Daredevil Villains #18: The Jester
DAREDEVIL #42 (July 1968)
“Nobody Laughs at the Jester!”
Writer, editor: Stan Lee
Penciller: Gene Colan
Inker: Dan Adkins
Letterer: Sam Rosen
Colourist: not known
It’s been a while since Daredevil introduced a new villain with a proper concept and some real fanfare, but the Jester certainly gets that treatment. He’s not just on the cover and in the title of the story. He gets the whole opening scene to establish his schtick. Then, after a brief check in with Matt and co (who are mourning the “death” of Mike Murdock last issue), we’re back to the Jester so that he can tell us again how great he is, and explain his back story. Of the first ten pages of issue #42, seven are pure Jester. Today he may be a D-lister, but in his debut he’s a major new villain.
The Jester is a man in a jester costume who robs a bank vault with sleep pellets and some gimmicked toys. Then he makes his getaway by flagging down a passing car, which he steals by knocking out the driver with a yo-yo. But as the Jester drives home, he wishes had had an audience to applaud him. It’s the one thing he regrets about turning to crime.
Even so, the Jester is delighted with his achievements. “With my superb skills, my titanic talents, I’ll reach the most dizzying heights of all! Never has a dedicated arch-criminal been endowed with the background, the training, the natural genius that I myself possess! Here, among my innocent-looking, specially-modified toys, I am ready to launch a crime campaign the like of which the world has never known!”
The Jester is Jonathan Powers, a failed actor who was booed off stage in his first night starring in Cyrano de Bergerac. It’s never entirely clear how he got hired for the role in the first place, or how he avoided getting fired before the opening night, given how appalling he apparently was. Naturally, Powers is convinced that he is a brilliant actor, cruelly denied the applause he deserves by a public envious of his genius. He reacts to his setback by dedicating his life to study – but not the study of acting, where he is, after all, already a genius. Instead, he studies gymnastics, sword fighting and so forth, in the hope that it’ll get him work in action movies.
It doesn’t. Instead, he winds up as a comedy stooge getting pied in the face every night until he finally snaps and decks the comedian. If the public want to laugh at him, he says, he’ll give them what he wants, and make himself the biggest star ever. Hence, the Jester. Well, kind of. The slapstick comedy part of his back story gets sidelined very quickly. But the desire for recognition and acclaim is indeed central to the character.
Halfway through the issue, we finally get to the plot, as corrupt politician Richard Raleigh hires the Jester to stop Foggy Nelson’s campaign for DA. So the Jester takes Matt hostage and demands that Foggy quit the race. Fortunately, Matt carries a spare costume “in my inner coat pocket”. Hold on, I hear you say. What about his street clothes? Won’t the Jester find those? Why no, because Matt also carries a “small vial of vaporous acid” which can destroy his clothes entirely without leaving any telltale marks. Remarkable stuff.
When Daredevil finally gets around to fighting him, the Jester turns out to be an unexpected challenge. He’s presented as a genuine match for Daredevil, capable of beating hero fair and square in a straight fight. It’s kind of a shame that fell by the wayside, because it does give him the credibility he needs to get away with his gimmick. Eventually Daredevil lets him escape and tails him back to Raleigh’s office in the hope of uncovering the real villain. Unfortunately, it turns out that Raleigh has died in Spectacular Spider-Man Magazine #1 while this story was taking place, for reasons completely unrelated to the plot. And so the Jester just escapes, promising to return. It’s an underpowered ending to say the least, but a perfectly solid introduction to the character.
As promised, the Jester does indeed return. Issue #43 is a random fight against guest star Captain America, but with issues #44-46 we’re right back to the Jester. Once again, he gets a lengthy intro to show off his toy gimmick, and stress that he doesn’t care about the things he’s stealing – “all that truly matters is the excitement of the game, the thrill of the chase!” To protect his own secret identity, he fakes the death of Jonathan Powers and frames Daredevil for the murder. Then, as the Jester, he sets out to catch the “rogue” hero. Eventually, Daredevil poses as the Jester in order to draw out the real villain, which leads to a televised fight where Daredevil unmasks Jester as Jonathan Powers.
We’ll see him again a few times, but the Jester never quite becomes a regular. Which is a shame, because his first two stories are surprisingly strong. Obviously, the elephant in the room is the Joker. But the two characters have less in common than you might think. They’ve both got a comedian gimmick, and they both enjoy toying with the hero, but that’s kind of it. The Jester isn’t even very committed to the comedian angle. What exactly do gimmicked toys have to do with being a jester, when you stop to think about it?
There are other reasons why the Jester should feel familiar, though. And not just because the “comedy stooge out for revenge on a world that mocked him” angle is Sideshow Bob. The Jester is a reworked Matador. They share the same basic idea of a showman who relishes the idea of amazing the public with his ludicrous themed stunts. It’s just that the toy theming is a lot more flexible than the Matador’s bullfighting gimmick. Aside from that, they’re basically the same character.
Gene Colan clearly loves drawing the Jester. He isn’t great at traditional supervillain costumes, but the Jester’s green and purple jester outfit is glorious theatrical nonsense, and looks surprisingly good in a fight. More to the point, the Jester chews the scenery throughout, in exactly the way his origin story demands he should. He’s having the time of his life. He’s inordinately pleased with himself. When he does show up as Jonathan Powers to fake his own death, he’s completely insufferable.
Maybe the Jester needed an artist like Colan to sell the character, someone who could commit to going way over the top with him. But on the strength of his first few issues, the Jester feels like a great foil for Daredevil and someone who’d have been worth using more often.
The death of Richard Raleigh is weird. The story in Spectacular Spider-Man Magazine 1 is redone in Amazing Spider-Man 116-118, several years later, only with updated references to match the plots in Amazing Spider-Man at that time. That raises the question- when did that story happen? Either Spectacular Spider-Man Magazine 1 or Amazing Spider-Man 116-118 can be canon but not both. One would think that since the death of Richard Raleigh was noted in Daredevil 42. that Spectacular Spider-Man Magazine 1 was canon. But the Official Marvel Index raises the possibility that Raleigh faked his own death and Amazing Spider-Man 116-118 was canon.
The Jester later retires in Daredevil 218, written by Denny O’Neil. He stays reformed until 2013, barring an odd story by Bendis where he buys a magical creature from the Hand and gets possessed by it. During that time, a second Jester is introduced.
The Jester was involved in DA Blake Tower’s first appearance. Foggy loses the election for DA due to a smear campaign by the Jester but the twist is that the Jester has nothing to do with Tower, who is actually a nice guy. The Jester was pretty ruthless in that story too- kjdnapping a scientist who was working on technology to alter images in order to create movies, forcing him to use the technology to smear Foggy and killing him when he no longer needed him.
@Michael: The Jester is an odd villain. Some writers, like Denny O’Neil, Bob Gale, and Dan Slott, tend to treat him as a relatively harmless attention-seeker.
But his best stories as a villain are about how much he enjoys manipulating the public and the media,, as in the Marv Wolfman “deepfakes-before-deepfakes” arc you mention from the 1970s and Mark Waid’s reprise of it in more recent years.
In those stories, the Jester is absolutely sociopathic, relishing not only turning the public into howling mobs out to kill the wrong people, but also using nasty (if campy) methods of killing people and so forth.
He really seems like two totally different characters. (without considering the odd second Jester who turned up in, of all laces, some Acts of Vengeance tie-in issues of Cloak and Dagger).
As to Richard Raleigh…yeah, maybe retconning is so that he faked his death would work well. Since he ends the earlier Spider-Man story seen as a martyred hero, maybe he used the excuse Norman Osborn did when he returned in the 1990s, saying he had to fake his death and hide from his enemies. It’d even work better with Raleigh’s shtick as a phony anti-crime crusader.
I like the Jester. He’s a good Daredevil villain: street-level, gimmicky, with an interesting visual.
I still remember DD #218, where Daredevil actually briefly impersonates the Jester while the real deal is giving a masterful performance of Cyrano… if that had been the last we ever saw of him as a villain, it would have been a great capstone to his career.
This guy is the best. There has never been a bad Jester story*. And he is an amazing mirror to Matt’s own theatrical side.
*In the pages of Daredevil**.
**Decalogue wasn’t good, but it wasn’t a Jester story, I assert.
“ Instead, he winds up as a comedy stooge getting pied in the face every night until he finally snaps and decks the comedian.”
He’s Sideshow Bob.
No relation to Spider-Girl villain Funnyface? The one must have directly inspired the other, at least.
You know, I actually feel like the Jester would work as a foil for a bunch of characters. The attention-seeker in him might make him a good counterpoint to a high-profile character like Spider-Man, but he’s still a lightweight enough character that you could see him going against Ms. Marvel or a comedy character like Squirrel Girl. At the same time, his combat skills might make him a good adversary for Deadpool, with the added layer of irony that the guy dressed up as a clown is the sane one.
I think a more one-to-one DC comparison would be The Trickster, who debuted in 1960.
Still, one wonders who Thomas didnt pick this guy up and run with him, after taking over for Lee… DD still doesnt have an arch nemesis, and The Jester feels like a solid match to the character, at least for the Silver Age.
The attention seeking/audience approval also o makes him sound like Abra Kadabra.
Until we see a comic cover featuring a superhero spouting the eternal words, “I’ve got the strangest feeling I’m being turned into a puppet!”, the Jester can never approach the levels of amazing reached by Abra Kadabra.
He’s truly one of the most tragic characters from comics. He just wanted to put on a magic show to entertain people, but he’s from a time in the future so advanced that everyone scoffs at stage magic. Sure, he’s so terrible at it that even with his future knowledge he had to telepathically force an audience in the early-1960s to clap for his tricks, but he tries.
My favorite Abra story is probably one where he’s the surprise villain, so I won’t say what it is, but it’s a clever twist.
@Chris V- but like the Jester, Abra has also been portrayed as a sociopathic monster. The most obvious example is Underworld Unleashed but he also tried to kill the other Rogues for no real reason at the end of the original Flash series.
@Derek Moreland: The one time Thomas did write the Jester — Daredevil v.1 #61 — it was kind of a rushed plot that also tries to cram in the Cobra and Mr. Hyde, which I think was during that short period around 1970 when Stan Lee arbitrarily decreed that no books could do continuing stories.
And then the Jester pretty much vanishes for six years. A lot of the villains vanish for a long while after Thomas leaves the book and Gerry Conway takes over and starts doing really half-baked stories and characters based on whatever news article or pulpy fantasy/sci-fi stuff was on his mind.
Creative instability is Daredevil’s true archenemy up until Frank Miller comes along and gives the book a niche, a feel, and a small but stable set of reference points and recurring antagonists.
@Michael: Yeah, but that’s mostly Mark Waid, the writer for whom the default archvillain archetype is “sociopathic monster.”
Waid’s take on Kadabra was that he was a malignant narcissist writ large. His Abra desperately needs to be the center of attention, so he tries to destroy anyone who takes his spotlight away from him.
In the last issues of the pre-Crisis Flash series under Cary Bates, my understanding (based on some stray interview quotes) is that Bates wanted the irony of Flash teaming with the mainline Rogues Gallery, so the story does some arbitrary things to get there by having Abra Kadabra antagonize them.
Oddly, the rest of that plot was about Abra trying to rewrite history and “save” the Flash on a bet by diverting him into the future for…reasons, which, being a villain, he did in a way that would torment his old enemy as much as possible.
One of the things I like about Abra is that he usually eschewed being part of the Rogues (much like Grodd).
@Mark Coale: Yeah. It was one of the many disappointments of that weird “Bart Allen, aged up, as the Flash” series to see Abra treated like just another one of the gang.
Abra Kadabra, the Reverse-Flash (any), and Grodd always make more sense as the three villains who don’t associated with the Rogues, and whom the Rogues fear, hate, and distrust in return.
There aren’t many other heroes who have those kinds of rich relationships among their enemies.
The X-Men, of course, have the most of this, with lots of villains who end up at odds over ideology, and plenty of triangular conflicts. Usually you get the pro- and anti-mutant extremists, or the way out there Apocalypse types not getting along with the Magnetos and Hellfire Clubs and so forth.
Some of Captain America’s enemies used to have political beef with each other, since Batroc and Flag-Smasher were originally portrayed as having limits on who they’ll work with or how far they’ll go. But that’s been largely lost in Cap’s books.
But in most heroes’ books, disputes between villains are one-offs for a single arc, and those same baddies may be allies or teammates next time around. Well, I guess most of the lesser crimelords at Marvel do try to take runs at the Kingpin, but that’s about it.
@Omar- In Conway’s defense, he DID bring back the Purple man for the first time since his first appearance, albeit in a badly written story. He also brought back the Owl for the first time in five years. And he used the Gladiator in one issue.
Batman’s villains all tend to work together about as well as a sack of wet cats… no real sense of community or teamwork on anything more than a temporary small-scale basis.
Spider-Man’s foes seem split between the megalomaniacal leader types (Osborn, Octopus) and the more group-minded ones. I enjoyed Spencer’s take on the Sinister Six as blue collar thieves who hung out together even with all the backstabbing, and I like the contrast between say, Shocker and Electro, and Vulture and Kraven.
It helps when a hero has a large group of regular recognizable villains. It’s almost a crime that both Superman and Wonder Woman have such shallow pools for (worthwhile) rogues galleries once you get past the top… five or so. (I.e. Luthor, Brainiac, Zod, Bizarro, Mxy… Cheetah, Giganta, Psycho, Ares, um…. Circe?) there’s no real dynamic between the members of those groups beyond the odd revenge squad.
I fondly recall Acts of Vengeance, where, among others, Magneto and Red Skull teamed up. At the end of the crossover Red Skull was buried alive in a metal box.
@Omar Karindu: I would love to read a Leader vs. Dr. Doom story, but there isn’t one that I know of. A genius science villain attacks *the* genius science villain? With the Hulk & FF caught in the middle? It practically writes itself.
There should be more villain vs. villain stories. The time Magneto went after the Red Skull during Acts of Vengeance is maybe the best story in that (sub-sub-) genre. Apocalypse vs. Mordo! Sabretooth vs. Bullseye! Tombstone vs. Lady Deathstrike! The Wrecking Crew vs. Terrax! Loki vs. the Magus! Marvel likes reusing old event names, let’s have Acts of Vengeance 2: This Time, the Villains.
In the ends, heels/villains may work together but will likely betray each other for one reason or another.
I also like when B/C list villains will declare A-list villain is too extreme for them, be it killing or something equally horrific. This makes me think of Gaiman’s Riddler story.
I remember in Detective 526 or 527 when you had just about every Bat villain together in one place.msut have been 20 or 30 people, even down to people like Captain Stingaree and Doctor Double X.
I was thinking about that Riddler story while discussing the Flash’s Rogues. It seems badly dated today. The Riddler was considered too innocent for the “grim ‘n’ gritty” comics that were starting in the 1980s. Now, the Riddler is described as a serial killer. I think Gaiman needs to write a response to that story with the Riddler saying, “Nevermind.”
That Mark Russell Riddler story was really fun. It reminded me of the Gaiman-version of Riddler again.
@Mike Loughlin- there isn’t a solo Leader vs. Doom fight but there is Fall of the Hulks. where the Intelligencia- a coalition of geniuses including the Leader, MODOK and the Wizard- succeed in getting the better of both Doom and Reed.
One interesting example is Cobra and Mr. Hyde. After their partnership ended, Mr. Hydra tried to kill Cobra on multiple occasions but they eventually made their peace toward the end of Gruenwald’s Captain America run.
What they have done to the Riddler makes the Gaiman story even more poignant. Turning Edward Nigma(you can keep your Eddie Nash retcon) into the guy from Saw is maybe my go to example for the coarsening of comics (for the worse, for me).
@Michael: Re: Conway’s Daredevil — Yeah, there was a little stretch from issue #80 or so to about issue #86 where Conway brought back the Silver Age villains, some in very strange forms (robot Hyde and Scorpion; glowing, exploding Ox).
None of it was very good, and some of it was still tangled up with the Mr. Kline mess. But before and after that short run, Conway was all about terrible new antagonist characters.
Re: Cobra and Hyde – Rather neatly, the Cobra got Hyde off his back before their uneasy truce in…a villain v.s villain plot during Acts of Vengeance! Hyde tries to kill Cobra. Cobra, about to be throttled to death, cons Hyde into thinking he’s poisoned him, and forces Hyde to agree to stop coming for him.
At the end, Cobra lets it go to his head and adopts the “King Cobra” moniker and costume, and his next set of appearances have him run the Serpent Society right into the ground. It was a nice little bit about how some villains just aren’t cut out to be suave masterminds or competent, stable leaders because they really are just weaselly little punks with delusions of grandeur. But Gruenwald was always at his best writing to the psychology of villains.
@The Other Michael: Yeah, the Batman villains are too inconsistent in their relationships for me to see anything consistent there. They’ll form little anti-batman armies in a big anniversary issue or when Jeph Loeb writes them, and then they’ll feud, and then the writers who like the Joker way too much have all the other villains scared of him….
It’s all pretty arbitrary.
@Mike Loughlin: Yeah, I’d read that event! A good set of villain clashes can work really well, especially if it’s kept small-scale.
Bigger villain wars always seem to flatten out characterization.
I also like villain team series, though they tend to try to give the main cast a worse enemy to fight. But I liked Deadly Foes of Spider-Man and chunks of the old Secret Society of Super-Villains series, as uneven as it was.
I also always love those prelude stories where we see someone recruiting the members of their villain team one by one, selling characters with varied motives on something. The big “team of villains attacks the heroes” stories that come after them, however, usually aren’t as good.
@Mark Coale, Chris V
At least when Peter Milligan had the Riddler doing awful things, it had some kind of explanation.
I do kind of like the Chuck Dixon take on the Riddler, though I’ll certainly allow that it’s a coarsening of the character.
But Scott Snyder or Tom King? Yecch. Their Riddler is, as you note, somewhere between Jigsaw and a substitute Joker. I like “Zero Year,” but I kind of have to pretend the Riddler there is someone else, and that take on the character never worked outside that series.
I think the last really good use of the Riddler was Paul Dini’s semi-reformed version as an egotistical private detective trying to outdo Batman at solving crimes. It was a nice corrective to where the character had gone after Jeph Loeb got ahold of him.
“The Joker’s killing people, for God’s sakes!”
I’m paraphrasing, I think, but that moment from the Gaiman/BEM Riddler story in the Secret Origins Special has stuck with me from the first time I read it. Riddler *should* be horrified that his old peers have become more violent. I know the story was meta-commentary more than continuity, but I would have liked to see that iteration of the Riddler become a tv personality (as was hinted at). Villains who do things that are outside of the bad guy norm are always fun.
Come to think of it, that might have happened in a Riddler special from the ’90s? My memory for meh comics is not great.
@Michael: I remembered Doom & Leader both being in Fall of the Hulks, but couldn’t remember the details, thanks for the refresher. I liked Greg Pak’s Hulk, and I wish it didn’t get tangled up with Jeph Loeb’s Red Hulk nonsense. It’s amazing that Jeff Parker & Co managed to make the Red Hulk work after Loeb left.
@Omar Karindu: I wish the detective Riddler era had lasted longer. The development made sense given his motive, to beat Batman at his own game. It was a left-field move, and so much more interesting than turning him darker.
“The Riddler’s killing people, for God’s sakes!” – Condiment King, probably.
I’m a fan of King’s Riddler mostly because I think he’s a fairly compelling representation of a certain kind of child abuse. I didn’t have much of a connection to him before that, but I can see how making him “grim ‘n gritty” would be disappointing to previous fans.
I enjoy villain series like Secret Six and Suicide Squad. The protagonists are more expendable, and you never know when one of them is going to break bad (again). Ostrander wrote great political thriller-type stories, but adding the extra suspense of “can we trust these people to do the job?” really made his Suicide Squad exciting.
I love Ostrander’s Suicide Squad also. I should also mention that I enjoy the post-Morrison’s Arkham Asylum version of the Mad Hatter.
I guess it depends on the character. Not every character works better by being turned into a psychopath or more “mature” version of the character. That grows tiresome.
It’s based on the potential of the original characterization, I’d say.
I don’t see that Ostrander’s Suicide Squad actively ruined any characters. Captain Boomerang was depicted as a coward and something of an idiot. He wasn’t changed into something completely unrecognizable compared to his Silver Age origins. Deadshot was created to be the sort of character as depicted in the Squad.
I wasn’t familiar with Count Vertigo prior to the Squad, but I have to guess that his depiction of being a sympathetic bi-polar man who had become suicidal was superior to any portrayal that had come before Ostrander.
The Mad Hatter had no interesting stories prior to his brief portrayal by Morrison. I don’t see any potential for a guy who likes hats compared to a control-obsessed paedophile.
The fact that almost no stories written after Arkham Asylum have tried to pull Tetch away from the modern version of the Mad Hatter probably speaks to whether a character was improved by changing them.
The Riddler has potential other than as just another dark psychopathic character as shown by Paul Dini or Mark Russell writing the character in a different style. How do you reconcile the two characters?
The same is true with Abra Kadabra. He’s more interesting and there is more fun story potential based on John Broome’s original interpretation.
There’s nothing wrong with keeping some more innocent characters in a comic universe.
There can be a happy medium too. The Jester has had two strong stories, in my opinion. One was the Marv Wolfman version and other was the O’Neil story. The latter plays off of the innocent Silver Age interpretation. Wolfman’s story was interesting due to the aspect of media manipulation and sowing panic and distrust in the masses. The Jester didn’t need to be made darker for that story, it could have worked as well with the Jester simply in the role of a manipulator.
The Timm/Dini animated series had the best take on the Mad Hatter, IMO. Shame that version didn’t catch on the way Mr. Freeze did.
King’s Riddler has ironically been cribbed for Zdarsky’s Joker, of all things. The retcon of “he could have won any time but chose to lose to Batman”.
My interpretation: the Riddler was written by nerds, for nerds. But non-nerds are extremely uncomfortable with writing a nerd so they make Riddler do anything but give riddles.
I’m not sure if Daredevil’s costumes were made from unstable molecules at this point, but if not, he must look pretty wrinkled on the days he unfolds them from his breast pocket.
Cliff Chiang’s Catwoman: Lonely City did some really nice bad guy team-up stuff with Batvillains. Setting it in the future allows for everybody to be more reflective, but I thought the use of the Riddler was particularly effective (and honestly just loved it overall, great story and beautiful art).
I only read a couple of stories with “private detective” Riddler, but I liked the concept.
As for villains teaming up and fighting each other, it’s probably best left memory holed, but DC’s Salvation Run mini-series? Where Waller sent a bunch of super-criminals to some alien world as a prison and they formed into two camps, one led by Luthor, the other by the Joker?
I couldn’t see anyone following the Joker except out of fear, and there were probably at least a dozen villains that would have no reason to fear him (Deadshot, for example, would just shoot him in the head and be done with it), but the Joker’s plot armor strikes again.
With Suicide Squad, Ostrander used Dr. Light as the butt of a fair amount of jokes, but that’s pretty much what he was then. And Boomerang was a coward and definitely a petty loser, but he was also written as vicious and dangerous, especially when his own life was on the line.
Some other blogger – maybe Dave Campbell – pointed out that yes, Boomerang lost all the time. To the Flash, the Silver Age version at least, who could run at the speed of light. Against the B-list and lower enemies the Squad normally tangled with, he was a serious threat.
Boomerang was also dangerous because he didn’t give a crap about his teammates. He watched Mindboggler(?) get killed in his very first outing with the team, adding enhanced apathy to his list of super-abilities.
I think part of the problem with both Captain Boomerang and Boomerang is that Digger and Fred are supposed to be backstabbing losers who squandered their natural talents. The problem is that some writers seem to forget that they have any talents and just write them as backstabbing losers. Digger and Fred have given Flash and Spider-Man- two of the hardest to hit heroes in the DC and Marvel Universes respectively- a hard time. But a lot of writers seem to forget that. The worst example has to be Identity Crisis, where Digger is killed by Jack Drake.
IDENTITY CRISIS where Digger is retconned as (1) fat and (2) past his prime and is killed by somebody who (A) never fired a gun before and (B) is dying from a boomerang in the chest
Well, it is Identity Crisis, after all.
Captain Boomerang was very much the kind of character mid-1980s and early 1990s DC was running away from, very fast, and it’s a testament to John Ostrander’s writing that Digger got a devoted fan following.
Ostrander would give Boomerang a moment of real competence every so often, showing that he could hold his own when he actually needed to save his own skin, but those moments got to be fewer and further between by the later issues of the run.
Even Geoff Johns couldn’t come up with much to change about Boomerbutt’s Ostrander-penned origin, save for — of course — gratuitously adding Boomerang killing his (non-biological) father via decapitation by boomerang.
Thinking about the Ostrander Suicide Squad also makes me miss his version of Amanda Waller, who’s long since been revised into by the “my country , right or wrong” character type she usually opposed in the old Squad stories.
One of the newer guys in my office and I were talking about video games last week which segued into a comics chat about anti heroes and villains as heroes which led to him saying how great Identity Crisis was and I really wanted to just end the conversation then and there but I was too polite to do that.
The year that Identity Crisis came out, I learned that the drama major in our circle at university…
One of the only art majors I knew…
Thought it was breaking new ground in comics storytelling.
Later I dropped by his dorm. It was the kind of place where you’d find a copy of Daredevil or Superman: For Tomorrow next to the toilet.
@K: Well, it was the first comic I’d ever read that seemed to be written exactly like a mediocre-to-bad airport thriller.
Identity Crisis comes in for a beating because it’s pretty awful. But I think we remember it because it’s awful in some ways that reflect the convergence of a bunch of terrible trends:
The stunt-hire writer, the grotesque abuse of inoffensive minor characters to create a sense of “importance,” the fanboying treatment of characters the writer likes, and the insistence on combining Silver and early Bronze Age nostalgia with “grownup” violence all crammed into one carelessly plotted, crass mess that we were assured was Mature and Significant for Comics.
I look back and can’t help but see “Guardian Devil,” Kevin Smith’s Daredevil arc, as a somewhat higher-quality version of the same kind of bad overall trends.
Yes, it has that great Mysterio monologue in the big climax issue, but in retrospect the plotting is contrived and handwavey (an undetectable poison that mind-controls you in very specific ways?), the killing of Karen Page was something that only mattered in terms of Matt’s pain, and the Catholicism themes are puddle-deep.
Even Mysterio is not so far from Doctor Light in Identify Crisis as the Silver Age villain who looks goofy to many readers today now being written as incredible nasty.
To Smith’s credit, he had the wit to show that this made Mysterio pathetic, not menacing, and them summarily kill him off.
But then Mysterio was brought back, and no one really mentions his part in the story again. Everybody remembers Bullseye killing Karen Page; no one seems to remember Mysterio medically raping a teenager or falsifying Karen’s HIV diagnosis as part of his manipulations.
Weirdly, I could imagine the story being done with the Jester instead of Mysterio, except Smith is a filmmaker, so Mysterio is the character he’s going to use. But I bet the Jester would’ve stayed dead afterwards.
@Omar – Oh man, way to tie it back to the topic at hand, and to be 100% RIGHT about it. The Jester being the villain at the heart of Guardian Devil would have been *tremendous*, both for his stock as a villain and as the climax of the story. It makes me sad that Smith didn’t clue in to the same idea.
As much as I dislike Identity Crisis, I did enjoy Meltzer’s Green Arrow.
@Omar- Keep in mind that Smith’s issues weren’t the first time Mysterio was written as a ruthless killer. In Larsen’s Sinister Six storyline, all of the Six were written as ruthless killers.
Other stories have also tried to turn Mysterio into a ruthless killer- Old Man Logan and Spider-Man: Far From Home.
I think the reason why writers try to turn Mysterio into a sociopath has to do with some of his revenge schemes against Spider-Man. One of his earliest ones involved tricking Spider-Man into thinking he was going insane and circa Inferno he tried to trick Spider-Man into thinking he killed an innocent man.With the modern concern about gaslighting, that’s a lot creepier than if he just tried to kill Peter.
There were a few reasons why the Jester wouldn’t have made sense as the villain of Smith’s run. First, the Jester retired in Daredevil 218 and the new Jester hadn’t met Daredevil. Second. during Mars Wolfman’s Jester storyline, the Jester was only capable of faking images over television. Smith’s plot required someone who could create illusions up close, so only Mysterio would work. (Or Mastermind’s daughter, but I can see why Smith didn’t want to use her.) Third. Jester used the deepfake equipment last in Marv Wolfman’s run, and since then he’d appeared in Daredevil 154, Moon Knight 13 and Daredevil 218 without it, so it didn’t become his gimmick.
I think the worst Daredevil example of a Silver Age villain being pointlessly darkened is Stunt Master. He was really only a true villain in his first appearance and reformed in his second, also by his creator, Roy Thomas. (There was also one time Death Stalker forced him to kidnap Karen.) Thomas intended him to be a reformed criminal. But Waid turned him into a bitter psycho killing homeless people.
@Michael: Smith’s story sort of tries to have it both ways. On the one hand, we could argue that the Jester doesn’t have those capabilities and wasn’t around much.
But on the other hand, Smith brought in a character who’d encountered Daredevil exactly once, in a relatively inconsequential fill-in story.
Additionally, Smith’s take on Mysterio wasn’t that he was a vicious killer, or at least not that he was always one. The motive speech Mysterio gives is that he’s dying and wants to go out having done something unforgettable, so the idea seems to be that this is Mysterio throwing off his moral fetters and transcending his limits as a campy old-=school villain.
Smith even has the Kingpin muse that this is not the Mysterio people remember, the cheap insurance scammer from Marv Wolfman’s run.
Moreover, Mysterio’s motive was that he had arbitrarily chosen Daredevil for the target of perhaps his most vicious scheme ever because “his” Spider-Man wasn’t around to torment anymore.
So I think Smith is leaning pretty heavily on Mysterio as a campy 60s villain who is, in extremis, suddenly willing to do terrible things out of sheer ego. And in term sof depth and quality of evil scheming, he’s punching way above his weight, as even other characters note.
But…that’s just as easily transplanted onto the Jester. He’s dying of something. He never made it as an actor. So now he pumping everything he’s got into a scheme he’d never have had the will or the skill to pull off before. And at least Daredevil is actually his primary enemy!
Having said all that..I’d say Mysterio was also “leveled up” for a while during the Clone Saga, when he clashed with Ben Reilly while trying to rule, that as supposed to be a badass revamp, too. (And it also makes something of a hash of his motives in “Guardian Devil,” since he would have had a grudge against Ben Reilly, too.)
As to the Stuntmaster, I’d generally agree. I did like Waid’s story, but — as with Smith’s Mysterio — you’d have to read it as a guy who snaps at some point. In many ways, the story might have worked better without the twist ending, instead going with the initial idea that this was a new Stuntmaster who really was a sociopath.
I have an oddly specific affection for this first Jester story because it – in a Marvel UK black-and-white reprint from the very early ‘80s or thereabouts– was the first place where I encountered Cyrano de Bergerac. I have a very vivid memory of those pages, and essentially none of the rest of the comic. But Colan’s depiction of Powers as Cyrano made a tremendous impression on me.
@Omar- Smith tried to explain that Mysterio didn’t want to want to go out fighting Ben Reilly because Reilly was a clone- which is ironic because Daredevil points out Mysterio has never had an original idea in his life.
Of course, the real problem with Smith using Mysterio was that he didn’t have permission to kill off Mysterio from the Spider-Office- and that caused problems because they were already working on a two-parter with Mysterio as the vilain when they learned Smith killed Mysterio. So the Spider-Office tried to explain that away by throwing in a line about Mysterio honing his skills against Daredevil “before bowing out in a most spectacular fashion”. But the readers didn’t like that explanation, so this led to a whole mess about whether this was Quentin Beck or a new Mysterio.
The mess with Mysterio was stupid.
Mysterio’s “power set” is illusion and fakery. If Mysterio died in any story and appeared in another story he faked his death.
In fact the Spider-Man office should have overcompensated and have Mysterio kill himself in every appearance after that, only to appear the next time none the worse for wear.
IIRC the Jester is my first Daredevil villain.
I enjoyed reading “Guardian Devil” for many smaller beats that Smith coincidentally got right but just about all of it stinks of amateur hour bullshit pushed through because they had a celebrity guest writer with no editorial tether.
IDENTITY CRISIS is worse because Meltzer memory of the Bronze Age is seen through a haze of violence and horror.
Metzler’s Green Arrow is great for sure.
I haven’t read Guardian Devil in probably 15 years but I remember enjoying it at the time of its release and in the years afterward. If nothing else it was a significant step up from the Daredevil comics we’d been getting for years prior.
Identity Crisis is a wild one. It’s hard to believe it’s been 20 years since it came out. It was hugely popular on the DC boards at the time of its release, though my memory of it was that the backlash against it didn’t begin until after it was finished. People have only soured on it further since then. That’s another one I haven’t revisited (probably since not long after its release).
Tiny bit surprised that, during this discussion of villains appearing en masse and fighting each other, the recent ASM Gang Wars thing wasn’t mentioned. That would have to be an example of doing it wrong. The inclusion of Madame Masque and Count Nefaria landed like a dull thud. The whole ‘war’ ends once Spidey clogs someone’s weapon? Characterization, logic, even entertainment, all fail to appear in that arc.
I couldn’t remember a single issue from Metzler’s run on GREEN ARROW.
I googled it. All I found were TPB solicits on the first page of results.
I switched to images and all I saw were covers for the TPB.
I infer nothing good from this. Was a classic DC character raped somewhere along GA’s scavenger hunt?
Chris.
No it was a pretty low-stakes storyline where Ollie and Roy go on a hunt to track down some of his property that was lost during the time he was dead in the 1990s.
It’s a fun little story. The only long-term significance to come out of it was that Ollie retrieved a spare Green Lantern ring Hal left behind.
If I’m not mistaken, it’s the ring that Hal gets a year or two later in Green Lantern Rebirth when he returns (with John Stewart getting the one that the past version of Hal left behind in the late 90s Emerald Knights)
One of the many small pieces that were being put in place through that early 2000s period to re-establish the whole thing (along with the return of the Guardians/Power battery in the Ion storyline, the return of Oa and Killawog in that Joe Kelly graphic novel and Alan Scott become Green Lantern again in JSA.