We’re skipping Daredevil #48, which is another Stilt-Man story. And with that, we’ve reached the end of Stan Lee’s run as writer.

DAREDEVIL #49-55
(January to August 1969)
Writer: Stan Lee (#49-50, 53), Roy Thomas (#51-55)
Pencillers: Gene Colan (#49, #53-55), Barry Smith (#50-52)
Inker: George Klein (#49, #51, #53-54), Johnny Craig (#50, #52), Syd Shores (#55)
Letterer: Artie Simek (#49, #51, #53-55), Herb Cooper (#50), Sam Rosen (#52)
Colourist: not credited
Editor: Stan Lee

You only have to look at those credits to see that this is a bit chaotic. Perhaps Stan Lee was keen to stick around until issue #50 because it was a nice round number. But instead of ending his run with a grand finale, Lee hands the book over to Roy Thomas in mid storyline. And the story just keeps going, in the book’s longest arc to date. In practice it’s really six issues rather than seven – issue #53 is a fill-in with a token framing sequence to continue the plot – but that’s still far longer than any continuous arc so far, and far longer than anything we’ll get in the rest of Roy Thomas’ run. The Masked Marauder hung around for the better part of a year, but that was as a recurring villain. This is one continuing arc.

Unusually for Daredevil villains of this period, Starr Saxon sticks around – kind of. He goes on to become Machinesmith, with his mind downloaded into a robot body. Machinesmith certainly sticks around, albeit as a D-lister. But beyond the interest in robotics, Machinesmith has little in common with this original version of Starr Saxon, an unconventional villain with no dual identity who is briefly positioned as Daredevil’s arch-nemesis. Despite that, he only makes the cover of one of these issues. That’s him above, on the bottom right.

Issue #49 opens with Matt being attacked in his home. The attacker is a robot hiding in Matt’s wardrobe. He’s a very 1960s robot. He has a “plastic” body, because plastic is still impressive. He also has a big display on his chest with a number on it to show his power levels, and he says things like “Must – adjust – my – speed – circuits!” The robot defeats Matt handily, and is about to cart him off to “the – master” when Willie Lincoln happens to come by. It turns out that the robot can’t improvise. It interprets Willie as terrible threat, and runs away.

A flashback then reveals that the robot has been sent to kill Daredevil by criminal scientist Starr Saxon. Saxon, in turn, has been hired by Biggie Benson, the crimelord that Daredevil sent to jail in issue #47. When we first see Saxon, he’s a sinister looking fellow in a purple suit. He has a very Kirbytech laboratory, with rather Frankenstein overtones. He couldn’t care less about Benson’s agenda, and he would happily have just picked a target at random to test his robot, but if somebody’s willing to pay him to test it on Daredevil, then that’s just lovely.

But how did the robot find its way into Matt’s wardrobe? Ah. Well. I know it’s the Silver Age, but you might still want to brace yourself for this one. Saxon, you see, has built a “scentolator”. This device allows his robot to track Daredevil by scent, simply by putting a “specially-treated photograph” of the hero into the robot’s “built-in aromascope”. I suppose that’s more inventive than “the robot waited for Daredevil to swing by and then followed him home”, but… a robot that can work out what people smell like from their photographs? Really?

Naturally, Saxon sends the robot back for another go. So Daredevil fights it again, and that fight continues into issue #50. At this point, Barry Windsor-Smith takes over on art for three issues. This is early BWS, when he was emulating Jack Kirby. The robot even starts doing Kirby Krackle. When Daredevil manages to damage it, and it decides to head home. “I – cannot – remember – my mission! I – must – return – for – new instructions!” And so Daredevil simply follows the thing back to Saxon’s base. This is what happens when you buy into the hype of AI instead of realising that you’ve invented a really useful scentolator.

Anyway, Saxon assumes the robot is doing fine, and is making plans to hire it out as a hitman throughout the underworld. He’ll get money, and lots of criminals will die, which is a “public service”. Unfortunately, Saxon has already been working on the “specially treated photographs” of other victims. So when the robot shows up with Daredevil in tow, Saxon is so panicked that he accidentally puts the wrong photo into the aromascope. Wouldn’t you just know it, the laws of irony dictate that it’s Biggy Benson’s photo, and so the robot dutifully plods off to prison to kill Benson, with Daredevil in hot pursuit. Stan Lee’s run on the book ends as Daredevil makes it to Benson’s cell, only for Benson to clock him over the head and knock him out moments before the robot arrives to kill him. More irony!

The real focus of Stan’s last two issues is the robot; Saxon is just a bit part criminal scientist. But Roy Thomas has other ideas. He’s much more interested in Saxon himself, and proceeds to push the new villain to the moon. That largely comes at the expense of Daredevil himself, who comes across as hopelessly weak and incompetent.

In issue #51, the prison staff take on the robot with one of Iron Man’s old gadgets – it wouldn’t be a Roy Thomas book without a random continuity reference Finally, the robot kills Biggie, declares its mission complete, and keels over dead. Well, permanently deactivated, I suppose, but you get the idea. Daredevil contributes precisely nothing to any of this, and spends most of it unconscious in the corner.

Meanwhile, Starr Saxon is very angry. He had all these big plans involving his lovely robot and now Daredevil has gone and broken it. Now he wants revenge on Daredevil himself. His first plan is to kill Daredevil by blowing up the robot, but Daredevil stops that. So Saxon moves on to plan B: he retraces the robot’s steps to find Matt’s apartment, and immediately figures out that Matt is Daredevil. By this point, Saxon is starting to get a bit more rounded. He wants to use his new information to kill Daredevil, but at the same time he quite admires the way Daredevil has pulled off his “blind lawyer” schtick for so long. It’s not so much that he’s impressed; he just enjoys what he sees as a joke by Matt at everyone else’s expense.

Saxon is still wearing his purple suit but it looks rather less formal at this point. There are moments when his monologues get more theatrical. Supposedly Windsor-Smith was trying to present Saxon as gay; if so, he’s relatively subtle about it, and it doesn’t figure into the script at all. But Windsor-Smith’s version of Saxon does have something of a David Bowie vibe to him. He feels modern, for the time. There’s a cusp-of-the-70s feel to Starr Saxon, especially now that that the clunky robot is out of the picture.

Meanwhile, Matt has yet again decided to give up being Daredevil and propose to Karen. But he’s feeling ill and his powers are failing. This is because of radiation poisoning from the robot, which wasn’t actually part of Saxon’s plan. Matt goes for dinner with Karen, only to panic and flee when Starr shows up. Starr persuades Karen to come with him, and bring Matt’s abandoned cane. Then he takes Karen back to Matt’s apartment and ties her up, assuming that Daredevil will show up to rescue her. Unfortunately, while Daredevil does show up, so does the Black Panther, who is here to give Daredevil the antidote. Saxon is defeated, the police show up… and then Saxon simply makes veiled threats to reveal Daredevil’s secret identity unless Daredevil lets him go. And Daredevil just agrees, while Black Panther looks at him as if he’s mad.

It certainly makes Saxon look strong – Daredevil is genuinely afraid of this guy. Saxon is getting away with stuff, in a way that villains at this point rarely did. But Daredevil is weak and dithering, even allowing for the fact that he’s ill. He does give chase, and catches up to Saxon on a rooftop, where Saxon argues that he has “no shred of proof that I’ve committed any crime.” Um… what? There are about six witnesses in this issue to him kidnapping Karen. And he’s just run away from the police. But Daredevil does accept the slightly saner argument that if he arrests Saxon then Saxon will reveal his secret identity – and there’s no point throwing that away if he doesn’t have the proof to convict Saxon for something significant. So once again, Saxon gets the upper hand, and even gives a departing speech in which he proudly declares that this is his story and he is the hero.

Issue #53’s fill-in story is a retelling of issue #1 – literally, with new art by Gene Colan fitted to Stan Lee’s original script. This random reminiscence prompts Daredevil to come up with a radical solution to his problem. He fakes Matt Murdock’s death in a plane crash, so that Saxon won’t be able to blackmail him! If he doesn’t have a dual identity any more, then Saxon won’t be able to expose him! It’s stretching a point to say that this makes any sense but, I suppose, Saxon doesn’t actually have any proof that Daredevil is Matt Murdock; you can make a case that his leverage lies in the fact that he knows they’re the same person. So it’s probably just on the right line of being totally ridiculous.

Of course, Karen is absolutely distraught, and will remain that way for several issues. Daredevil returns to New York and asks Karen for his stick back. But as far as Karen’s concerned, this stick is the only thing she has left of her beloved, and she quite reasonably declines to hand it over to a random vigilante. So Daredevil just breaks into her room at night and steals it. Matt Murdock is an awful, awful human being.

At this point the story seemingly diverts to bring back Mr Fear, fresh out of jail, who challenges Daredevil to a fight. When Daredevil accepts, Fear somehow strikes terror into him with a mere gesture, and Daredevil flies into a humiliating panic in front of a crowd of onlookers. Much of issue #55 then consists of Daredevil running around New York being a bit pathetic. But eventually he figures out what’s going on, catches up to Mr Fear, and fights him on a flying platform. Fear is unmasked as a disguised Starr Saxon, and falls from the platform to his death.

That happens three panels from the end of issue #55. The book ends with Daredevil gabbling out essential exposition: “When Saxon briefly possessed Matt’s cane he rigged the club with these specially timed fear-gas pellets, which his flying disk triggered during our first battle! It was his warped revenge on me for ‘killing’ Matt Murdock to escape his blackmail threats!” This really is a stretch. It means that Saxon had already murdered the original Mr Fear and stolen his gear at some point prior to issue #49 (before he had any interest in taking revenge on Daredevil), and then concealed the fear pellets in Daredevil’s cane somewhere between issues #51-52, just in case he happened to feel like setting them off two issues later in “revenge” for something that Matt hadn’t actually done yet. There’s a certain logic to the idea that, with his blackmail scheme thwarted, Saxon sets out to destroy Daredevil’s reputation so that his Daredevil identity becomes unviable as well. But the story really does go off the rails in that final act.

The insanely abrupt ending doesn’t help. Supposedly, this was a recurring problem with Gene Colan: given a Silver Age Marve-style plot, which was basically just a plot synopsis, he simply started drawing the opening scenes without figuring out how much space he needed to save for the rest of the story, and he consistently got it wrong. Whether or not that’s the real reason, it’s certainly true that a lot of Gene Colan Daredevil issues have remarkably languid pacing at the start – issue #49 opens with four straight pages of Matt simply wandering around his apartment – and quite a few of them have extremely rushed endings. In issue #55, it borders on ridiculous, with the book’s major villain of 1969 being summarily despatched in just a few panels. At least Colan made the Mr Fear costume look good.

Saxon is an incredibly strong villain in his first appearance, but it comes at the expense of making the lead character look like a fool. Roy Thomas didn’t get the balance right. But his basic approach to Saxon was promising for an arch villain. He comes into the book and blows up the status quo entirely. Obviously, most of it gets reversed, but it takes another three issues, and there’s still a major status quo change that comes out of it. More of that next time, though.

Reading these issues, you can imagine a world where Starr Saxon became this book’s Norman Osborn, or where he toyed with Matt’s dual identity as a long-term storyline, taking much longer to show his hand. But Roy Thomas went in so hard on the idea, and boxed himself into such a corner, that he wound up killing Starr off in order to resolve the problem. Saxon had something, but Thomas burns through him very quickly.