DAREDEVIL #12-13 (January & February 1966)
“Sightless, in a Savage Land” / “The Secret of Ka-Zar’s Origin!”
Writer, editor: Stan Lee
Layout penciller: Jack Kirby 
Finishing penciller, inker: John Romita
Letterer: Sam Rosen
Colourist: not credited

DAREDEVIL #14 (March 1966)
“If This Be Justice…!”
Writer, editor: Stan Lee
Penciller: John Romita
Inker: “Frankie Ray” (Frank Giacoia)
Letterer: Artie Simek
Colourist: not credited

However questionably, Stan Lee apparently felt that Wally Wood’s run on Daredevil had gone awry. Wood’s replacement was John Romita Sr, doing his first work for Marvel. This time, Lee took no chances, with Jack Kirby doing the layouts for Romita’s first two issues before Romita (who says that he only wanted the inking work at first) took over as penciller. He didn’t stick around on Daredevil for long, but that’s because he was swiftly promoted to Amazing Spider-Man.

As for the story direction, Lee seems to have been toying with drastic action. The previous arc ends with a tacked-on epilogue in which Matt and Foggy suddenly realise that they’ve been so preoccupied with the plot that they haven’t been doing any legal work and they’ve run out of money. They need to downsize. So Matt announces that he’s leaving, and the whole thing plays like it’s setting up a new status quo.

It isn’t. Instead, Daredevil spends three issues exploring the back story of Ka-Zar, before Matt simply returns to the office, with no mention of why he left in the first place. It’s been three months, the kids will have forgotten.

(more…)

DAREDEVIL #10 (October 1965)
“While the City Sleeps, part 1: The Organization”
Writer, finishing penciller, inker: Wally Wood
Layout penciller: Bob Powell
Letterer: Artie Simek
Editor: Stan Lee

DAREDEVIL #11 (December 1965)
“A Time to Unmask!”
Writer, editor: Stan Lee
Penciller: Bobby Powell
Inker: Wally Wood
Letterer: Sam Rosen

Even the most casual glance at those credits might suggest a troubled production, and that’s exactly what this is. According to Brian Cronin’s “Comic Book Legends Revealed”, it goes something like this: Wally Wood didn’t care for the Marvel method and felt that he was writing the book without being paid for it. So he asked to write a story and Stan Lee agreed. But when Wood’s story came in, Lee hated it.

Accounts vary as to how heavily Lee edited issue #10. Wood claims that relatively little was changed. Lee, in a spectacularly ungracious bitching session on the letters page of issue #12, said that “about the only thing left that Wally himself had written was his name”. The surviving original art suggests the truth is somewhere in the middle and that the published story is basically what Wood wrote. Either way, Lee refused to let Wood finish the story, wrote the concluding half himself, and fired Wood after reducing him to working as inker on part 2.

(more…)

DAREDEVIL #9 (August 1965)
“That He May See!”
Writer, editor: Stan Lee
Layout penciller: Wally Wood
Finisher: Bobby Powell
Letterer: Sam Rosen
Colourist: Not credited

You can tell that a 1960s Stan Lee character is a real dud when they never appear again. These are the early, foundational issues of long-running books, and later creative teams frequently mine them for ideas. A certain generation of creators idolised the Silver Age and loved to draw on its forgotten corners. So when even they don’t touch a character, well, there’s probably a reason.

All the Daredevil villains we’ve met until now have returned in later stories – except for the Fixer, but he’s a special case, because he dies in Daredevil’s origin story. Even the Matador gets a few further appearances. But no one has gone back to Klaus Kruger.

Duke Klaus Kruger is the “hereditary ruler of the tiny principality of Lichtenbad”. He’s visiting New York for undisclosed reasons, which somehow is front page news. By a remarkable coincidence, Klaus knew Matt and Foggy at law school as a foreign exchange student – the art for this flashback shows him in a lab coat with test tubes, which suggests someone wasn’t quite thinking this through. By a further remarkable coincidence, the world’s top eye surgeon, Dr Van Eyck, has recently emigrated to Lichtenbad. So Karen Page phones up the Duke, which apparently is a thing you can just do, and asks if he can help Matt get his sight back.

(more…)

Daredevil #7 doesn’t have a villain – it’s a fight with Namor the Sub-Mariner, who was just about to launch his own feature in Tales to Astonish. So we move on to…

DAREDEVIL #8 (June 1965)
“The Stiltman Cometh”
Writer, editor: Stan Lee
Artist: Wally Wood
Letterer: Sam Rosen
Colourist: Not credited

In the first instalment of this series, I asked whether people could name ten Daredevil villains. Well, here’s one that plenty of people remembered: Stilt-Man. (In fact, in this issue he’s Stilt Man or Stiltman. He won’t get the hyphen until later. But I’ll go with the more familiar version of the name here.)

Everyone remembers Stilt-Man, even if they don’t remember a single one of his stories. Once seen, he’s not easy to forget. He is iconically lame. Silver Age Marvel was fairly light on completely ridiculous villains, and when Marvel did stray into this territory, they often leaned into it. But in his debut, Stilt-Man is played mostly straight. He’s certainly presented as a real threat.

So thing that really makes him stick in the mind is the “what were they thinking” factor. Sure, it’s a struggle to keep thinking of new gimmicks for villains. But… stilts? Even if you’re picking words at random from the dictionary… stilts? Massive, clearly impractical, skyscraper-sized stilts? There’s something adorably mundane about the whole concept of a stilt-themed supervillain, no matter how extraordinary those stilts may be. Did someone have a traumatic childhood experience with a stilt? Even the pros look tentative and awkward moving on stilts. Their height doesn’t translate into an intimidation factor. Nobody has ever looked at a stilt-walker and thought, I bet they’d be dangerous in a fight.

(more…)

DAREDEVIL #6 (February 1965)
“Trapped By … the Fellowship of Fear”
Writer, editor: Stan Lee
Artist: Wally Wood
Letterer: Sam Rosen
Colourist: uncredited

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out the thinking behind this one. Daredevil is the Man Without Fear. It says so on the cover. So clearly his natural enemy is someone who inspires fear. Hence, Mister Fear. Job done. Pub?

Even without Daredevil’s gimmick to play off, fear is a fine motif for a villain. After all, over at DC, it’s  the Scarecrow’s whole thing. But that’s hindsight. At this point, the Scarecrow is a villain who appeared in two stories during World War II and was never seen again. He won’t be revived for another couple of years. The fear motif is open for use. So once again, Daredevil gets in first with a version of an idea that another character will get right in a few years time.

But Mr Fear doesn’t stick around. The identity doesn’t get revived for years, and even then, it’s someone else under the mask. So what went wrong?

We might start by asking whether Daredevil’s “Man Without Fear” tagline is anything more than a tagline. Is the idea really central to the character? Is Daredevil noticeably more fearless than any other superhero? Well, not really. His central gimmick is his blindness and the way he works around that with his other senses. There are moments in the early issues which really play down how much he’s getting from his radar sense and suggest that he’s taking incredible risks on the information available to him, to be sure. There’s one in this issue, where he jumps from a rooftop to attack some bad guys and, if you take the dialogue literally, he’s just hoping that there’s going to be a lamppost to grab hold of.

(more…)

DAREDEVIL #5 (December 1964)
“The Mysterious Masked Matador”
Writer, editor: Stan Lee
Artist: Wally Wood
Letterer: Sam Rosen (uncredited)
Colourist: not credited 

While the previous issue featured a goofy Silver Age villain who became increasingly grim in retrospect, there are no such concerns here. In Wally Wood’s first issue, we have the Matador, who is as Silver Age as it gets. He is an evil matador who commits crimes in the style of a matador while dressed as a matador. He is absolutely committed to the theme. He is wonderful. He really should be fighting Adam West, and isn’t that what you come to the Silver Age for?

Like any new villain, the Matador gets quite the build-up. He has been on a “one-man crime wave”. He is, we are assured, “the greatest threat to law and order in years”. Now, you may be wondering how exactly you commit crimes in the style of a matador. Does it just mean wearing a fancy costume and waggling a sword around? No, no it does not. In his first scene, the Matador robs an armoured truck by making it crash with his bullfighting skills. He stands in the middle of the road and confuses the driver by waving a cape around. And he is very pleased with himself. “What delicacy! What artistry! What magnificent daring!”

This issue isn’t just about the matador gimmickry, though. There’s an actual theme to this story. Eventually we get the Matador’s origin: he’s Spain’s most famous and controversial bullfighter, “Manuel Eloganto”. Ah, the sixties. Audiences turned on Manuel over his cruelty towards the bulls – we’re not told exactly what this involved, but since bullfighting already involves killing the bulls, I suppose any more detailed explanation would be a horrible tone clash. Manuel was so distracted by the booing that he got gored. Now that he’s better, he wants “revenge on all mankind”, and to do that, he’s going to manipulate the public into loving him. That’s not a means to an end, mind you. It’s the entire plot. He just wants to make the suckers love him.

(more…)

DAREDEVIL #4 (October 1964)
“Killgrave, the Unbelievable Purple Man!”
Writer, editor: Stan Lee
Penciller: Joe Orlando
Inker: Vince Colletta
Letterer: Sam Rosen
Colourist: not credited

“You’re about to meet possibly the most off-beat, far-out, ding-dong, rootin’-tootin’ crackerjack super-villain you just ever did see!”

Such was Stan Lee’s vision of the Purple Man, as set out on the splash page of his debut. Things have changed. Today, as the nemesis of Jessica Jones, the Purple Man is the most high profile character from Daredevil‘s early issues. But he’s also now a character who needs a trigger warning. Look, there it was. This is the debut of a character who goes on to be a horrific abuser – in the TV version, an unambiguous rapist. What the hell happened?

On his own account, Zebediah Killgrave was a “spy for a foreign power” who got caught sneaking into an army ordnance depot. He got drenched in an experimental nerve gas which turned him purple and gave him the power to make people obey him. Being a villain already, he decides to use this power for world domination. It’s never entirely clear how he thinks that’s going to work, given that his power only works at close range. But that’s the goal.

(more…)

DAREDEVIL #3 (August 1964)
“Daredevil Battles the Owl, Ominous Overlord of Crime!”
Writer, editor: Stan Lee
Penciller: Joe Orlando
Inker: Vince Colletta
Letterer: Sam Rosen
Colourist: uncredited

It’s Daredevil’s first supervillain of his very own… for a fairly undemanding definition of “super”. And he gets a huge build-up, which suggests Stan Lee had hopes for him as a recurring villain.

The Owl is a Wall Street financier. The narrator tells us that he’s “merciless” and has “no friends … no loved ones… nothing to connect him with the human race save the fact of his birth!” What this means in practice is that he’s massively rich and powerful, everyone is afraid of him, and everyone already suspects him of corruption. For some reason, he’s actually changed his name to “the Owl”. Orlando draws him as a smug, sinister fat guy in an old fashioned suit (even for the time).

This could have been a workable set-up for the Owl – albeit a bit anti-capitalist for Stan Lee. He’s a rich criminal operating in plain sight and mocking the fact that nobody can prove anything against him. In fact, we know that’s a workable set-up, because it’s the Kingpin. But the Kingpin won’t debut until 1967. The Owl isn’t fighting for space with him just yet.

Unfortunately for the Owl, the first time around, Stan Lee doesn’t stick with the set-up. He blows it up almost immediately. The Owl is arrested for fraud. As a show of contempt, he picks a lawyer at random from the phone book, which turns out to be Nelson & Murdock, because of course it does. Matt takes the case – partly because he wants to learn more about the Owl, but partly because he actually believes that everyone is entitled to representation – and gets the Owl released overnight. According to Matt, the Owl “is charged with sheer animal power” and “almost limitless energy, all of it directed into evil channels”, which is an odd mix with the bloated fat cat that Orlando draws. But you can kind of see it, in a force of personality way.

(more…)

DAREDEVIL #2 (June 1964)
“The Evil Menace of Electro”
Writer, editor: Stan Lee
Artist: Joe Orlando
Inker: Vince Colletta
Letterer: Sam Rosen
Colourist: uncredited

If you’re going to play Daredevil as a swashbuckling solo superhero who swings through the streets of Marvel’s New York, there’s an elephant in the room: Spider-Man already exists. So what makes this new guy stand out? One solution would be to give Daredevil his very own arch enemy. Instead, here’s Electro.

Now, this is only the second Electro story. He debuted in Amazing Spider-Man #9 four months earlier. He hasn’t been slotted as a C-lister yet. But even allowing for all of that, Daredevil’s not even met a supervillain of his own yet, and already he’s dealing with Spider-Man’s hand-me-downs. How was that supposed to help him?

It’s not like Electro is an especially strong concept. His back story and powers have no particular synergy with Daredevil. Max Dillon is a lineman who gets electric powers when he’s struck by lightning, and decides to become a criminal. That’s it. That’s the character. Electro stands and falls on the strength of his electricity gimmick, and there are certainly worse gimmicks. It’s a strong enough visual to have kept him around to the present day. But he’s still a gimmick villain. Going to him as early as issue #2 is not a good sign.

(more…)

So, I thought we’d do something different.

Quick: Name ten Daredevil villains. Come on, the book’s been a mainstay of Marvel’s line since 1964, it can’t be that hard. There’s the Kingpin, the Hand, Bullseye, um, Typhoid… um… does Elektra count…? Admittedly, this is not really my area. But I googled a few lists of top Daredevil villains and almost all of them resorted to counting the Punisher. One of them was desperate enough to include Mysterio.

So I thought I’d read some Daredevil and find out what the hell he’s been doing all these years when he wasn’t fighting the Hand or the Kingpin. I’ve barely read any pre-Nocenti Daredevil before and I have pretty much no idea what happens in the book prior to Frank Miller, other than that there’s a wacky bit where he pretends to be his own twin brother. The general consensus seems to be that early Daredevil is completely skippable. Even at the time, Marvel don’t seem to have thought much of his commercial appeal – between issue #10 in 1965, and issue #100 in 1973, he made less than ten guest appearances in other books, even counting cameos.

And yet he must have been doing something right, because he hung in there when the likes of Dr Strange couldn’t. So I’m going to read through Daredevil and cover the issues that add new villains to his list. Some of these will be pretty short, and it’s going to be an irregular series (in other words, you’ll be getting these in quiet weeks).

DAREDEVIL #1 (April 1964)
“The Origin of Daredevil”
Writer, editor: Stan Lee
Artist: Bill Everett
Letterer: Sam Rosen
Colourist: not credited

This is the one early Daredevil issue that everyone knows, because it’s mostly an extended flashback setting out his origin story. The villain of that story is the Fixer, who is emphatically not going to be Daredevil’s arch enemy.

The original version goes like this. Little Matt Murdock wants to follow in the footsteps of his boxer father Battlin’ Jack. But Jack insists that Matt ignore sports and manly pursuits in favour of study, so that he can break out of poverty and “amount to something” – a promise that Jack made to Matt’s late mother. All the other kids think Matt’s a loser and nickname him Daredevil, which is thoughtful of them. But Matt trains in secret, while also getting straight As. Desperate to pay for Matt to go to college, Jack agrees to be managed by the disreputable Fixer. Meanwhile, Matt randomly loses his sight and gains super powers when he shoves a blind man out of the way of a runaway radioactive waste truck. Matt still goes to college, while Jack goes on an implausible middle-aged winning streak under the Fixer’s management. The Fixer tells Jack to take a dive in the first round of a key fight, but Jack refuses to disappoint his watching son, and wins by knockout. The Fixer has Jack shot dead in retaliation.

(more…)