DAREDEVIL #72 (January 1971)
“Lo! The Lord of the Leopards!”
Writer: Gerry Conway
Penciller: Gene Colan
Inker: Syd Shores
Letterer: Artie Simek
Colourist: not credited
Editor: Stan Lee

If you were feeling harsh, you might say that for Stan Lee, Daredevil was about the romantic triangle between Matt, Foggy and Karen; for Roy Thomas, Daredevil was about Matt and Karen trying to make their relationship work; and for Gerry Conway, Daredevil was about twenty pages long, once a month.

This isn’t entirely fair. True, Gerry Conway’s first year on the book has a lot of blatant filler, random crossover issues, and some decent ideas that would have been better suited to a different title. But he was clearly aware of the problem, given the drastic steps he took to re-tool the the book. And besides, right at the start of his run, we have a couple of stories that are unquestionably Daredevil-specific. They’re about blindness.

At first glance, this makes sense. Daredevil’s powers are his USP. Without them, he’s just a man with optimism and a stick. Some creators have focussed on his powers and made it work. But they’ve done it by taking a broader approach based on how he experiences the world differently. Conway focusses specifically on blindness. And you can do stories with Matt about how blind people are treated by others. But because of his powers, functionally speaking, Matt isn’t really blind at all. Sure, he can’t see through glass, he can’t read from across the room, he doesn’t experience colour, he can’t watch a movie – and you can build stories around those things. But is he really blind, at least in the same sense that other blind people are blind?

Issue #72 opens with a shadowy figure stealing a painting from the Metropolitan Museum. Here is how the narrator describes the scene.

“Midnight… the steady heartbeat of silence pulses unbroken… the shadows seep thickly ’round darkened corner… and in that darkness – movement! Lithe… soundless, he darts forward like a silken cat, whispering ‘cross marble floors, a shifting spot of black against the waning glow of pale moonlight…! Quietly, softly – a breath of midnight air, he runs… Until, penultimately, the shadow pauses… the night wind dies in the halls… and the thief steals!”

Welcome to 1971. Welcome to the Gerry Conway run.

Silver Age narration was always florid, but it was also more explicitly tongue in cheek. By comparison, the early 70s sees a turn towards histrionically earnest purple prose, something that never came back into fashion. “Penultimately, the shadow pauses”? What?

This isn’t a one-off. Here’s the next page:

NARRATOR: Light! Lancing crystal-white through the iron gray sky, twin spotlights knife open the twilight…!

VILLAIN (to himself): Down! Remember well your training – keep ever to the shadows – lest light’s revealing rays catch you unaware!

It’s going to be a long few years.

Anyway. This scene is meant to imply that the shadowy thief is Tagak the Leopard Lord, who debuts in this issue with much fanfare. Tagak is a costumed man with a trained leopard. Well, a more-or-less trained leopard – sometimes it takes a bit of yelling from Tagak before the leopard backs down from a fight. And on the surface, that’s pretty much Tagak’s whole gimmick. He’s got a leopard.

When Daredevil comes across Tagak, he and his leopard are in Times Square, looking for someone. Tagak gets into an argument with the police, no doubt because of New York’s famously strict anti-leopard laws. Daredevil steps in, but the leopard makes short work of him before Tagak calls it off. Then, Tagak just wanders off in search of whoever it was that he was hunting for.

This where we get to the theme, as Matt starts reflecting on the position of the blind in society. And Conway does hit on an interesting idea: that Matt is “so caught up in a sighted society” that he has things in his apartment that are completely useless to him both as Matt and as Daredevil. They don’t even make sense as part of a secret identity. What does he need a bathroom mirror for? Since 1971 was a very melodramatic time, Matt smashes the mirror in frustration. Look, a metaphor!

It turns out that Tagak is blind too; he “sees” thanks to his mental link with his leopard. What’s more, he comes from an alternate dimension where everyone is blind. Well, I think they are. It’s not entirely clear. At one point, Tagak says that the leopard thing is “a method employed when those of my world journey beyond our dimension”. That makes it sound like they don’t need the leopard at home. The leopard is only for special occasions. But later on, Tagak invites Daredevil back to his world, and says that “in this world, you are a misfit, but in mine…” Maybe Tagak thinks that all blind people regain their sight when they’re in his world? Who knows.

Don’t ask why Tagak’s alien dimension has leopards. It just does.

Tagak and his leopard have come to New York via their “Crysto-Mirror” portal – look, a metaphor? – to pursue Quothar, a “blasphemous thief” who has come to Tagak’s world from somewhere or other, stolen “the sacred Krill statue”, and escaped with it to Earth. This is literally as much personality as Quothar gets. He’s just a random bad guy for Daredevil and Tagak to team up against. He doesn’t even seem to be properly coloured – he’s shown in a bland light green in every panel. At first, it looks as if he’s meant to be in the shadows. But no, he still looks like even in plain sight.

Once located, Quothar is defeated in two panels. The story really doesn’t care about him at all. There’s a little subplot about how the museum director jumped to conclusions about Tagak. And that makes him the real blind man, you see. Feel free to sigh as deeply as you like.

Quothar is plainly an afterthought – he’s one step up from a macguffin, and he isn’t even set up as a potential recurring villain for Tagak, let alone Daredevil.  Tagak, in contrast, seems to have been intended as a potential recurring character. Perhaps Conway had plans for a hidden city of blind people that Daredevil could go and visit, but that’s more of a Superman idea than a Daredevil one. At any rate, if that was the plan, he thought better of it – Tagak never appears in this series again. His next appearance is the “Defenders for a Day” two-parter in 1978, and he’s also in a couple of issues of Contest of Champions in 1982. And that’s it.

You can see why nobody wanted to run with the idea, because this issue is painfully bad. Conway’s run does get better – it could hardly get worse – but this is a deeply unpromising start.