Daredevil Villains #1: The Fixer
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.
Matt comes up with the Daredevil identity as a hair-splittingly legalistic way to honour his promise that Matt Murdock will be a thinker rather than a fighter – it’s not Matt who’s fighting, you see, it’s Daredevil. Uh-huh. In his first outing, Daredevil tracks down the Fixer, who makes a break for it, but then dies of a heart attack when cornered. And that’s the end of the Fixer. He never gets brought back.
Nor should he, because he’s not that kind of character. The Fixer is to Daredevil what the burglar is to Spider-Man and Joe Chill is to Batman. It’s the dead dad that matters, not the specific guy who killed him. (Or, in the Fixer’s case, had him killed – the actual killer is a henchman called Slade, but he never shows up again either.) These characters actively benefit from being generic, because they’re supposed to motivate a wider agenda for the hero. The Fixer is there to be an icon of criminality in general, and corruption in particular, which plays into both sides of Daredevil’s dual identity as lawyer and vigilante.
I’m not normally going to read very far ahead for these posts, but for obvious reasons Daredevil #1 has been retold numerous times. Unusually, it tends to be done in ways that are either out of continuity or at least dubiously canonical. The 1993 miniseries Daredevil: The Man Without Fear by Frank Miller and John Romita Jr is comprehensively non-canon (even though some elements of it have been imported into continuity) because it has Jack dying, and Matt defeating the Fixer, all before Matt goes to university and becomes Daredevil. It does that because it’s not especially interested in the Fixer, and wants that bit of the story out of the way as soon as possible. It’s a Frank Miller story and it wants to talk about Stick.
2001’s Daredevil: Yellow, by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale, is a much closer retelling of the first few issues of Daredevil, but with quite a bit of artistic licence. So it still deviates enough to make it doubtfully canonical. As far as the origin story is concerned, Yellow‘s main addition is a sequence where Matt tries to take down the Fixer through legal channels first, but the Fixer buys off the judge. I think that’s an improvement – it gives Matt a stronger motivation to break his promise to his father.
Daredevil: Battlin’ Jack Murdock, by Carmine Di Giandomenico and Zeb Wells (both have co-writing credits), is a 2007 miniseries which retells the story from Jack’s point of view, although for obvious reasons it ends with when he dies. It has a couple of minor canon problems too – it seems to think that Matt was conceived out of wedlock, and that his mother only returned from the nuns to leave the baby with Jack, while other stories show baby Matt with both parents – but it’s relatively faithful to the original plot beats. By this point other flashbacks had re-cast Jack as an alcoholic loser, rather than the blue collar saint that Stan Lee intended, and that’s very much the approach that BJM takes.
It’s a clever interpretation, though, which sees Jack as a badly flawed and overprotective father, filled with self-loathing because he knows he isn’t up to the job, and sporadically abusive because he’s drinking so much. In this reading, it’s Jack’s need to protect his poor defenceless son that drives him into underworld dealings. A masked Matt saves Jack from underworld thugs shortly before the fight. During the fight, Jack figures out that it was Matt, and realises that Matt can look after himself. That frees Jack to defy the Fixer in full knowledge of what’s going to happen to him, and he dies with honour on his own terms. This isn’t what any of the narration or thought balloons in Daredevil #1 say, but it’s a better version.
None of these stories, though, see the Fixer as anything more than a generic crime boss for Jack to bounce off. The striking thing about Daredevil #1, with hindsight, is that it’s setting the series up as a street level crime book. That’s absolutely not the comic that Stan Lee is going to deliver. Yet ironically it’s a lot closer to the version of Daredevil that will eventually succeed in the 1980s. Stan Lee had the right idea to start with, but in the end he went for a more conventional superhero book instead. We’ll see in future instalments how that worked out for him.
Oh, nice ! I love Silver Age Daredevil for how kooky it is, and treasure my Essentials.
(The very pretty Colan B&W artwork starting with #20 doesn’t hurt, either… and his predecessors include Wally Wood & John Romita Sr !)
Thanks to that, I can name a few more Daredevil villains if I put some thought into it, although it definitely says something that issue #2’s baddie is a straight Spider-Man import – in a story that also involves the FF.
“Yet ironically it’s a lot closer to the version of Daredevil that will eventually succeed in the 1980s.”
A lot of Gene Colan’s work along the way looks more noir than the stories it’s telling, as well.
The last story Wally Wood did for the book — he got fed up with Stan Lee and quit halfway through — moves slightly back in the direction of street-level crime, but that’s about it for that mood on the comic until the late 1970s.
But yes, Daredevil’s had a hell of a time getting a decent rogues’ gallery, opr at least one that sticks around after a writer leaves.
A few writers have tried to address this: Ann Nocenti probably had the most success; Mark Waid got some underused old villains to work in his run and set up some new ones; and there’re some clear efforts to build a roster of villains on the parts of Steve Gerber, Marv Wolfman, Denny O’Neil, and Charles Soule.
This looks like it’ll be a fun, interesting occasional series.
The Mysterio thing is interesting because while he’s not a DD villain in any meaningful way, “Guardian Devil” is almost certainly the DD story (and quite possibly the Mysterio story) the most people have read.
Looking forward to reading the rest of this series!
Yeah, most Silver Age DD is ignorable, and his initial rogues gallery is a joke (Stilt-Man. Leap Frog. Matador.). But #7 is a classic. The simple summary is DD battles the Sub-Mariner. And of course he loses. Badly. But it’s how he loses that’s the point.
I can’t believe you left off the Owl when listing Daredevil villains- he’s Matt’s fourth foe after Kingpin, Bullseye and Typhoid Mary.
Matt isn’t alone in lacking a good rogues gallery- Iron Man and the Hulk also come to mind. Aside from Mandarin and Madame Masque, none of Iron Man’s villains have really caught on. (Does the Living Laser count as an Iron Man villain?) Many of Tony’s villains get killed off and replaced- Blizzard, Whiplash, Melter. How many Crimson Dynamos have there been? And the two best “villains” in Tony’s early issues- Black Widow and Hawkeye- quickly became heroes.
Similarly, the only two Hulk villains that have really caught on are the Leader and the Abomination. Boomerang got moved to being a Spider-Man villain because the writers realized that trick boomerangs, boot jets and Improbable Aiming Skills make Fred a serious threat to Spider-Man but not much of one to the Hulk. Similarly, Constrictor and Moonstone were introduced in the Hulk but became other heroes’ rogues.
And Dr.Strrange struggles to find good villains beside the core four of Dormrammu, Mordo, Nightmare and Umar.
I got to 13 villains, but I included Nekra, who is not primarily a DD opponent, and the Matador, who I only know from the Wally Wood cover.
I think Daredevil lasted, pre-Miller, because of the quality of its artists. As was pointed out above, you go from Everett (with some inks and backgrounds in issue 1 by Steve Ditko) to Wood to Romita to Colan. The series takes a dip in quality post-Colan. After Steve Gerber leaves, it also lacks direction writing-wise. Sales went down until the McKenzie/Miller team righted the ship, then Miller’s solo run attracted new/lapsed readers.
I can name a bunch, but I’m a mark for B and C list Silver/Bronze Age villains and like Al, love the Handbook (and Who’s Who).
I will, as always, trumpet the Kesel/Nord on the book, esp for some clever uses of the classic villains.
@Michael: Other than X-Men, the Hulk is my favorite super-hero property, and I’m struggling to name Hulk villains that aren’t big monsters, the military, or imported from another series (Rhino, Absorbing Man, Sandman). The character works best in small doses, or being put in situations that upend the status quo.
I think the worst rogues gallery belongs to Superman. You have Lex Luthor, Brainiac, Parasite, Bizarro (not really a villain), Zod and other surviving Kryptonians, Doomsday (who you can’t use too often), the annoying Mr. Mxyzptlx, Livewire, Silver Banshee, the lame Prankster and Toyman, and a ton of one-off bad guys and also-rans who weren’t interesting enough to warrant a second or third appearance. Superman has had multiple titles since the ‘40s, and has about as many usable, recurring villains as Daredevil.
Apocalypse counts as a Daredevil villain, right? He was originally supposed to be the Owl, that seems close enough. 😉
Oh, this is going to be fun! Daredevil has really never made any impact on me over the years, it’ll be nice to learn some new things… 🙂
Tagak, the Leopard Lord had so much lost potential.
@Mike Loughlin- Superman doesn’t have anywhere close to the worst rogues gallery at DC. First there’s Wonder Woman- you have Ares, Circe, Cheetah, Dr. Psycho and Giganta. And that’s pretty much it. (It took DC THREE Cheetahs to make the character work.) Then, there’s Shazam. He’s got Sivana, Mr.Mind, Black Adam and Captain Nazi. And that’s pretty much it. One of the problems with the Shazam 2 movie is that once they decided not to use Mr. Mind as the villain and gave Black Adam his own separate movie, they didn’t have any good villains to use. (I guess that they didn’t want to use Captain Nazi because of the current political climate.) So we had Shazam facing off against new villains and Black Adam facing off against Sabbac. Some of the other DC heroes have even worse rogues galleries. Green Lantern has basically Sinestro. And who else? Aquaman has Black Manta and Ocean Master. And who else?
Daredevil #1 is the best first issue Stan Lee ever wrote. For some reason he decided to take a hard left turn to goofy town with the rest of his time on the book.
Purple Man. Purple Man turned out better than expectedl
Green Lantern has some interesting villains from the early days…Hector Hammond, Black Hand, Star Sapphire, etc.
I don’t think every character needs a strong rogue’s gallery. A character like Spider-Man or Batman needs a strong recurring cast of supervillains (I’d include DD in this catergory). A character like the Hulk or Green Lantern, I’d say their recurring villains are far less important. The Hulk comic works best when its focus is on being a horror-adjacent series where he is fighting against other monsters or weird menaces. The Hulk never worked as well as a standard superhero comic. Green Lantern is an intergalactic cop charged with protecting an entire sector of the galaxy. Green Lantern coming across different planets with new threats is what I find most interesting in GL comics.
If a character is localized to a certain area with the remit that they are protecting the innocent from criminals in their city, it’s easier to create an isolated world where the villains become as important part of that world as the protagonist and his supporting cast.
It is difficult to conceive good villains that are also recurring.
DD has quite a few recurring villains, but a surprisingly high fraction of them are primarily or originally someone else’s villain.
Out of those who started out as primarily DD foes, there are of course Purple Man and the Owl. Later Jester, Mr. Fear (the first one is now Machinesmith, but we had others since), Bullseye, Death-Stalker. We can probably include Stilt-Man and Gladiator (Melvin Potter)… and then things get awkward indeed: Leap Frog, Man-Bull, Matador, Silver Samurai.
Daredevil is remarkable for how frequently his established foes graduate to other heroes, as well as how often he lends foes from other heroes, going back to Electro in #2. Also Vulture, Beetle, Kingpin of course, and I will definitely count Punisher here as well. Of particular note are Kobra and Mr. Hyde, who started fighting Thor but fit DD better. IIRC the Enforcers too. Oh, and Silvermane once.
Going the other direction we have quite the odd list: Purple Man, Owl, Gladiator, even Silver Samurai and Lady Deathstryke. Also the Masked Marauder.
Before Frank Miller Daredevil was very much an “also” character, and sometimes other books faced little resistance from editorial in borrowing his foes (and other characters such as Blake Tower) for a while.
It helps/hurts that the character lends itself so well to foes that are very much street level and have little reason to reappear once they are defeated.
As far as the Daredevil comic, I agree it became one of the weakest ongoing Marvel Silver Age comics (and very quickly). The owner of the comic store I frequent disagreed, saying the X-Men must have been the worst as it was cancelled, unlike DD. With the post-Jack Kirby issues of X-Men, he does have a fair point.
However, much like Spider-Man, Daredevil remained one of the few grounded superhero comics at Marvel. Spider-Man didn’t feature aliens or other dimensions, unlike the other Silver Age books. DD is the only other Marvel comic which fits that mould: it was about a guy living in a city who gains powers and fights supervillains. He doesn’t travel into outer space or other dimensions, meeting otherworldly beings. There was only one issue of DD where he did come across aliens (with a plan to make every human blind), until the 1970s.
Under Gerry Conway, DD had some of the craziest stories (also Tagak). I did love how insane the DD comic became at that point.
@Luis- Machinesmith was the second Mr. Fear.
Owl who would be a big deal if apocalypse hadn’t stolen his x-factor role.
Stilt man
Gladiator
Bullet
Bushwacker
Mr fear
Purple man
Frogman
Matador
Man bull
Catholic guilt his real nemesis
Isn’t Bullseye a major DD villain? I don’t see him listed here. I also don’t know Bullseye or DD very well, so happy to be wrong.
And Superman has a fantastic rogues gallery. Of that I’m 100% certain.
Oops – and of course he’s listed in the original post. My bad.
I’m still right about Superman, though.
Absolutely agree with Thom H about Superman. Evem Mike Loughlin, in his claim his rogues’ gallery is worse than DD’s, manages to list eleven. And that’s without remembering Metallo, or Intergang. (I’m not sure I buy the idea that Superman should have a better rogues’ gallery because he’s been around for longer, because with the exception of Batman, most characters who’ve been around since then didn’t develop an even slightly decent cast of recurring villains until the Silver Age. If you look at, say, Captain America villains, even most of the ones he fought in the war were created retroactively after he was revived, Skull excepted.)
@Michael: For Wondy, I’d add Veronica Cale (yes, she’s “what if modern Luthor, but a girl?”, but still), Silver Swan, and maybe Dr Cyber (whoever either of them are this week). For Captain Shazam, I’d add Ibac and Sabbac (although I guess they’ve been transplanted to Black Adam villains these days), and I guess the Seven Deadly Enemies of Man?
The thing about the Owl is that he probably would have been a big deal if he’d stayed in Apocalypse’s role … but that wouldn’t have helped the list of classic Daredevil villains; he’d be the guy who only became a success when he hitched himself to the mutant books instead.
Michael said: Then, there’s Shazam. He’s got Sivana, Mr.Mind, Black Adam and Captain Nazi. And that’s pretty much it. One of the problems with the Shazam 2 movie is that once they decided not to use Mr. Mind as the villain and gave Black Adam his own separate movie, they didn’t have any good villains to use.
Shazam has a pretty big rogues’ gallery if you go back far enough. He had plenty of other recurring or serialized villains, like King Kull the Beastman, Mister Atom, Oggar the Immortal, and IBAC. E. Nelson Bridwell even put all the villains together for his own late 1970s version of the Monster Society serial.
And the Marvel Family bring in even more villains, like Sabbac (who does get some use) and the Weeper. And Captain Nazi was originally Captain Marvel, Jr.’s villain much more than the main Captain Marvel/Shazam’s. It’s easy to forget the Shazam/Marvel Family characters were the first superhero franchise, and had villains aplenty.
Shazam’s problem is twofold: first, a lot of his pretty big Golden Age rogues’ gallery are awfully dated now. Second, the Marvel Family were mostly written as a children’s fantasy characters, and that’s not where superheroes are today.
So good luck getting readers today to buy into some of his major foes from his heyday. Even Sivana no longer gets written as a gleeful mad scientist, and has to be made over as some kind of…evil magic guy? Failed Shazam candidate? I’m actually not sure what his high concept is supposed to be, post-Geoff Johns.
Captain Marvel/Shazam is hard to make work unless you go back to the more whimsical, fairy-tale tone of his Fawcett adventures, which DC seems loath to do. Well, aside from the occasional one-off project by the likes of Jeff Smith or Grant Morrison.
But, then, there’s likely no market for it.
The question of whether X-Men or Daredevil was weaker is an interesting one. Obviously not being cancelled is pretty convincing, though other Silver Age books were cancelled (Silver Surfer, Dr. Strange). But what makes X-Men a weird case is that it was somehow popular enough to continue as a reprint book for 27 issues even though there wasn’t much of a body of work to draw from.
@Daibhid C- Even Batman’s Rogues Gallery wasn’t that developed in the Golden Age. With the exception of Joker, Penguin and Catwoman, most of his rogues hardly had any appearances. The Riddler and Scarecrow had two appearances. The Mad Hatter had one appearance. Hugo Strange had three appearances. Even Two- Face only had seven appearances. And Catwoman was written out in 1954.
In fact, it’s amazing how many of Batman’s rogues didn’t use their trademark gimmicks in their first appearances. The Scarecrow didn’t use his fear gas until his third appearance in the Silver Age. Poison Ivy didn’t use plant-manipulating technology until her fifth appearance. Ra’s Al Ghoul didn’t use his Lazarus Pits until his fourth appearance (admittedly only little more than a year after his first appearance). The Mad Hatter didn’t use mind-controlling hats until the 1980s- and that almost seemed like it was covering for an error in the art. (The Scarecrow goes from cowering due to being exposed to his own fear gas in one panel to suddenly choking Talia a couple pages later and the Hatter explains that it’s due to his mind control technology.) Basically, the reason why Batman has such a good rogue’s gallery is because the writers kept tinkering with his villains until they found something the readers liked.
I guess maybe covering The Jester in a recent OHOHOTMU segment might have contributed to this.
I’ve always liked DD, and between Essentials and back issues, I’ve read the whole run. Not sure why. I mean, the Miller stuff was brilliant, and the silver age stuff stands in stark contrast to it, but I happen to like Silver Age stuff.
It’s kind of a bummer that the character has been stuck in grimdark/near insanity for most of the last 20-30 years.
There are very few heroes with a genuinely deep bench of rogues. Other than Batman, Spider-Man, and The Flash who is there?
Most of the Big Two’s marquee characters don’t have a great rogue’s gallery and I’m not sure it really hurts them. Deadpool is an inarguably successful character and I don’t know that I could name a single Deadpool villain.
I’m not sure a lot of these characters would benefit from having a huge rogues gallery. Although, honestly, Daredevil probably would.
Just here to say that I’m sad no one has mentioned Klaw. Is he actually an FF villain who’s only showed up in Daredevil once or twice? Absolutely. But I loved the weirdness of a man with echolocation powers fighting someone made of solid sound, and that made him a DD villain in my mind forever, regardless of his more cosmic-science origins.
Deadpool villains? Well, there’s… T-Ray, if that was his name. 90s dude with no nose. And… Um. Weapon X and Sabretooth. Madcap? I haven’t actually read the run cleaning after Way, but Madcap was there.
Um.
…Wolverine and Cable, I guess.
I was all set to launch into a defense of the Monster Society but I see it was addressed as I read the rest of the comments.
Anyone who is a listener of Longbox Heroes knows just deep and bad both the Batman and Spider Man villain list goes. Although, as a Paste Pot Pete fan, every lame villain has their fans out there.
Despite the feelings of the hosts here, I think the FF has a decent Rogues Gallery, even if it is top heavy because of Doom.
I’d think Klaw would be classified as a Black Panther villain, although they both debuted in FF.
I also think most of the DC Silver Age folks have good villains, more so if you include ones inherited from their Golden Age predecessors (like the Gentleman Ghost and Hawkman).
A big quality rogue gallery isn’t everything. John Constantine has Nergal. That’s it I think. I still like the character just fine.
For some reason people just feel Daredevil is a character who just ought to have more.
Honestly, if he needs to fight a costume character he can just borrow one of Spidey’s for an issue. It works out just fine.
Shazam the wizard whose name is spoken to summon Captain Marvel?
@Chris- for the past decade or so Billy’s been calling himself Shazam when he transforms instead of Captain Marvel. He recently started calling himself the Captain.
Daredevil is an interesting book in the Marvel age in the sense that while it’s a Stan Lee product, his run isn’t particularly remembered, with its definitive run (Miller) coming nearly two decades in.
X-Men is in a similar boat.
Miller’s run holds up really well overall and is still impressive today, particularly because it is such a significant step up from anything going on in the book at the time and was genuinely unlike anything else happening at the time.
I’ve always found it interesting how the Kingpin started out as a Spider-Man villain and then transitioning into being primarily a Daredevil antagonist.
@Mark Coale- Klaw is also a Fantastic Four villain- he’s been part of multiple Frightful Fours.
I agree that the FF have a decent Rogue’s gallery- Doom, Galactus, Wizard, Klaw, Mad-Thinker. Super-Skrull, Puppet Master, Mole Man, Trapster.
DC have made such a mess of Captain Marvel/Shazam in recent decades, ironically at the hands of Geoff Johns who I think mostly did a really good job with the character when he was writing JSA in the early 2000s.
Infinite Crisis onward, they’ve changed direction and concept so frequently, or taken the character out of circulation for long periods and it’s never really worked again.
@michael
I’d add Annihilus, Blastarr and Diablo, among others, to the FF list. And Namor as a tweener. For nostalgia sake, I’ll mention The Red Ghost and his Super Apes and the Hate Monger.
I have faith that Waid can rehabilitate Captain Marvel. Issue 2 had the Psycho Pirate as the bad guy, so that’s a good start.
For my money, the books which have the best rogues galleries are The Flash, Spider-Man, Batman and the X-Men.
Superman’s got a few great ones, but how good they are often depends on which era and how they’re written. Luthor works much better in the post-Crisis era where he becomes more of a puppet-master style character than the mad scientist in purple jumpsuit or flying battlesuit eras.
Though the less said about his Australia era the better.
What, you don’t think Killgrave The Purple Man, The Matador, The Animen, The Gladiator, Leapfrog, The Plunderer, Starr Saxon, The Owl, Mr Fear, Stilt-Man, The Masked Marauder, The Jester, The Tribune, Death-Stalker, Blackwing, The Man-Bull & Angar The Screamer are names to conjure with?
(Yeah, DD’s rogues gallery is so anemic he had to borrow enemies from all over the place just to spruce it up…)
You had to be there to appreciate the 1970s Luthor. In many ways he was more appealling than Marv Wolfman’s creation. He was certainly more complex and less predictable.
Flash’s rogues gallery always struck me as generic and unsophisticated. All of them are defined by their powers to a level that even early LSH and Batman’s own rogues gallery usually managed to avoid. Also, far too often they are remembered mostly for being members of the rogues gallery, which makes them even further generic.
I’m def more of a fan of “planet Lexor” Luthor than corporate baddie Luthor, even less so now that his 1980s model is well, you know.
One of the best things about the Rogues is, for a while, how many turned babyface before Johns (I think) turned them bad again. We should have seen some of his tropes for the whole DCU coming with what he did on Flash. 🙁
@Michael: ok, Wonder Woman & Aquaman have worse rogues galleries than Superman. However, a character published 2-6X/month since the ‘40s should have better villains. I think pre-Crisis Luthor is a boring character. I think most of his frequent villains (Parasite, Metallo who I forgot about, Livewire) are one-note. I find most of the nuisance villains (including Mr. Mxy) annoying. I actually like Bizarro, but he’s not a true villain. Doomsday is boring, at least in the comics I’ve read.
Interesting points, everyone, about heroes needing or not needing good villains. I don’t think of Deadpool or Harley Quinn need rogues galleries given that they are anti-villains often in comedic stories. They can play off of anybody, or deal with comedy villains.
For more traditional heroes, I think they benefit from the adversarial relationships that build after repeated encounters. Daredevil & Bullseye, for example, have a well-defined enmity that is personal as well as professional. This backfires with overexposure (e.g. Batman and the Joker; I don’t need to read another story about why one is obsessed with the other or that they’re opposite sides of the same coin, etc.), but a good variety of opponents can help.
Luis Dantas/ Mark Coale
I wasn’t around for that era of Luthor or the Superman books, so the Byrne/Jurgens/Wolfman take on the character was the default one for me.
I’ve gone back and read a lot of the 60s-early 80s stuff and, while I much prefer the post-Crisis era material, there was a lot to appreciate from the 70s Bronze Age Superman books.
It’s quite an underrated period and the art is often really good.
As I think I’ve said on here before, taste and entertainment-wise I can’t stand the 50s-60s Silver Age Superman stuff at all. It’s incredibly silly and not at all what I look for or enjoy in a Superman comic.
I appreciate that it’s something plenty of people enjoy but it’s not my thing at all.
The flipside is I’ve been re-reading the Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four recently and it’s great. It’s easily one of the highlights of the era and stands out enormously.
For all that it’s become something of a running joke, I think Mysterio merits a place on the list for killing off one of Matt’s girlfriends.
Speaking of running jokes, I’m a bit surprised no one has mentioned Turk yet.
Oh baby, I loves me some Daredevil!
Yeah I’m also of the opinion very few superheroes have particularly impressive, large rogues galleries with “classic” villains.
Batman, Spidey, the X-Men, maybe Flash if I’m being generous.
Most are lucky if they have six or so.
Hopefully there’s an evil truck driver supervillain in his garage lair, laughing maniacally that he blinded the promising child Matt Murdock with his turtle mutating ooze, and got away with it to this very day. Crime of the century, and nobody even knows.
@Alexx Kay- But aside from that story, Beck has had, what, one other appearance in Daredevil? It would be like claiming the second Red Skull is a Spider-Man villain since he killed Peter’s parents, even though he had no interactions with Peter other than that Annual.