DAREDEVIL #75-76 (April & May 1971)
“Now Rides the Ghost of El Condor!” / “The Deathmarch of El Condor!”
Writer: Gerry Conway
Penciller: Gene Colan
Inker: Syd Shores (#75) and Tom Palmer (#76)
Letterer: Sam Rosen (#75) and Artie Simek (#76)
Colourist: not credited
Editor: Stan Lee

In certain parts of South America, January 1971 was an exciting time to be a diplomat, particularly if you fancied leaving the house. In Brazil, guerillas  kidnapped four diplomats, and ransomed them to secure the release of 130 prisoners. At around the same time, in Uruguay, the Marxist-Leninist group Tupamaros kidnapped the British ambassador.

What, you might ask, does any of this have to do with Daredevil? And… well, yes, that’s a good question.

What it has to do with Daredevil is this two part story, billed on the cover of issue #75 as “A shocker… ripped from today’s screaming headlines!” Just to prove the point, it includes a Daily Bugle front page story about a kidnapping in Buenos Aires (or a “kidnaping”, as the cover says in three separate places). But this being the Marvel Universe, the story is not set in Argentina. We’re in the previously unheralded nation of Delvadia.

The first thing we’re told about Delvadia is that the national hero is a guy called El Condor. He’s a masked horseman with a trained condor who died heroically in the Delvadian revolution back in the 1930s. The Delvadians love El Condor. There’s an insanely enormous statute of him over the capital city. And yes, it really does seem to be Delvadia’s answer to Rio’s statue of Jesus.

The basic idea is that an impostor El Condor is leveraging the legend for his own ends. This new Condor doesn’t seem like much fun – the guerrillas used to have “singing and drinking in the hours of firelight”, but now they have a grumpy, shouty man who punches his own men in the face when they interrupt his brooding sessions. His small band of revolutionary followers seem to be mostly sincere; one of them says he’s only in it for the money, but he seems to acknowledge that he’s in the minority. The guerillas also seem to be quite gullible, as they’re willing to believe that El Condor has returned from the dead after forty years, even though he hasn’t aged and doesn’t have any supernatural abilities. To be fair, at least one sensible American character also seems to take the possibility seriously, so apparently it’s meant to be semi-plausible.

The story opens with the US consul being kidnapped as he leaves the embassy. And while we may have left the United States, this is still a Gerry Conway story from 1971, so this is how the narrator sets the scene:

“Embassy! A building, a structure like any other – and yet, it represents something far more than a style of architecture. Within its echoing halls and tight, untidy rooms, men and women from the far-off, near legenday land of America work to make that legend real to the people of this tiny South-American nation…”

The first line of dialogue from a Delvadian character is “Ahh, Meester Villiers, you deesappoint us. Such a well-behaved man as yoursealve – it isn’t deegnified to scream!” This is not promising. It’s a relief to turn the page and find an unexpected diversion into the realms of Peter Milligan: The kidnapper’s colleague demands to know what the silly voice is for, and gets told that it’s a satire on American expectations. Conway clearly likes this moment, because he repeats it in full when recapping the plot (at inordinate length) in issue #76 – only to give precisely the same accent to some other locals who aren’t faking it.

Daredevil drives off the kidnappers, and we learn that poor Villiers is standing in for the US ambassador, who was kidnapped a couple of weeks previously. This has not deterred Villiers from strolling out of the embassy on his own with no security. As it turns out, Daredevil’s rescue achieves precisely nothing, because Villiers is taken away in an ambulance, and the crew hand him straight over to the guerillas anyway. Meanwhile, Villiers’ loyal aide Keith Bayard is determined to take matters into his own hands. The story centres around Daredevil trying to rescue the diplomats, while stopping Bayard from starting some sort of diplomatic incident by taking the law into his own hands – which he does, though it has no real impact on the plot.

But what on earth is Daredevil doing here? Ah, well. You see, he and Foggy have come to Delvadia on a “Senate-sponsored fact-finding mission”. Because who better than the New York District Attorney and his assistant to investigate political instability in South America? To be fair, Conway has an upcoming plot about Foggy’s thwarted political ambitions, and so it makes at least some sense for him to sign up for political junkets at this point. And Matt, supposedly, has been brought along for “a simple paid vacation”. Even so, it’s a real stretch to shoehorn either of them into this story.

El Condor’s plan is to use the kidnapped diplomats to lure the government forces into the hills, and then capture the undefended city. At first glance this seems unduly ambitious for a force of 100 men, but wait! It turns out that El Condor also has “helicopters! Thirty of them!” And everyone seems to agree that that’s going to make all the difference.

The helicopters come from the Russians – well, from “powerful foreign friends”, but you get the idea. El Condor’s personal motivations are kept ambiguous for most of the story – is he a Russian plant, a genuine revolutionary who happens to be taking Russian money, or just a cynic who wants to seize power? In the end, he gives us a rant about the peasants are a bunch of superstitious morons and how he plans to claim El Condor’s legacy for himself, so apparently he’s just a cynic. This was probably a mistake. El Condor is a more interesting character when the story lets everyone else project whatever they want onto his legend. That’s what the story is meant to be about, after all.

El Condor’s conquest of the nation does not come to pass, because that giant statue of the original Condor falls on him and crushes him to death. Supposedly it’s dislodged by a lightning strike, which would suggest some seriously questionable engineering decisions when they put it up. But we’re clearly meant to think that the spirit of the original has intervened to put a stop to the abuse of his legacy.

This story is much more simplistic than it would like to think. It has a rather utopian view of American involvement in South America, and never really gets to grips with its theme of the manipulation of legacy. But for all that, it’s actually quite a fun neo-Western romp. And the basic idea is quite solid, even if it was never going to translate into a recurring villain. As usual, Colan pays lip service to supervillain tropes by basically making him El Condor revolutionary with a rudimentary mask. If he looks a bit dated, well, he is supposed to be mimicking a figure from the 30s. In fact, there might have been some more story potential in the original El Condor, the interwar revolutionary.

Still, El Condor isn’t a Daredevil villain. He’s too far removed from the book’s usual setting to use him regularly, and that brings us back to the question of what on earth this story is doing in Daredevil in the first place, when it really has to shoehorn Daredevil into the plot. This is a story about national heroes and the American presence in South America – surely this is a Captain America concept?