Adamantine. Still fighting people who have been suggested as opponents by Romulus. In previous issues, Romulus sent it after retired boxers and UFC fighters. This time, he sends them after some eastern European mercenaries, who don’t do much better. All of this seems like Romulus is wasting the Adamantine’s time for some reason. That doesn’t seem to occur to the Adamantine (probably because it has no context to realise how low-rent Romulus’ targets are), but it does lose patience with him anyway, apparently concluding that he’s just useless at giving recommendations. They “decree Romulus’ time on this Earth at an end”, whatever that means, and claims that something called “the godling” will replace him.
When pressed to identify “the best of your kind”, one of the mercenaries suggests Silver Sable, so these subplots will evidently join up with the main story next time.
CONTINUITY REFERENCES:
- Ape says that the Morlocks left the tunnels because “Bad people came”, referencing the “Mutant Massacre” crossover from 1986.
- Department H “wrecked the last camp” in issues #15-16 (presumably in the sense of making it unsafe to stay around, rather than literally destroying the buildings).
X-Men #26 annotations
X-MEN vol 7 #26
“Danger Room, part 1”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Netho Diaz
Inker: Sean Parsons
Colourist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: The X-Men (Cyclops, Juggernaut, Beast and Magik) are ambushed on the ship.
THE X-MEN:
Cyclops. As usual, he gives entirely pragmatic rather than principled reasons for helping to find Sheriff Robins – she’s a useful ally and her replacement might not be. This isn’t particularly heroic reasoning but he may simply be tailoring his reasons to his audience (Quentin and Cain).
He says that he was a kid when he lived in Alaska, and “grew up” in Westchester – this glosses over his time in the Nebraska orphanage entirely.
His initial reaction to Psylocke prioritising Greycrow is to tell her that she’s needed on the mission, and then to more or less imply that Greycrow had it coming. He backs off, probably more because he realises that he’s being insensitive. However, he does then offer Xorn’s services.
Psylocke. She seems to have a broadly positive view of the locals (it doesn’t seem to occur to her that Glob might get into any trouble running his vegetable stall), but still has no particular interest in being called in to investigate the attack on the police station. She seems to see it as a pointless exercise in soldiers pretending to be detectives for show and rejects the description of the X-Men as super heroes. She claims to like Robbins, but understandably wants to focus on Greycrow when she learns that he’s in hospital.
Kid Omega. He grumbles about the X-Men paying any attention to “a cop”, even though she’s clearly been abducted.
Juggernaut. He’s a big guy who smashes things.
Magik. She uses “sympathetic magic” to track Paula Robbins using her blood, and quotes the old “as above, so below” line, presumably on the reading that things at different scales are essentially similar. For some reason she refers to George Frazer’s The Golden Bough, which was a work of comparative mythology, not a magical text.
Beast. He joins the field team, possibly replacing Psylocke.
SUPPORTING CAST:
John Greycrow. Psylocke’s boyfriend from her solo book (and Hellions before that) has appeared in this book before, and his bank robbing activities were specifically mentioned in issue #5. Adorably, he’s wearing a mask for the purposes of this robbery, even though he’s also in his extremely recognisable costume where he normally appears unmasked. Mind you, he’s hardly a public figure.
Greycrow tells us that the robbery was a trap (or at least that someone tipped off the authorities). When faced with a ton of police, his immediate reaction is to remove his mask and prepare to fight, anticipating death. Either he’s assuming that the cops will try to kill him, or he can’t accept capture – he doesn’t seem to regard surrender as an option. We don’t actually see who shoots first, but he does wind up in hospital.
Amy. Greycrow repeatedly tries to contact an unseen “Amy” to get him away. Based on issue #5, this would be the teleporter Amelia Voght. Something seems to have happened to her.
Glob Herman. He’s setting up a vegetable stand to sell fruit and vegetables to the locals. He’d rather just give the produce away, but Cyclops has persuaded him that people will trust him more if there’s at least a token price. Most of the locals seem to like him just fine, but he apparently gets shot at the end of the issue.
Paula Robbins. She’s been selected as bait to lure the X-Men into a trap, presumably on the view that she’s the closest thing to an outside supporting character that they have.
Deputy Smith. I don’t think we’ve seen this guy before, but Scott seems familiar with him. He’s entirely out of his depth dealing with the attack on the police station, and responds by calling in the X-Men rather than the authorities (either that, or he’s leading the X-Men into a trap). He regards the X-Men as superheroes who saved the town twice.
Rose Ellen Cobb. She seems to have been more or less deradicalised following the discovery that she had a mutant daughter, and is very apologetic to Glob about having believed “all those podcasts”. Understandably, she’s still quite keen to know what happened to the missing daughter, Robin. Glob gives a slightly evasive answer, confirming that the X-Men know that she’s with 3K (which Rose already knows) but dancing around the other reasons why the X-Men are trying to find 3K. Presumably Glob has in mind the fact that the Chairman has turned out to be the original Beast, and that the X-Men’s Beast shared that information with the team after the previous issue.
Piper Cobb. She likes Glob’s strawberries and seems quite happy.
VILLAINS:
Frank Bohannan. He wears his trenchcoat even in his office, and has a mug with the American flag on it. He’s hired Beyond to deal with the X-Men, but regards them as “psychopaths” and cynics who lack his belief in God and country.
Maxine Danger. She was the head of the Beyond Corporation’s New York branch in Amazing Spider-Man and responsible for turning Ben Reilly into a corporate Spider-Man. Originally an absurdist outfit from NextWave, at this point Beyond have basically become mercenaries with assorted wacky technology. She was last seen in Amazing Spider-Man: Blood Hunt, where she certainly wasn’t in jail – so when Bohannan says that he “approved your release requests”, he presumably means that Beyond asked for some people to be released from jail to help.
REFERENCES:
- Deputy Smith refers to “the Iron Night” (the first Sentinel attack on Merle that we saw in flashback in issue #7) and “the Second Iron Night” (presumably Magneto’s Sentinel fighting the attacking monster in issues #14-17).
- Glob is singing “The Move” by the Beastie Boys.
House to Astonish Episode 217
Paul and I have a lot of news for you this time round, as we remember Tatjana Wood, and talk 3 Worlds 3 Moons, Hulk War, Terminal, M.A.S.K., Skate Ali, Odin, Avengers/JLA, Jays of Future Past and Concrete: Stars Over Sand. We’ve also got reviews of The Peril of the Brutal Dark: An Ezra Cain Mystery and The Punisher, and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe appears subject to work commitments. All this plus the octopus that predicts the football results, donkey cigars and one unit of entertainment.
The episode is here, or available through the player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments, on Bluesky, or via email.
(Also, I know the Vertigo book I was thinking of was End of Life rather than The Living End, it was late and I was tired)
Daredevil Villains #73: Project Reptile
DAREDEVIL #236 (November 1986)
“American Dreamer”
Writer: Ann Nocenti
Penciller, co-inker: Barry Windsor-Smith
Co-inker: Bob Wiacek
Colourist: Max Scheele
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Editor: Ralph Macchio
“Born Again” completely upended the series. By the end, Matt has lost his licence to practice law and started a new life in Hell’s Kitchen as a diner chef, happily reunited with Karen Page for a fresh start. Oh, and the star name creators from “Born Again” have left. So how do you follow that?
Well, this is Daredevil, so the short-term answer is “with fill-in stories”. The first two don’t concern us. Issue #234, by the improbable creative team of Mark Gruenwald, Steve Ditko and Klaus Janson, features Madcap (from Captain America) and the Rose (from Amazing Spider-Man). Issue #235 is a Mr Hyde story by Danny Fingeroth, Steve Ditko and Danny Bulandi. Both acknowledge the new status quo, but don’t really attempt to do anything with it.
That brings us to issue #236, by the book’s new regular writer Ann Nocenti and guest artist Barry Windsor-Smith. Nocenti was the editor of Uncanny X-Men and New Mutants at this point, and would remain so for another couple of years. As well as various fill-ins and anthology contributions, she’d written the final four issues of Spider-Woman, the Dazzler/Beast miniseries Beauty and the Beast and one of her signature works, the Longshot miniseries. Daredevil was her first substantial run on an ongoing title, and turned out to be by far her longest run on any book.
Charts – 27 February 2026
It’s a quiet week for new entries, but we do at least have some songs making a march towards the top of the chart.
1. Sam Fender & Oliva Dean – “Rein Me In”
Second week and somehow, after all this time, it’s actually continuing to grow. Once again, if it wasn’t for the downweighting rule, the rightful number 1 would be Olivia Dean’s “Man I Need’ (by a wide margin). And once again, the official number 2 is another Olivia Dean single, “So Easy (To Fall In Love)”.
The top end of the chart actually has quite a bit of activity this week, but not in terms of new entries.
23. Twenty One Pilots – “Drag Path”
This is a new mix of a track that was previously released as an exclusive for purchasers of a digital album. It seems to be a different mix in an attempt to square the demand for wider release with a desire to honour the original promotion of the track as exclusive. Reportedly the original version is better.
The X-Axis – 25 February 2026
INGLORIOUS X-FORCE #2. (Annotations here.) Okay, so this is going pretty well so far. Cable’s got an ulterior motive for putting the team together, but it’s mainly just to figure out which team member needs to be saved from themselves. Boom-Boom not being able to get her head round the fact that the villains are younger than her these days is a cute angle. And Ms Marvel seems to be here to provide a contrast with everyone else – the point is for her to drag the team in her direction, not the other way round. Tim Seeley’s reference point is the original X-Force, after all, and they weren’t especially grimdark at all – that only became the norm in the Kyle/Yost era where nobody seemed able to find a lightswitch. The original X-Force was pretty much technicolour. This is a bit more restrained, but it’s still far from bleak. Hellverine is as grim as it gets, and this issue seems to exist mainly to establish early that he’s not going to be the killer – though I’m not entirely sold on bringing in the Blasphemy Cult as doomsday cult villains, which does drag us a bit in the downbeat direction. Still, having them call up old folklore monsters to fight for them is kind of fun, and Michael Sta. Maria gives them the right balance of backwoods extremists and actual magicians. Pretty solid.
SPIDER-MAN & WOLVERINE #10. By Marc Guggenheim, Gerardo Sandoval, Victor Nava, Brian Reber & Travis Lanham. Final issue. I honestly don’t know what to make of the farewell message from Marc Guggenheim, which says that “in these ten issues, we have something very rare for comics these days: a consistent creative team”. Uh, Kaare Andrews drew six issues and Gerardo Sandoval drew four, and they don’t even look much alike. In fact, Sandoval wound up drawing the last two issues. I guess you can make the case that at least they consistently had the same fill-in artist, but come on now.
Inglorious X-Force #2 annotations
INGLORIOUS X-FORCE #2
“Hunter of Lost Souls”
Writer: Tim Seeley
Artist: Michael Sta. Maria
Colour artist: Romulo Fajardo Jr
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER: X-Force (minus Ms Marvel) square off against… well, a thing in shadow with claws and stuff.
X-FORCE:
Cable. As explained last issue, he’s convinced that one of Archangel, Hellverine or Boom-Boom killed Kamala in last issue’s future timeline (though quite why he’s so convinced still isn’t clear). He’s certain that Kamala is the “last best hope for mutantkind” and is hoping to find a solution that doesn’t involve killing any of them. He seems to be hoping to find out not just who kills Kamala but why, and to be trying to influence the team to steer all three of them away from killing her.
He claims that Cyclops and Rogue don’t know about the Blasphemy Cartel’s anti-mutant weapon and that even if they did, they’d dither instead of doing anything about it. That seems a questionable claim for Cyclops in particular, but that’s what Cable claims. However, Cable also seems to know that if he frees Anielle from the Cartel (see below) then she’ll answer a question for him as a favour.
