Daredevil Villains #16: The Boss
DAREDEVIL #29 (June 1967)
“Unmasked!”
Writer, editor: Stan Lee
Penciller: Gene Colan
Inker: John Tartaglione
Letterer: Sam Rosen
Colourist: not credited
As Daredevil approached issue #30, Stan Lee was getting downright sluggish when it came to new ideas for villains. Last month was little green men. This month is “the heartless hood they call… the Boss!” The Boss is just a regular old crime boss, with no particular hook. Often characters like this represent Daredevil toying with the sort of stories that will eventually make the book work. Less so in this case.
The issue opens with Matt pondering a dilemma. He’s decided to ask Karen to marry him. No, you didn’t miss an issue. It’s all or nothing with Matt. The dilemma is: should he marry her as Matt, or as Mike? Yes, this sounds like an excellent foundation for a healthy marriage. As Colan draws him, Matt at home looks like a genial English professor, with a nice cardigan and a tweed jacket. For some reason he also has a signed photograph of Karen Page. Seems like an odd gift for Karen to give to a man she believes to be completely blind, but it keeps showing up in later issues.
Meanwhile, we check in on the Masked Marauder’s men. The Marauder died two issues ago, and his men have been waiting patiently for “over a month” for further orders. Finally, they decide that he’s really not coming back, and so they open his last instruction. It tells them to go after Nelson and Murdock, find out who Daredevil is, and then avenge the Marauder’s defeat. The Marauder certainly has a lot of faith in his men to carry out this vague instruction from a man who is, presumably, no longer paying their wages. But follow it they do, heading to the Nelson & Murdock offices in the Marauder’s customised truck that very night.
But one of them sells the group out to the Boss. “I figger… with the Marauder gone – that you’re the only one big enough to fill his shoes!” All the Boss needs to do is show up tonight, round up the Marauder’s henchmen, and seize control of the group. Colan makes this scene look a lot better than it deserves to be, with the Boss as a cheerfully confident, relaxed figure, stretched out on his chair and seeming to find the whole thing very diverting. As he often does with Karen, Colan gives the Boss a level of charisma that really isn’t there in the writing.
The Boss and a car full of ordinary gangsters show up to attack the Marauder’s hi-tech gang and defeat them handily in less than two pages. Having thus seized control, the Boss decides to go on with the “fight Daredevil” plan anyway. So they kidnap Karen and leave a message telling Daredevil where to find her. (This, of course, will prompt Matt to decide that he can’t marry Karen after all because his life is far too dangerous. You know how it goes.)
Matt duly heads to the spooky house “on the outskirts of town” where Karen is being held. Obviously, the villains’ plan is just to kill Daredevil when he shows up. Daredevil has a plan to outwit them, but it’s one of those mystifying ideas where you just have to shrug and say, hell, it was the sixties. He shows up in costume, but he pretends to be blind Matt Murdock pretending to be Daredevil. Why? Well, because then the gang will capture him rather than shoot him on sight… apparently?
And it work. Matt is captured, and then he does precisely what you’d expect: he escapes the cell, goes back as Proper Daredevil, and beats up all the baddies. Why couldn’t he have just done that in the first place? Because then the story would be even more generic than it already is! The Boss’s mixed crew of underlings, now made up of both conventional mobsters and costumed supervillain henchmen, completely fail to get along. Their lack of teamwork lets Daredevil to beat them all singlehandedly, and the Boss simply surrenders rather than fight. And that’s the issue.
So let’s be fair to Stan. Yes, the Boss is completely off the peg. But the story hook here is probably meant to be the culture clash between two different styles of villain – the regular mob and the supervillains. If that’s the idea, then it makes sense for the Boss to be a standard issue mob boss. But the story never really gets into the tension between the groups. They’re just two gangs who don’t get on – the Marauder’s group are at least visually distinct, but nothing else really turns on where they came from.
After this issue, Lee goes into a long stretch where he just recycles cast-offs from the rest of the Marvel Universe. The well of inspiration is so obviously running dry at this point that you’d think Lee surely had to be on his way out, but in fact he sticks around through to issue #50. Fortunately, things pick up again towards the end of his run. But at this point he was really starting to struggle.
“The Boss” is what every mob thug ever in a comic book calls their employer in dialogue, even the ones whose villain names reflect even a moment of brainstorming.
It’s almost a shame that Lee didn’t just lean into Daredevil as extruded superhero product.
The next issue should’ve had Daredevil fighting “the Sinister Seneschal of Sabotage known as.. The Supervillain!”, like some early-bird version of Marvel’s 1980s one-shot The Generic Comic crossed with Keith Giffen’s “John Doe” story from The Heckler.
Actually, maybe that does explain the next year or so of stories….
because then the gang will capture him rather than shoot him on sight…
BOSS: Oh, for…. “shoot him on sight” means when you see him, not when he sees you.
Stan even previously did “the cover shows the villain unmasking the hero, but what actually happens is the villain concludes the hero can’t possibly be this guy” in a fairly well-known Spider-Man story. It made more sense that time.
Matt wondering if it should be him or his fictional alter-ego who marries Karen Page. If he decides it must be Mike, it would obviously have to be a false wedding he concocts to fool Karen into thinking they are legally married.
Karen with her passive-aggressive present of a signed photo given to her blind boyfriend.
All the seeds are being perfectly planted for “Born Again” within a few years….Wait. What’s that? “Born Again” doesn’t take place until the 1980s? This is supposed to be taken as all acceptable behaviour by well-adjusted human beings. Oh, Stan.
Yes, there’s a very long stretch between the Leap-Frog and the next supervillain created for DD. Then, when Stan does think up another costumed criminal for DD, he overdoes it with the character. Roy Thomas can’t get on this book fast enough at this point. How often does one say that about a comic?
Just have to say, these write-ups may prompt me to re-up Marvel Unlimited just so I can experience this stuff firsthand.
And people think the Silver Age Superman/Lois stuff was bad…
I know people have commented about why Stan kept writing Daredevil when he clearly had no good hook for it, but why did people keep reading it? It sounds haphazard and clunky.
I guess the art has gotten better and more consistent by this point. Were there already Marvel completists in the 60s?
@Chris V: There’s an early issue where Daredevil is shown to have some kind of pep pills in a compartment of his billy club gadget.
I like to imagine the offices of Nelson and Murdock in the Silver Age are like that one episode of Mad Men in which everyone takes the “energy serum” to try to get ahead on work and ends up going bonkers.
@Thom H.: Te big distinction between the bulk of Marvel and DC output in the Silver Age is, I think, Marvel’s messy, haphazard energy that drew in the adolescent crowd and DC’s tightly edited but stiff and stilted storytelling aimed squarely at children (right down to some weird “girls are icky” stuff applied to relationships between adult characters).
There are exceptions — the Hank Pym and Wasp stories in Tales to Astonish and some of the Torch-Thing stories in Strange Tales read like Silver Age DC stuff with worse plotting, and Arnold Drake and Bob Haney have some of the wild energy fo the Marvel books — but the overall distinction holds pretty well for the most of the 1960s.
It was not hard to be a Marvel completist in the early years, when you have less than a dozen superhero books.
@Mark Coale: Good point. I assumed that since distribution was sort of spotty in the 60s it would be difficult to find every book Marvel released. Making it easier to drop titles that weren’t so great? But maybe that just made it more of a fun challenge. I guess X-Men coasted along as a reprint book for years, so the marketplace must have been more forgiving.
In the early years, due to (IIRC) deals between DC and the distributors, Marvel rack space was limited. That’s probably one reason that you had superhero books take over existing titles like Starnge Tales and Tales to Astonish.
Yes, I’ve often wondered what the rationale was for keeping Daredevil going for so long without a very clear hook. By this point, Daredevil was also one of the only Marvel superhero titles that hadn’t been licensed for animation (I believe the others major titles were The X-Men and Doctor Strange).
I wonder if Stan Lee kept writing the title because it wasn’t profitable enough to hire someone else!
Perhaps they saw value in having it as part of a line – an offbrand Spider-Man, in the same way that they had published Hedy comics alongside Patsy Walker in the heyday of their romance line. In another era, they would have just launched a second Spider-Man title, or branded this as “Spider-Man’s heroic pal Daredevil”. I suppose the inter-title continuity, house ads and letter column hype meant that enough readers understood it that way anyway.
I may have missed this in previous posts (likely) but is “Mike” also blind? Quite a coincidence if so!
If he’s not, could the signed photo of Karen be a gift for “Mike” rather than Matt?
I can’t recall a specific panel or statement right now, but I always felt that Mike was not blind. It would not serve Matt’s purposes to admit that his twin brother was both Daredevil and blind.
Mike isn’t blind: in fact, in #31, after Daredevil has his super-senses removed by Mister Hyde, Matt has to go into character as Mike and convince Foggy and Karen that DD and therefore Mike has only just now been blinded.
“Mike” is not blind, but he does insist on wearing sunglasses at all times.
Yeah, at first the idea is “Matt needs to wear sunglasses as Mike so Karen and Foggy don’t see the damage to his eyes, but he’ll play it like he wears them 24/7 because Mike is just – that – cool”… but then in that same #31, Foggy tumbles to the conclusion that “It was more than just an act!” – that Mike had been wearing them because he shared Matt’s eye “weakness”. (Did Matt never tell Foggy he’d been blinded in an accident rather than just suffering from macular degeneration or something?)
I’m really hoping he was actually wearing his glasses under his mask in the comic like he is on the cover.
out of all the odd, ridiculous things from this issue, I particularly enjoy Stan writing himself a cameo appearance (where he and Daredevil appear to know each other) (and where Stan claims to be surprised to see DD despite being the one who wrote the story – or maybe Colan drew that panel on his own initiative, and that’s why Lee wrote the dialogue about not expecting to see him?)
That panel was clearly a parody of the Batman TV series of the late 1960s.
Re: Mike Murdock’s glasses
Direct depictions of eye injuries were one of Frederic Wertham’s big hobbyhorses. He spends a lot of time on what he calls the “injury to the eye motif” and its supposed negative influence on children in Seduction of the Innocent.
Did the Silver Age artists ever show Matt’s eyes? Or would that have been understood as something the Comics Code would prohibit as an example of the forbidden category of “lurid, unsavory, gruesome illustrations?”
I haven’t checked this in detail, but yes, the book does seem to try to avoid showing Matt’s eyes directly. In this issue, he is indeed wearing his glasses under his Daredevil mask, just as shown on the cover, which makes no sense at all. He appears for several pages of issue #49 with his face in plain view, but his eyes are kept in shadow. When he finally unmasks to Karen in issue #57, he’s shown from behind.
Daredevil #57’s cover does show Karen unmasking DD with Matt’s face visible, but the way she is lifting the mask does leave Matt’s eyes mostly in shadow. I’ve always found it a very awkwardly drawn cover, with DD looking stoop shouldered, I wonder if Colan having to draw the character a certain way to disguise his eyes had anything to do with the weird anatomy.
I know there is a Gene Colan drawn closeup picture of Matt’s eyes during the Gerry Conway run (I can’t place the issue), but that would probably have been after the Comics Code policies were relaxed in the Bronze Age (with them allowing Marvel to publish things like Tomb of Dracula).
I wonder if this also holds true for Dr Mdinite at DC and any other notable blind characters in the Silver Age.
Let’s see… Dr. Mid-Nite and his successor Beth Chapel; Madame Web, who is in evidence these days (both Cassandra and Julia); Shroud; Dagger for a certain time; Blindfold; Destiny, of course; Deadpool’s Blind Al; Alicia Masters; Blindspot (an once substitute Daredevil); Daredevil’s once wife Milla Donovan; Betsy Braddock for a certain time; Rachel McGregor from 1968’s “Nick Fury #3”; DC’s Randu Singh, Cassandra Craft, I-Ching, Amethyst and Professor Ojo; Wonder Woman at one time after fighting a Gorgon; and several one-shot characters, often from horror stories.
I had not realized how frequent blindness is in superhero comics. Very often it is associated with some form of psychic, magic or enhanced perception, or even with precognition specifically. Some seem to essentially never show their eyes to the reader, others are drawn with white irises instead.
I don’t think it is usual to actually show clearly injured eyes; even when it is known to be the case we almost always end up seeing eyepatches. The one exception that comes to mind is Walking Dead’s Carl Grimes, and only for a couple of panels or so.
It is not unusual either for blind characters to have entirely normal eyes, either in real life or in comics. It is strongly implied that this is Matt Murdock’s situation, since he has on occasion lived a normal life while hiding his blindness entirely. IIRC that was what happened at the late stages of the second Frank Miller run. At some point in the transition between Ann Noccenti to D.G. Chichester he had lost his memory and did not quite understand that he was blind; presumably people around him did not notice and remark on anything unusual about his eyes either.
Now that you mention Alicia Masters, I can’t recall any images immediately where she wore glasses.
I-Ching, in the mod WW stories and the Sand Superman story, I remember wearing glasses.
I think whomever was Libra in the Zodiac Gang usually wore a blindfold given their gimmick, but I don’t remember if they were always blind. I think the one in Avengers during the Mantis Saga was, IIRC.
@Luis Dantas: Yeah, I think when Matt’s eyes are shown in the 1970s or 1980s, he has the “white irises” thing that Bronze Age comics sometimes used as shorthand for visually impaired characters.
@Mark Coale: Alicia Masters is definitely the big exception to the “blind people’s eyes are never shown” thing in the 1960s. She was usually shown with normally colored irises, IIRC. Indeed, the plot point in her first appearance that has her as a dead ringer for Sue Storm wouldn’t work if her blindness were, er, visible.
This makes the other characters, whose eyes were usually kept hidden, stand out even more.
So maybe it’s because Alicia is the one blind character who doesn’t seem to have gotten superpowers s compensation.
For the others, keeping their eyes in shadow, or under masks and sunglasses and blindfolds is the only way the comic can communicate that they’re any different than all the sighted characters doing backflips, casting spells, and so forth.
Now I’m trying to remember if there were any stories that made anything out of a meeting between Daredevil and Alicia….
@Omar Karindu: Alicia might not have a super power, but she might as well be considered a super-human sculptor. Many fictional characters with disabilities have a near super-human skill to compensate. It’s a trope I have mixed feelings about. Daredevil fits this trope, but it works because he’s in a universe with super powered people. I didn’t realized there were so many blind super-characters, though. Weird that it seems to be more represented in super-hero comics than other disabilities, but I guess it’s easy to draw blindness or incorporate it into a costume design.
Daredevil is the poster child, but there’s too many blind super-types who have the super power that they’re not blind. See also the various amputees who have superior robot limbs. It’s cheap, and maybe even offensive.
Alicia Masters is an interesting case. I can’t remember if she was introduced as a love interest for Thing, is that why she’s blind? But yeah, she was made to impersonate Sue Storm, not so much because she looked so alike that her own brother didn’t notice, but because it’s an old opera trope, all you need for an impenetrable disguise is a dress and a wig, maybe a small domino mask. Scooby Doo did it all the time.
But then recently, around the wedding, was the retcon story where Sue knew Ben was in love with her, so he pushed him into a relationship with her lookalike as compensation. Which is way sicker than the Madelyne Prior story. I don’t know what they were thinking.
With Alicia, you have lots of things at work.
– daughter of a super villain who uses magic clay for evil
– she is obviously Ben’s GF because “she sees his inner beauty” and is not scared/repulsed by how he looks. You know, because she’s blind.
– I don’t think 616 Alicia has evenrhad powers, but other versions have.
Was there not a recentish story where Alicia used the same magic clay as Puppet Master? I can’t recall any details of the story, it might have been a bluff or something. Then again, maybe it’s the clay that has the powers, not the sculptor.
What I’m most surprised by is that she never got any powers even when she was Silver Surfer’s girlfriend. Compare to Rick Jones, but then I suppose sidekicks are different to love interests.
Si-The clay has the powers. The Puppet Master discovered the clay in the Wundagore Mountains. It is slightly radioactive (as most things with powers must be during the Silver Age), but the later revelations about Chthon dwelling under the mountains makes it more likely that the clay has mystical properties outside of just being radioactive.
Alicia not being given some kind of compensatory gizmo/power to let her ‘see’ will never not be weird for me. It’s really just a check box on the “suspension of disbelief for super-hero universe” release form, along with Reed not handing out single-use Wizard discs for emergency falling situations or life-support force field rings for vacuum/gas environments.
@Mike Loughlin, Si- the blind person with some sort of extrasensory perception is a trope that goes back millennia. TV Tropes has an article on it:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BlindSeer
@Si- yeah. during Slott’s run, Alicia used the Puppet Master’s clay. At first she used it to make Lyja leave Earth, which might be understandable considering Lyja helped kidnap her and hold her prisoner for months. But then she was tempted to use it on her adoptive children and the Puppet Master called her out on it, pointing out she was turning into him.
I can’t believe I failed to mention Stick and no one mentioned him since either…
@Si- I like when a character like Oracle, Cassandra Cain, Wiz Kid, or Silhouette has the disability, it’s not erased, and they are portrayed as capable super-heroes in their own rights. The robot-limb-that’s-better trope you mention is the kind of nonsense I don’t usually like (although Misty Knight is a cool character).
My pet peeve is autism being portrayed as granting superhuman cognition/perception/fighting skills and the autistic person being “quirky.” It’s… not how autism usually works, and plays down/dismisses the challenges associated with the diagnosis.
Oracle and Cassandra Cain might not be such good examples as of, well… over a decade ago? Barbara Gordon is walking and Batgirling all over town, and Cassandra Cain has been talking since I’ve become aware of the character. (Which isn’t that long, but, again – it’s been years now).
With Barbara Gordon, they’ve since established that the experimental implant which helped her overcome her spinal injury has its limits, so while she -can- still Batgirl, she has periods where she needs to rest.
They “fixed” Cassandra Cain’s muteness very soon after she got her solo series.
There was a Thunderbolts storyline in which USAgent, after losing several limbs, refused anything but the most basic prosthetics, until he was forcibly “fixed” while in an alternate reality…
Silhouette, formerly of the New Warriors, is super-powered but still uses crutches for mobility. (Just saw she was referenced above)
Ditto also the new Sun-Spider, whose EDS allows her to perform superhuman feats, but she still needs both wheelchair and/or mobility aids for everyday life and superheroing.
Basically, I think creators are much more aware of disability discourse and making sure that characters with disabilities are represented properly and fairly, something which was obviously not always a thing years ago. Hence why Karma of the New Mutants retains her own prosthetic leg despite having the opportunity for healing/replacing.
But of course, in a comic book universe, one always has to balance the idea of disease, illness, and disability with the existence of healing magic, cybernetics, alien tech, cloning, and so forth.
(The biggest example of this in my opinion? The Death of Captain Marvel, where Mar-Vell succumbed to cancer, and the story had to explain the why and how of his condition being incurable despite everything theoretically available…)
Yeah. Part of the weird balance of superhero comics is why everyone isn’t “cured” of any malady or disability. Tony Stark/Reed Richards can do “x” but can’t make Alicia see or heal Barbara Gordon’s spine? Of course, Tony couldn’t heal his heart and Reed could never “cure” Ben permanently.
One of those diegetic things you have to accept, without even wanting to have disabled characters as inspirational characters for readers.
Fabian Nicieza has treated disabilities relatively realistically not only with Silhouette in New Warriors and Jolt in Thunderbolts.
Jolt suffered hemiparalysis, after a death-and-partial-healing/resurrection experience. She could use her energy powers to regain superhuman mobility, but not indefinitely.
She was shown to recover via phyisotherapy over time.
Tony Stark’s heart was healed (Iron Man vol. 1 #18)…probably more than once. Stark also recovered from having his spine severed by a bullet (shot by a jilted lover) and, well, death (somehow that’s not as impressive in the comic book world as the first two)…the time in the early-‘90s where he had to be cryogenically frozen, as he’s come back from death more than once too.
@ChrisV: Tony Stark has a really weird history with all of this stuff, hanks to the constant tug-of-war between writers who want 1960s Tony who needs the armor to survive and writers who want 1980s Tony whose limitation is his substance abuse disorder.
And then there are the period runs where he’s juts a control freak who goes through a whole cycle of bad behavior when tech or comic energy gives him actual super powers.
Comic energy giving him super powers?
So Tony is like Slapstick or Ambush Bug or Norm Macdonald?
Whose comic energy prevented us from even knowing he was sick?
John Byrne came up with the explanation that Ben Grimm subconsciously doesn’t want to be cured.
Also The man who gave us THAT origin for Lockjaw.
@Neutrino
To the best of my understanding Byrne spelled it out, but the hints are there from the very first FF stories (which often had Thing turning into Ben and vice versa at suspiciously convenient times).
It’s superhero comics, all random events are at suspiciously convenient times.
By the way, hands down the best Thing transformation was when he randomly turned human, but later got so angry at the *readers* for suggesting in letters to the editor that Invisible Girl never actually did anything, that he turned back.
Si, whenabouts was that? It sounds like something Stan might do, but I don’t remember running across it before.