Daredevil Villains #4: The Purple Man
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.
As the story starts, the Purple Man is a genial chap who wanders into banks, asks nicely for money, gets it, and leaves. For some reason he allows himself to get arrested. Perhaps he’s simply amusing himself by playing along for a bit, given that he can leave at any time. Matt is his court-appointed lawyer, and Karen comes along to take notes – which is an excuse to hang out with Matt. As soon as they show up, the Purple Man asks the guard nicely to unlock him, and then leaves with the pretty girl. Daredevil is resistant to his power, though not entirely immune. Indomitable will and all that.
Daredevil: Yellow has a slightly more elegant explanation for this, which is that the Purple Man’s effect depends partly on being able to see his aura. So his colour is actually relevant, and Daredevil’s immunity is mainly because he’s blind, rather than just because he’s awesome.
Next, the Purple Man stops by a “large gymnasium” to round up some muscular chaps as his bodyguards. This scene also establishes that his power doesn’t work against dimwits, an odd sideline that doesn’t play into anything. It’s probably just an excuse for Killgrave to face a bit of minor opposition that he can casually overcome with his new gymnast guards. Finally, he and his “intensely loyal gymnasts”, none of whom have bothered to get changed, commandeer the top floor of the Ritz Plaza Hotel to use as his headquarters.
Naturally, when Daredevil gets there, he beats up all the gymnasts with ease. So the Purple Man threatens to make Karen jump off the roof, and Daredevil surrenders. Before killing him, the Purple Man obligingly explains his origin story, only to learn that Daredevil has taped the confession. Daredevil gets Karen to safety, and uses a specially treated plastic sheet to wrap up the Purple Man safely. We won’t see him again until issue #88, which is understandable – a little of the Purple Man goes a long way.
This issue reminds me a lot of X-Men #2, the Vanisher’s debut appearance. The hook is simply that the Purple Man runs rings around everyone with a blithe arrogance that seems to be entirely justified by his 100% success rate. He doesn’t control people’s minds directly, which would be a bit dull; he makes them extremely suggestible, to the point where they’ll accept anything he says to them. Despite the world domination stuff, he’s played as an impish prankster.
If you take him literally, of course, he’s also extremely creepy. He’s a mind control character without ethics, an inherently disturbing gimmick. Brian Bendis’ approach is simply to take at face value something that was always implicit, at least to some degree. This is tricky territory, because it gives Jessica a traumatic back story with a serious theme, based on a Silver Age novelty villain. It works because the gimmicky aspects of the character feel like something that rubs salt into the wound, rather than a misjudged tone clash. The idea of the Purple Man as an emotional sadist certainly has a basis in his first appearance, where he takes an evident low-key delight in what he can get away with.
You could also argue that Bendis is taking an unduly literal approach to a children’s character. Following genre conventions, nobody seems to find the Purple Man’s effect especially traumatising or invasive. Karen calls him “horrible” in the epilogue, but then promptly moves on with her life. Nor is it especially unusual, at this point, to have villains carting female characters off for purposes left vague. But even that trope has the subtext. There’s no getting away from the fact that the Purple Man’s debut appearance is built largely around him marching off with Karen Page for his own entertainment. There’s certainly a PG reading of this story where he sees her as just another ornament and trapping of power, like the hotel suite and the bodyguards. But we’re also told very clearly that he finds Karen attractive. Everything he’s come to be associated with is at least being hinted at from the start, even if those hints aren’t being taken very seriously because it’s just the sort of thing that villains do in the Silver Age.
All of that makes this an odd story to read with hindsight. The Purple Man has become a very different kind of creep from the one Stan Lee had in mind, and one much less suited to light hearted romps. But if he was going to be anything more than a one-off villain, psychological horror may have been an inevitable direction for him. He’s a mind controller who deprives people of agency, and who lives in a world where nobody (except Daredevil) ever says no to him. Everyone in his world stops being a functioning character when they get within range, and so he lives in a world of one, and he doesn’t care about anyone else. That’s all there from the start.
In his debut, the Purple Man is the cheerful Silver Age version of that character. And that’s fun in its own way, on its own terms. But it jars with the modern take, in a way that serves Jessica Jones’s story but casts a shadow over the original.
For some reason this post is dated September 3rd ?
It was, but I’ve fixed that.
“It’s never entirely clear how he thinks that’s going to work, given that his power only works at close range.”
Getting into a ‘close, trusted advisor’ position to a major world leader would probably be something quite well-suited to those powers, at least.
He’s definitely a disturbing kind of character if you think about the implications more than silver age writers generally did.
The explicit rapist aspect goes back at least as far as 1986, with the Purple Girl’s origin, but there it’s presented as something that happened in the past, so perhaps a bit more remote and distant than something happening to a contemporary hero…
The Purple Man is one of the villains who gradually got creepier over time. First, in Shooter’s Daredevil run, the Purple Man orders Maxwell Glenn, the father of Matt’s love interest Heather Glenn, to commit crimes for him and leaves him to take the fall. Maxwell Glenn winds up killing himself. Then we see another man spending his life savings to hire Paladin to try to find the Purple Man because he’s been charged with kidnapping, implying that Purple Man has done this a lot.
Then in Marvel Team-Up Annual 4, the Purple Man is shown using his power to force a woman to kiss him, although he gets bored and commands her to leave. He also orders people to spend several hours standing on their heads or jump in lakes for no real reason. In Emperor Doom, we see him order a man to try to do cartwheels just to amuse him. And finally, in Alpha Flight 41. as Zoomy mentioned, we see that he raped Purple Girl’s mother. So Bendis’s treatment of him was a logical extrapolation of other writers’ handling of him.
Why was the Purple Man used so rarely before being killed off in Emperor Doom? After this he’s next seen in Daredevil 88-89, then he disappears until Daredevil 147. After that plot is resolved in Daredevil 154, he appears in a backup story in Marvel Tales 100, Marvel Team-Up Annual 4, a flashback in Alpha Flight 41 and is killed off in Emperor Doom. Other mind control villains were used more often. The Puppet Master and the Ringmaster were mind control villains and they appeared frequently in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s, Emma Frost became a major villain within a few years of her introduction. Even Empath was used more often than him. So why wasn’t the Purple Man used more often? You’d think Claremont would have loved him.
The Purple Man might have become more popular if his daughter Persuasion had become a major super hero. As it is, she was rarely used after Simon Furman’s run on Alpha Flight ended in 1994. And in the original run of Alpha Flight, he only met her once. as a zombie in issue 61, and that was implied to have been one of the Dreamqueen’s tricks.
Maybe an in-story explanation for the increased creepiness and malice of the Purple Man is that he just realizes what more he can do over time. At first, it’s fun just to steal some cash and make other people uncomfortable for a while. But that power becomes addictive over time and he starts getting more seriously abusive because he can or because he’s bored or because he’s resentful that no pretty girls will date someone who’s purple and also fully dresses in purple. So he’s “off-beat” and “far-out” when Daredevil meets him, but becomes a sadistic rapist by the time Jessica Jones is super-heroing.
Incidentally, Persuasion was brought back for last year’s incarnation of the Thunderbolts (heroic team working for NYC mayor Luke Cage).
She also teamed up with Jessica Jones and the Purple Children against her dad in 2019’s Jessica Jones: Purple Daughter.
In a world where they still MAX books, you could easily Purple Man running a porn empire, as his power nicely fills a certain niche in that business.
Have we ever had Purple Man run into Starfox, speaking of characters who read much differently in 2023 than even in the 1980s?
@Mark Coale- When Starfox was first introduced, Roger Stern explained that he only used his powers on people outside battle with their consent. The problem was that in a back-up story in a Silver Surfer story Ron Marz had Starfox use his powers to seduce women.
Marvel wasn’t always careful in the 90s about the implications of the backup stories, fill-ins and Marvel Super Heroes stories. In one Iron Man fill-in story, Tony Stark switches bodies with a villain and has no problem sleeping with the villain’s girlfriend while she thinks he’s the villain. In a Marvel Super Heroes story, Brother Voodoo basically uses his powers to make his girlfriend change his mind about wanting to leave him. Both of those were forgotten about.
@Michael- I think the Purple Man was never popular because he’s deliberately goofy. His name, his clothes, they kind of eclipse any credibility he might have. Unless you turn the creepiness of his powers up to 11 of course.
I wonder if Killgrave’s darker turn was inspired by Mesmero’s rape harem in the backup story to Classic X-Men #17.
“You could also argue that Bendis is taking an unduly literal approach to a children’s character.”
Bendis took a literal approach to a lot of characters, one which usually didn’t suit them, but I think he gets away with it with the Purple Man. As someone else noted, the rapey implications of Starfox were also dealt with in an issue of Dan Slott’s She-Hulk (I don’t think I actually read that issue, though, so I don’t know how well it was handled).
And despite how often Claremont went to the mind control trope, he often let the implications play out, with Mastermind trying to seduce and twist Jean, with the Mandarin reprogramming Psylocke, the demons and Madelyne, Madelyne and Havok, Malice and Polaris, etc.
We had Mark Millar teasing the notion that Professor X was manipulating all the X-Men in Ultimate X-Men (I don’t think that idea went anywhere, though), and Emma Frost being criticized any time she tried to manipulate humans in Morrison’s New X-Men.
I think writers over time have largely treated mind control powers as the personal invasion of privacy and free will (relatively speaking) they are designed to be.
I almost forgot, mind control was one of the central plot devices of the original Squadron Supreme miniseries, not to mention a major factor in 2004’s Identity Crisis. In both cases, its abuse was highlighted and explored.
The thought occurs that, as presented in this initial story, the Purple Man’s powers are spectacularly unsuited to much more than Joker-eseque “some men just want to watch the world burn”ism. You can do a lot of *damage*, but when you can only control people in immediate proximity to you and it wears off quickly after you leave (or get wrapped up in plastic) with the person realising they’ve been controlled, your ability to use it for long-term goals is nearly nil.
[This goes even more in the modern day, with a lot done remotely, and stuff done in person often not under the agency of the person you’re actually talking to, but a computer system or person far away.]
Nu-D> I wonder if Killgrave’s darker turn was inspired by Mesmero’s rape harem in the backup story to Classic X-Men #17.
I would be more likely to think Bendis has never heard of the CXM backups than that he was inspired by them.
“In Emperor Doom, we see him order a man to try to do cartwheels just to amuse him”.
Man, how did that get past the CCA?
Hi. Anyone else having trouble posting here? Am I under some sort of disciplinary impediment?
“your ability to use it for long-term goals is nearly nil”
Rage at his own limitations seems like a good reason to become more sadistic over time.
Also, it’s too bad he isn’t better at working with others. If he’d been a better father, he could have had a small army of kids to expand his power.
Or he could have been more strategic about who he controls, as James Moar suggested above.
I guess selfish and abusive behavior ends up really isolating you. That’s one to grow on!
“Am I under some sort of disciplinary impediment?”
You aren’t, and I can’t see any comments from you that have been diverted for moderation.
Comments do sometimes get held for manual moderation if they contain any red flags, the most common one being links.
Si said: I think the Purple Man was never popular because he’s deliberately goofy. His name, his clothes, they kind of eclipse any credibility he might have. Unless you turn the creepiness of his powers up to 11 of course.
The Hulk is (usually) green and the Thing is orange, but it never hurt them much. And the Silver Age Baron Zemo somehow got away with making the visual of always wearing a pink bag on his head into an actual motive.
The Purple Man’s problem is that the visual doesn’t match the powers. Mind control is a sneaky, creepy, insidious power. But the Purple Man is a bright purple grotesque.
It’s worth noting that when writers do start using him again, he’s often in a secret base the heroes stumble across, as in the Hawkeye/Two-Gun Kid backup story in Marvel Tales #100, or gets kept quietly behind the scenes — and eventually shown hiding in a little back room — for big parts of the arc, as in later-1970s Daredevil, where he’s belatedly revealed as the force behind the “corrupt Maxwell Glenn” plotline about eight issues after it’s begun. In both stories, being discovered is the start of his defeat.
I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that, as early as his second appearance, the cover captions start calling him “Killgrave” in big letters, and “the Purple Man” in smaller ones.
And then, by the 1980s, he’s treated by Frank Miller (Marvel Team-Up Annual; #4) and later David Michelinie (Emperor Doom GN) as a flamboyant, opportunistic, and unambitious minor villain who only becomes threatening when he’s coerced into serving as the instrument of a major baddie like the Kingpin or Doctor Doom.
Bendis is really the person who0 plays up the incongruity deliberately, and that’s mostly about Jessica Jones for the reasons Paul states: a character previously used mostly as minor gimmick villain with a very Silver Age visual inflicting that kind of trauma is part of the point.
And yes, I am ignoring Gerry Conway having him turn up in a flying pod with a gang of gun-toting goons in purple costumes (Daredevil v.1 #88-89) to rob banks.
That was about as generic a use of a villain to fill the fight scene quota of the month as one could imagine.
Luis-I’ve had that problem in the past here also. It gives you some message where it seems as if you’ve been suspended from posting here. It lasts for a few hours and then corrects itself. I don’t understand why it happens. I’ve found sometimes it seems to be the length of a post, as if you post one short paragraph, it will go through, but anything longer than a paragraph gets blocked.
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Back to the subject at hand:
There was an episode of the Twilight Zone where a mobster gets killed and, much to his surprise, thinks he’s in Heaven. An Angel meets him in the afterlife. He finds that everything always goes his own way, there’s never any thrill or challenge. He always wins when gambling. Any woman he wants is interested in him. He grows bored and confronts the angel, saying he doesn’t think Heaven is the proper place for someone like him. The angel responds, “What made you think you were in Heaven?”.
I think this would be an interesting twist on the Purple Man. At first, he’s enamoured of his power. He can have anything he’s ever wanted. As time goes on, he grows bored. There’s no challenge anymore. Someone with more imagination or creativity might be able to think of ways to use the power which won’t lead to ennui, but Purple Man is a “ding-dong crackerjack” thug who lucked into such monumental powers. So, for him, the powers have become a curse. He does horrible, sadistic things to others under his control simply because he’s trying to give some meaning to his existence.
It’s not just that he’s purple. If Hulk was a man of ordinary build who dressed entirely in green and called himself Green Man, he’d probably be just as forgotten (pagans notwithstanding). But “green” still sounds less innately goofy than the word “purple”. It’s just one of those words.
@Si- I think Omar had s point. At Marvel, the inhuman-looking mind-control villains are D-listers (Mesmero, Corrupter, Mandrill). Meanwhile, Emma Frost got a redemption and became a major X-Man, and Empath got to be one of the Hellions and Puppet Master is a core member of the Fantastic Four’s rogues gallery. (Yes, I know the Puppet Master is sometimes drawn like a human puppet but he’s supposed to be able to pass for a normal person in civvies,)
Purple Man is a character that had one great story in him, and we got it on Netflix. The analogy to the coercive power imbalance in domestic abuse was exactly what the character needed to be interesting, and David Tennant was brilliant (as one of his other incarnations might say). There really is no need for more, because that was the story Kilgrave was meant for.
Does anyone REALLY like Puppet Master? To me he’s just there because he always has been (and has the Alicia link). I’d find him a bit more interesting if he WAS neon pink or something.
What about that Marvel Two-in-One issue by Steve Gerber? The Puppet Master looked like an actual creepy puppet.
Ringmaster is an ordinary looking mind control guy, only time you hear from him is when one of the Hawkeyes need an easy win. And be honest, would anyone have cared about Emma Frost if she wasn’t naughty and into lingerie as day wear? I mean she’s compelling now, with decades of character work, but none of that was present in the character until the mid 90s or something.
Empath can be fully expected to return to the limbo he’s been mostly in since Claremont stopped writing New Mutants. Lots of background characters briefly made it big in the Krakoa era. It doesn’t mean he’s a B lister.
I never considered Puppet Master was meant to look like a puppet. I thought he was basically a drag queen without a wig, which made me uncomfortable about the implications of femininity being visual shorthand for corruption.
But yes, the puppet thing makes sense.
It varies how much the artist leans into the ‘looks like a puppet’ thing. Kirby drew him with vertical lines either side of his chin that suggest a ventriloquist’s-dummy mouth.
Si said: Ringmaster is an ordinary looking mind control guy, only time you hear from him is when one of the Hawkeyes need an easy win.
The suggestion is that it seems like the only mind-control villains who become prominent tend to be characters who can pass for ordinary humans, not that all ordinary-looking mind-control villains become prominent.
The counter-example would have to be a non-humanoid Marvel villain who frequently uses mind control as a primary modus operandi.
With that in mind, there may be one good example: the Shadow King, who usually shows up in a monstrous astral form or in a humanoid form that’s mean to look uncanny (in the “uncanny valley” sense).
Also, the Puppet Master has the added gimmick of using dolls to control people, which plays into the ways dolls definitely fall into the “uncanny valley” for people, and into old traditions of sympathetic magic and superstition, like poppets.
I think one thing most of the less prominent mind-control baddies have in common is that they don’t draw on some kind of preexisting imagery. The Purple Man is especially random in the mismatch between his visual and his power, but a lot of the others — the Corrupter, Mesmero, the Ringmaster — really don’t. The Corrupter does have the demonic look and the “unleashing inner evil” thing, but why bother in a universe with actual demons in it?
The Ringmaster might just barely be able to draw on “creepy circus” imagery, but his Kirby design doesn’t really lend itself to that, and “mind control” doesn’t entirely fit that set of tropes. (Weirdly, it’s Mesmero who forces people to become circus performers; the Ringmaster just robs them. Maybe they should switch schemes?)
Empath works as a manipulative pretty-boy archetype, exaggerating the idea of playing with other people’s emotions, hence his status as a fairly significant running threat to the original New Mutants, who then gets brought back out again from time to time. (When Claremont created a mind-influencing cyborg villain later on, he actually named him “Pretty Boy.”)
And then there’s the Mandrill, with his ape-like mutation and his power to control women, about which the less said the better. (And more than enough was said some time back in the comments of another one of Paul’s posts.)
Shadow King is closer to the realm of the demonic though, in that he possesses people. He exists outside of the physical realm. He doesn’t need to use a secretive manner in order to gain power over his victims, like a mortal with mind-control powers.
Regarding the start of this series’ challenge to name five Daredevil villains ..
I just reread the 1992 Daredevil annual. In the 1992 annuals — I think every Marvel annual that year did this? — they would count down the hero’s top ten villains.
Here’s who someone decided were Daredevil’s:
10. Stilt-Man
9. Blackheart
8. Mister Fear
7. The Hand
6. The Owl
5. Typhoid Mary
4. Bullet
3. Elektra
2. Kingpin
1. Bullseye
So there’s that.
… Bullet ???
Who seems to have appeared in all of 7 issues before that annual ?
Okay, he debuted in the first issue of JRJr in Nocenti’s run (and the milestone #250 at that), so maybe he made an impression on the people who were reading then, but it was before my time and I have no clue who this guy is.
(Apparently Zdarsky used him quite a bit in his run, but I’ve already all forgotten about him.)
Bullet made sense for the time. As Paul pointed out when this series started, DD’s foes tend to be all over the place.
Bullseye, too, was a bit of a seasonal foe. He wasn’t either a very traditional character (Marv Wolfman created in in the mid-1970s) nor featured all that often before Frank Miller decided to pump him up. Come to think of it, I don’t think we have seen much of him in the last 20 years or so.
Electro, Jester, the various Mister Fears… I don’t know that any of those appeared all that often either.
It may well be that for most of its published history Daredevil as a character concept is a bit too street-level to suit itself well for the idea of recurring foes and archenemies.
It’s so far away, but I’m curious to see who the villains are when Matt moves to SF and Natasha becomes the co-star.
(I don’t want to read ahead, as it were.)
Luis> Bullseye, too, was a bit of a seasonal foe. He wasn’t either a very traditional character (Marv Wolfman created in in the mid-1970s) nor featured all that often before Frank Miller decided to pump him up. Come to think of it, I don’t think we have seen much of him in the last 20 years or so.
Oh, we have. He’s been in Daredevil a bunch, he was in Bendis’ Dark Avengers, he was in Old Man Logan… hell, he was in the Loki miniseries of all places just last month…
For the SF years? Oh, that would have to be Mr. Kline, Damon Dran, followed by the Ox (formerly of the Enforcers), and then the Dark Messiah. heh
Yes, the annual was from 1992. At that point, the creator of the list probably expected Bullet to become a major recurring foe for DD. He was still new and Nocenti had made good use of the character.
Let’s not forget the other archfoe of the San Francisco years, Matt’s boss, Kerwin J. Broderick, aka “The Man,” who turned out to be the guy profiting from the creation of Dark Messiah, Ramrod, and Angar. It ends up requiring Moondragon and Captain Mar-Vell to stop him.
On the side of heroic mind controllers, there’s Karma, writers never seem to have any idea what to do with her. Under Claremont, she was usually portrayed as having incredibly solid ethics that prevented her from abusing her powers. Even then, he wrote her out of the book for a while courtesy of Ahmal Farouk (before the whole Shadow King is an ancient being nonsense came about) and then to look for her missing siblings, saving her from being written by Louise Simonson. My non-Claremont Karma is spotty, even though there’s not that much of it.
I believe her twin brother Trahn came back in the Krakoa era? I believe he was shown to be a later-era-Purple Man nasty person; I want to say that he did some pretty bad things to Viper?
Bullet is one of the all-time greatest Daredevil villains, so it made sense in 1992 and still makes sense now.
“Let’s not forget the other archfoe of the San Francisco years, Matt’s boss, Kerwin J. Broderick, aka “The Man,” who turned out to be the guy profiting from the creation of Dark Messiah, Ramrod, and Angar. It ends up requiring Moondragon and Captain Mar-Vell to stop him.”
Also the Dark Messiah’s wacky henchmen, Josiah, Macabee and Uriah!
And I think DD met his first-ever martial-arts-themed foe during the San Fran years, in the form of … the Blue Talon!
Jason said: Bullet is one of the all-time greatest Daredevil villains, so it made sense in 1992 and still makes sense now.
Yeah, I’m surprised Bullet didn’t become a bit like the Shocker, the dependable blue-collar villain who turns up frequently enough and gets a bit of fan following.
I think he fills a good niche in DD’s rogues gallery as a relatively sane, but utterly amoral enforcer-for-hire with enough power to give street-level heroes a decent fight.
DD needs a recurring villain whose thing is that he’s a sleazeball willing to do anything for a dollar, but isn’t an obsessive who holds grudges or a psychopath who’s more about the sadism than the job. There’s certainly precedent for that character type in the crime thrillers and Film noir genres that inform the post-Miller material.
Maybe the problem with Bullet is the rather dated baggage of his son Lance, whose very 1980s “nuclear phobia” was a big part of Bullet’s appearances.
But even that could be written past or tweaked pretty easily, and Bullet’s weird mix of neglect and hints of genuine affection for his kid always added some texture to him back when he actually got to show up.
I haven’t caught up to the Zdarsky run yet, but I’m looking forward to seeing how Bullet was used there.
Well said.
I think you’ll dig the Bullet stuff in Daredevil. Part of it is Zdarsky doing a course-correct on a previous appearance by Bullet in “Old Man Logan,” which I didn’t read. But there’s also just some nice conversational material between Bullet and DD.
Zdarsky has a lot of respect for the Nocenti run — that’s clear in his use of both Typhoid Mary and Bullet, I think. It’s one of the reasons the Zdarsky run really worked for me as a DD fan.
Tranh got the “Daken” treatment last year in the Marvel/XMen Love Unlimited digital comics, that is, he was rehabilitated into being a “nice guy” with his evil rationalized as being due to PTSD from their childhood during wartime (originally the Vietnam War , now retconned by Mark Waid’s History of the Marvel Universe into being “The Sin-Cong Conflict”) + the corrupting influences of parental-authority-figures , in this case , their uncle Nguyen Ngoc Coy *
* like Karma, the Vietnamese name of their uncle , as written by their creator Chris Claremont is simply nonsense in the Vietnamese language : Nguyen is a last/family name ; not a first/given name , Ngoc is a female name , the male counterpart being Ngoc An , and Coy is an entirely original family name not present in RL Vietnam . Furthermore, I don’t know if the writers realized it , but having their uncle’s family name be Coy , while their father’s family name still be Coy-Manh* means that Karma’s parents must have been 1st cousins to each other .
*again, Manh is a first/given name IRL , not a last/family name, while Tran is last/family name , not a first/given name
Also BTW, Trivia , but 616-Purple Man revealed in a 1997 storyline in X-Man, to Nate Grey that he was actually a fellow X-gene mutant (which NG never refuted but could have done so if it was indeed a lie) whose latent mutation was only activated by the experimental gas * , and I believe its a wasted opportunity not having him appear resurrected on Krakoa like most other X-villains , after he was finally killed in Daredevil
* this is exactly the same thing that happened to 616-Mimic, whose latent X-gene was activated by exposure to an experimental gas USA military-industrial-complex weapon
** it would explain why his daughter Purple Girl, who inherited his powerset , is an X-gene mutant , which could not happen if PM was not an X-gene mutant himself.
Purple Man is also the secret villain of Neil Gaiman’s 1602, although as I remember, he only appears in flashbacks.
@Jason Powell- The Old Man Logan thing is Zdarsky correcting a mistake of his own making. In Old Man Logan 45, Bullseye kills Bullet’s son Lance. In Daredevil 18-20, written by Zdarsky, the Stromwyns hire Bullseye and Bullet. Many people complained that Bullseye and Bullet working together made no sense considering their last appearance together. Zdarsky apparently never read or forgot about Old Man Logan 45. So in this year’s Daredevil 6, Zdarsky had Bullet explain that he faked his son’s death to keep Bullseye from harming him.
JDSM24 said: Also BTW, Trivia , but 616-Purple Man revealed in a 1997 storyline in X-Man, to Nate Grey that he was actually a fellow X-gene mutant (which NG never refuted but could have done so if it was indeed a lie) whose latent mutation was only activated by the experimental gas
I suspect that was itself building on the inexplicable use of the Purple Man in a 1996 episode of the X-Men animated series, which made him a mutant villain who was manipulating the cartoon’s version of the 1980s-era X-Terminators/X-Factor trainees.
Omar: You make it sound like someone like Crossbones or the Taskmaster would be a good Daredevil villain.