Daredevil Villains #31: The Committee
DAREDEVIL #74 (March 1971)
“In the Country of the Blind!”
Writer: Gerry Conway
Artist: Gene Colan
Inker: Syd Shores
Letterer: Sam Rosen
Colourist: not credited
Editor: Stan Lee
We’ve skipped issue #73, which is a crossover with Iron Man. The villains are Zodiac and Spymaster, but they’re not getting an entry because it’s not a Daredevil story. It’s an Iron Man story, and there’s absolutely no reason for Daredevil to be in it, other than (presumably) a vague hope of boosting sales. Daredevil’s contribution is to join in some fight scenes and to stand around listening patiently to pages of exposition about the origin of the Zodiac Key. Two issues in, Conway has yet to write anything for Daredevil which isn’t a complete dud.
Issue #74 is better, though it’s still not exactly good. It’s the second of Conway’s two stories about blindness. We open with Daredevil fighting some random thugs, getting clocked over the head, and miraculously regaining his sight. But alas, it was all a dream. This takes up a quarter of the book, because Daredevil‘s eccentric pacing decisions are unaffected by the change of writer. We still have languid opening scenes, and a desperate rush to finish the plot at the end.
The plot finally starts on page 6, when Foggy shows up at Matt’s door. On his way over, he has suddenly and inexplicably gone blind.
Since this is a Gerry Conway script from 1971, Foggy’s reaction is overwrought. “I suddenly realised how you must have felt all these years – so helpless – so alone!” But let’s put that in context. This is a story where Matt Murdock literally can’t answer the door without saying things like “soul-searching’s not going to get that doorbell answered, and unanswered doorbells have a habit of haunting your conscience with burning questions”. If we’re taking that as a baseline, perhaps Foggy is actually being remarkably restrained.
Out on the streets, Matt and Foggy find that other New Yorkers are also suddenly losing their sight. Proving that he really is a man without fear, Matt hails a cab, and takes Foggy to visit his opthalmologist. But other than confirming that it’s a physical thing, the eye expert has no explanation.
Finally, Matt heads out as Daredevil. Right away, he stumbles upon a group of thieves raiding a jewellery store. This group is the Committee, who seem to be a bunch of street-level criminals led by a big bald guy called Smasher. Smasher refers to himself in the third person, and it’s hard to figure out quite what Conway was trying to convey with him. Sometimes he has Hulk-like dialogue (“Smasher hit you hard – hard so fat mouth rattle!”) which suggests he’s meant to be mentally impaired somehow. But at other times he talks normally except for the third person thing. And he’s clearly the leader of the Committee. You suspect Conway himself wasn’t quite sure what he was going for.
The rest of the Committee consists of eccentrically and flamboyantly dressed weirdos who don’t seem like any sort of threat. Somehow of other, one of them – he’s called George, but it’s never clear which of the group is George – has come up with a chemical that can blind all of New York by contaminating the water supply. Their plan is blind the whole city and loot some shops while nobody can stop them. That’s it. That’s the whole plan.
At first, the “Committee” name seems random – there’s nothing businesslike about these guys. It seems to be linked to an underdeveloped angle where Smasher has ideas above his station about how professional the gang is. That idea does make it to the page in a few points. When the gang ask how much money they’re each going to get, Smasher replies that he’s nominating himself as Committee Treasurer, and he’ll “keep all the dough in escrow”. There’s a joke I wasn’t expecting.
Individually, the Committee are just a bunch of guys. But thanks to Smasher’s brute strength and the gang’s weight of numbers, they actually win their first fight with Daredevil. That leads to the real point of the story, in which Daredevil teams up with a bunch of blind New Yorkers, since the blindness is now city wide, and they’re the only people who are unfazed by it. By this point, it seems, Conway had figured out that Daredevil isn’t functionally blind, so if you want to do stories about blindness, you’ll need some regular blind people. Of course, the other conclusion you might draw is that Daredevil doesn’t really lend himself to stories about blindness as well as you might think. And indeed, Conway doesn’t come back to the theme after this issue.
There are some sketchy attempts to show us the diverse range of blind people in New York, which is well and good, and strengthens the point of the story. Still, ultimately it’s a rather moralistic story about how the blind deserve more appreciation.
Given that context, the Committee don’t really have to be strong villains. They’re just there to drive the plot and provide a bit of entertainment value; the story is about the city-wide blindness gimmick, not about them. Even so, they feel like a missed opportunity. There’s something in the way Smasher tries to straddle being a thug and a mastermind at the same time – and the fact that his gang seem to accept him in the role. The joke about the Committee being delusionally “professional” had way more mileage in it. Gene Colan gives them fun, memorable designs – they’re ludicrously dressed for low-level criminals, and all the better for it.
The Committee could actually have worked as recurring comedy nuisance villains. They probably shouldn’t have been given such an effective scheme in their one issue – or at least they shouldn’t have been credited with inventing the blinding chemical themselves. It would have suited their gimmick better if they’d just stumbled upon it, or if they’d been given it by another villain who wanted to cause a bit of chaose. Then their angle would have been that they were a bunch of low-tier losers who had blundered into being a genuine city-wide threat, yet lacked the ambition or imagination to do anything with it beyond robbing a jewellery store. Smasher was never going to be a big name, but he could have been a good recurring joke.
This Committee is not the same Committee that fought Werewolf by Night and Moon Knight.
Oddly, Matt fights two other villains named Smasher by issue 150. (The others were agents of Death-Stalker.)
Very disappointed that a story with this title didn’t give Smasher an eyepatch.
The cover strikes me as a bit of a homage and parody to that of Action Comics #1.
Foggy takes the place of the unnamed person running scared towards the lower left corner, and we have a green bus partially rolled at the cover’s left side.
Almost as if Superman were just off-cover and decided to thrown green buses after starting with a green Beetle.
@Luis: I love that reading of the cover.
Also, the coloring on that cover is absolutely lurid. Remember just a few years ago when the covers were small, dull collages on a white background?
Before Waid/Marcos/Rivera/Samnee, was there anyone who was able to weave Matt’s blindness into the book effectively?
Finally, it occurs to me that Colan’s experience of drawing comics must have been so frustrating. He clearly wants to stretch out and really give the material some room to breathe. But he has to finish up in 22 pages by a certain deadline.
I mean, I’m just guessing — he could have just been a bad judge of time/page count. But he was a professional. I doubt he was making the same mistake again and again for no reason.
How do you come up with a plan like this?!
1) Make ALL OF NEW YORK go blind, including, presumably, the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, and Spider-man. How long is it going to take Reed Richards to come up with a work around for blindness? Is Vision (who would presumably be unaffected) with the Avengers at this point? Do you really want to get that entire crowd mad at you?
2) Any halfway sensible person is going to immediately connect “a series of robberies while everyone was blind” with “the robbers are probably responsible for the blindness.
3) Isn’t everyone in a major city going blind likely to result in some deaths? Even if it’s slow enough that it doesn’t cause everyone driving to crash, you’ve still effectively completely disabled the fire department, emergency rescue, and hospitals.
All this risk for some minor looting? That’s living dangerously.
Being an early-1970s Gerry Conway issue of DD, the Committee really should have been revealed as the same aliens who used this exact scheme (except for the purpose of colonization rather than robbery) in a Stan Lee issue. Of course that reveal would have been ridiculous, but that’s the raison d’être for Conway’s early-1970s comics.
@Sol- Vision was with the Avengers at this point but in his early stories he could be affected by poisons like an ordinary human. In Avengers 62, the Man-Ape knocks him, Hawkeye and Black Knight out with the same drugged wine.
The Vision was totally blind and Thor was in Asgard.
@Thom H: there’s a Jim Shooter interview in which he said that Gene Colan drew a lot of big panels so that he could work faster and make more money. In particular he complained that whenever the story featured an explosion, Colan would make the explosion a full-page panel.
@Joe S. Walker: Ah, there go my romantic notions of an artist’s dreams thwarted by the demands of commerce. Thanks for the info!
I could see a 1970s comic book science explanation that as a synthezoid, the visions eyes work like a real person and he could be blinded in the same way.
Yes, that was the early take on the Vision.
In his very first appearance, Hank Pym analyzes his body and says that “all his organs are normal, yet synthetic” IIRC.
It’s kind of odd that they changed Vision into being just another robot. A synthetic (super)human is far more interesting. But I suppose that’s a bit hard to explain every issue.
A large part of it comes from the revelation that the Vision used to be the Human Torch, I think. It was surprising enough that Ultron-5 would have the means to make an artificial biological human-like being in 1968, let alone Professor Horton back in 1939.
But beyond that, the Vision’s powers just aren’t a good fit to biological limitations and needs. For instance, how can he breathe while insubstantial? It is just easier to think of him as a mechanical being.
“Finally, it occurs to me that Colan’s experience of drawing comics must have been so frustrating. He clearly wants to stretch out and really give the material some room to breathe. But he has to finish up in 22 pages by a certain deadline.”
Said this on an earlier post, but when it comes to pacing he was basically a manga artist born in the wrong country.
Gene Colan did his best work when the structure was imposed by the writer. His Warren work is gorgeous, and doesn’t suffer from any pacing issues. He has noted in interviews that two of his favorite jobs were drawing Tomb of Dracula and Howard the Duck, which were tightly plotted.
As for Shooter criticizing Gene the Dean: there’s an interview in Comic Book Artist magazine in which Gene and his wife Adrienne talk about the Shooter years. Gene mentioned that pages were getting sent back with lots of notes for corrections. These corrections cost Gene time and money, as he wasn’t being paid for them. Adrienne suggested that Gene turn them in with just a handful of those corrections, something like 4 out of 20. When Gene did so, the pages were accepted and sent into production. Gene jumped ship to DC shortly after.
@Luis Dantas: Breathing while intangible is one of those genre things that generally get ignored.
Iron Man’s enemy the Ghost doesn’t seem to have any problems, for example.
Kate Pryde’s original limitation of having to hold her breath was discarded by the time of the mutant Massacre storyline, when she was stuck in an intangible state for a long time.
Even in the 1960s, Hank Pym is briefly turned intangible while inside the Vision’s body, and he gives out with multiple panels of wordy Roy Thomas dialogue. Likewise, Kitty, the Vision, and the Ghost have always been able to speak while intangible, which would mean moving air around in the body.
It’s a bit like the question about how characters like the Atom can see and breathe when they’re smaller than photons and gas molecules. Or how energy beings like the Living Laser or Klaw still seem to have normal sensory inputs. (How does light talk and hear?)
At most, there’ll be a handwave about how some other unspecified process is going on instead.
The Vision as a dickless automaton was a mistake and the Vision as an MP3 player was a greater mistake.
Gravity while intangible and sight while invisible are more problems to best not think about.
That said, there are different kinds of invisibility and Shadowcat’s phasing is wholly different from the Vision’s mass-shifting, which means they are entirely different kettles of fish. Or am I confusing density and mass too much? The Vision and the Atom increase and decrease
density but Giant Man, Goliath, Ant-Man and the Wasp increase and decrease mass, as does the Hulk, She-Hulk and Sasquatch, but only when they transform into gamma monsters, the last being a demonic gamma monster.
Invisible Woman doesn’t turn transparent (I don’t believe) but she can turn objects transparent… apparently.
My big problem with Klaw is his prosthetic wasn’t made of living sound but some writers treat it as insubstantial as the rest of him.
I’m pretty sure Kitty Pryde only had to hold her breath when moving through large solid objects, because there was no air inside them.
Quite a while ago (on usenet?), I recall getting into a discussion about Vision having children. Most people said that was stupid, but I leaned into “Even an android can cry” and said if he was complex enough to produce tears and he has synthetic organs, why can’t his anatomically correct organs produce sperm and semen?
I wasn’t being a jerk, I really wanted Vizh to be as detailed as a human.
(I think I also annoyed Kurt Busiek around the same time by asking, “Does Galactus poop?”)
@Si- yeah, the Official Handbook states that “Since she is unable to breathe while “inside” an object. she can only continuously phase through sold objects (as when she travels underground) as long as she can hold her breath.
What might have confused people is Uncanny X-Men Annual 18, where Sabretooth attacks Kitty and she phases and he says you can only stay phased as long as you hold your breath, and sooner or later you’ll have to solidify and she says “You’re right. Is this solid enough for you?” and punches him in the face. I always assumed that was because Sabretooth didn’t understand exactly how Kitty’s powers work and Kitty didn’t let accuracy get in the way of a good quip.
I always assumed that Kitty was able to breathe and talk while in open air by phasing the air molecules around her. Vision doesn’t usually turn large objects intangible but there is precedent for him turning smaller objects intangible- in Vision and the Scarlet Witch 5, he phases through a wall while carrying a Halloween costume in his hands. So it’s possible Vision can talk and breathe by turning the air molecules intangible.
For what it’s worth, in Avengers 244, the Dire Wraiths use the mists of the Dark Nebula on Vision and Vision thinks “I can exist for short periods of time in airless space…I should not be affected…yet I am.” The fact that Vision mentions “short periods of time” suggests that he can go without air longer than a normal human but still needs it.
Even into the 1980s, there were still hints that Vision was close to human. In Avengers 246, the Vision drinks coffee in front of humans and Wanda thinks “he never drinks coffee”, suggesting he does drink other beverages from time to time. In Avengers 251, he wakes from a nightmare sweating. The idea of Vision as “just a robot” really didn’t set in until Byrne had him taken apart and put back together in West Coast Avengers and showed a robotic body.
The problem I always had with Klaw was that writers couldn’t make up their minds about whether or not he was just living sound that looked like a man and therefore immune to physical harm except by Vibranium (which was apparently Kirby’s intention) or whether he was still human and could still be injured by physical force. The most extreme example of this is a Quasar story where Klaw falls and Wendell states that Klaw’s body should be unharmed by the fall, and an Annual following up on that that stated the fall nearly killed Klaw and would have had AIM not intervened.
@Michael: The Vision was also able to carry the Serpent Crown while intangible back in Avengers v.1 #154 so he could drop it into the ocean.
Byrne’s treatment of the Vision was especially bizarre after Byrne brought back the android Human Torch in that same run and wrote him treated as essentially humanlike. It’s worth noting that the Vision was still supposed to be built using similar technology, and that the Golden Age Torch could do things like give blood transfusions to human beings (usually giving them super-powers).
Regarding Klaw, the Marvel Handbooks tried to get around that inconsistency by stating that sometimes physical impacts create counterharmonics that can hurt Klaw. Of course, this is just stating that it’s going to be inconsistently handled, but in a technobabble sort of way.
Another minor inconsistency with Klaw: artists don’t seem to be able to decide if he still has external ears (as he was drawn in the 1960s and 1970s), weird circular things on the side of his head, or nothing at all.
Ears made of sound, now there’s a conundrum.
In the original golden age stories, Human Torch was almost always treated by the writer as a human … torch. The fact that he was an android was almost never mentioned.
Whether Vision (originally) could impregnate a human, I suppose that depends on just how finnicky Ultron got. Sure he has all the usual guts, but does he have synthetic cells with little synthetic mitochondria? Does he have synthetic chromosomes to pass on? If so, at what point does he stop being a synthetic man, and start being a human clone?
Finally, does Galactus poop? We’ve all seen asteroid Oumuamua, I think we know what it is.
Originally, it was stated several times that the Vision couldn’t have children. (It was clear that Vision was “fully functional”. though.) Englehart had Wanda create the babies after absorbing the energies of hundreds of sorcerers- and even though it was stated repeatedly that Wanda couldn’t have created the babies under normal circumstances, this led to writers boosting Wanda’s powers to ridiculous levels. (See also: Wolverine healing from a drop of blood with the help of a magic gem.)
@Michael: Serialized heroic narratives seem to have this problem in general.
What was shocking, spectacular, or special that one time becomes common knowledge for readers and creators, so the next thing has to get even wilder and the one-time thing becomes the new baseline.
In an endless serial, this trend eventually collapses the series into self-parody and/or you either get some kind of hard or soft reset of characters or continuities. It happens in superhero comics all the time, but it’s also happened to the likes of James Bond in film and to the Buffyverse characters in the various continuation series.
Or you deliberately exhaust the whole thing, getting to the point of maximum escalation, and then examine the narrative problem ythat creates, as in One-Punch Man and, in a grimmer way, Miracleman.
To paraphrase MST3K, “If you’re wondering how Vision eats and breathes. And other science facts, just repeat to yourself “It’s just a comic, I should really just relax.”
That said, I think Vision is cooler as a synthetic human than a robot. Like, him being a straight robot just gives writers the excuse for him to get blown up all the time.
@Mike Loughlin- even on Tomb go Dracula. Colin’s work had problems.In one scene, the plot was that a bullet came toward Dracula, Dracula turned to mist and the bullet a baby. That should have been a cool scene. But Colin just drew a panel of Dracula and then a panel of the mom, forcing Wolfman to have the mom explain to the audience what happened.
As for Colin and Shooter- keep in mind that Shooter DID have some legitimate gripes against Colan. At one point while Shooter was Editor-In-Chief, Colan was drawing a Dr. Strange issue written by Claremont where Strange and the Man-Thing fought Baron Mordo. In one scene, Mordo is approaching Strange from behind about to ambush him and on the next page Strange is saving the Man-Thing with Mordo nowhere to be seen. Claremont had to throw in an entire panel of text explaining what happened to Mordo.
@Michael: sure, Gene Colan made mistakes and I understand that Jim Shooter would have some legitimate criticisms of him. That doesn’t justify Shooter treating a talented, celebrated artist who had been with Marvel since Stan Lee’s days awfully. See also: a whole bunch of Marvel mainstays who departed for DC during Shooter’s tenure as EIC. I acknowledge that Shooter righted the ship during the late ‘70s, but there’s a reason Marvel staffers burned an effigy of the guy at a party held after he was fired.
There were reasons, but they are not necessarily all that defensable… and there were some awful excesses among Shooter’s critics as well, some of whom went on to have questionable stances elsewhere.
Invisible Woman doesn’t turn transparent (I don’t believe)
Sh used to make herself invisible back in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s. I don’t know of things have changed.
@Oldie- Yeah, she was able to trick a villain into thinking he killed her by turning one layer of her body invisible at a time in a Roger Stern story. That only works if she’s transparent. Which really doesn’t fit with the explanation that her power involves bending light but don’t think about it too hard.
In the 1990s cartoon Sue turned a section of ground invisible to reveal her location to the FF. That’s definitely making Sr Doom’s ceiling transparent.
But that cartoon didn’t explain her powers specifically because it’s a children’s show so there was no inconsistency there either.
“There were reasons, but they are not necessarily all that defensable… and there were some awful excesses among Shooter’s critics as well, some of whom went on to have questionable stances elsewhere”
Shooter usually deferred to his detractors, but not always, when his account differs from theirs. Two things to remember is that skilled storytellers don’t make for reliable narrators ESPECIALLY when they are persuasive autobiographers… and Shooter can make bad calls while also making good calls; a grudge built on creative differences makes for a passionate elligy burning but rarely a reasonable one.
So that’s my painfully centrist take on the matter.
@Chris: that is an entirely reasonable position. I’ll always give Shooter credit for being instrumental in Marvel’s late-‘70s/early-‘80s success, while thinking he treated a lot of people terribly. I don’t trust the veracity of a lot of Shooter’s recollections.
Reed would find a workaround for blindness just for himself, so he can carry on with his lab work, and wouldn’t even think of rolling it out to everyone unless Ben or Sue reminded him.
Reed: I did it. It took all of my incredible knowledge and scientific ability, not to mention tons of willpower, but I’ve created a cure for blindness. I can see again!
Alicia: …
@Mike Loughlin we shouldn’t entirely trust the veracity of any narrative crafted by professional storytellers.
ESPECIALLY because most of these people, by profession, were very good at making the unbelievable believable.
Well, that, and if the motive of Shooter is self-serving (why should it not?) and his detractors hold passionate grudges…
I think some of Shooter’s stories are true and others are not.
It’s an easy position to take when I have nothing at stake.
@Chris: I agree with your overall point. Even Kirby got some things wrong, or at least misremembered. It’s too bad that more pre-Bronze Age comic book history wasn’t recorded formally. Being junk that no sensible adult cared about (at the time) meant that we have to sift through what’s available to figure out who did what.
In Shooter’s case, however, he’s been called out for being incorrect in his recollections (because of either lying or imperfect memory) in the past, by others who were present at the time, or (in the Comics Journal’s case) did the research and showed where Shooter went wrong. Yes, his detractors can be quite zealous (see: the aforementioned Comics Journal). Sifting though what I’ve read, however, puts me on their side more often than not.
“Even Kirby”
Both Lee and Kirby notoriously possess awful memories.
Mark Evanier, on the other hand, kept receipts.