DAREDEVIL #78-79 (July & August 1971)
“The Horns of the Bull!” / “‘Murder!’ Cries the Man-Bull”
Plot: Gerry Conway
Script: Gerry Conway (#78), Gary Friedrich (#79)
Penciller: Gene Colan
Inker: Tom Palmer
Letterer: Sam Rosen
Colourist: not credited
Editor: Stan Lee

We’ve skipped issue #77, which is the comic that the Teardrop Explodes got their name from. It’s another random crossover – a prologue to Sub-Mariner #40, where Daredevil doesn’t appear. And it doesn’t have a villain anyway.

That brings us to the Man-Bull. It’s been a while since we had a new villain with any staying power whatsoever. He may be a Z-lister, but the Man-Bull does still show up from time to time. Why, he was in Miles Morales, Spider-Man just this year! Admittedly, he was teaming up with the likes of Mr Fish and Lady Stilt-Man. But hey, at least he was still in print in 2024. It’s more than you can say for most Daredevil villains of the early 1970s.

These two issues are part of the Mr Kline storyline, which was running through both Daredevil and Iron Man at the time. Kline is a complicated matter, and I’ll come to him properly next time. Fortunately, the details of Kline’s much-maligned arc don’t really matter for the Man-Bull. For present purposes, all you need to know is that Mr Kline kept showing up as a shadowy manipulator who got people to do seemingly arbitrary things with no apparent connection, all in service of a mysterious masterplan. In fact, for present purposes, you don’t even need to know that. All that really matters is that the future Man-Bull is a hapless henchman who’s been dragged into a larger scheme that he hasn’t got a clue about.

The implausibly named Bull Taurus – which later gets retconned to “Bill Taurents” – is the leader of a gang of street thugs. They happen to be working for Mr Kline, but their job for the day is simply to find some experimental subjects for “the Professor”, a mad scientist in Kline’s employ. Apparently the victim needs to be fairly big and strong, but otherwise, pretty much anyone will do. So Bull and his gang are just driving around the back alleys of Manhattan looking for random people to drag off the street. Gene Colan always likes to give some personality to characters like this, so they have a jeep, and a couple of them have flamboyant hats. And that’s pretty much the group. It’s only through weight of numbers that they qualify as a threat to Daredevil at all.

Bull and the gang try to abduct a couple of tourist hippies, but Daredevil drives them off. As you might expect, given Daredevil‘s chronic pacing problems, this sequence takes up half of the first issue. And all it really tells us about Bull is that he’s a confident bully and a violent thug with a modicum of common sense who evidently has the respect of his crew.

For some reason it’s desperately urgent that the Professor’s experiment goes ahead – “for some reason” is a common feature of Mr Kline stories, and we never do find out how any of this stuff fitted into his masterplan. What’s more, it seems that nobody else was wandering around in Manhattan that day. So, having failed to abduct anyone, Bull puts himself forward. It’s never quite spelled out, but there’s certainly an implication in the first story that Bull is doing this because he’s taking responsibility for his failure, and because he wants to protect the rest of his gang from having to do it. The gang are fiercely loyal to him – they talk about how well he’s always treated them – so we’re given to understand that Bull really does have some redeeming qualities. He’s meant to be a semi-tragic figure here.

While Bull is having alarming things injected into him, his gang set out for revenge on Daredevil and the two hippies. Daredevil is kidnapped, and wakes up to find himself facing a bizarrely mutated bull thing. This is worth stressing, because over the years the Man-Bull’s design has drifted towards a fairly standard animalistic humanoid. By Marvel Universe standards, he looks fairly normal. In his debut, he looks much downright distorted. It’s much more monstrous, and much more effective.

Oh, and he never actually calls himself “the Man-Bull” in these stories; that’s just the story title. The name doesn’t do the character any favours either, since it sounds so generic. They could at least have gone with “Minotaur”.

Bull’s transformation into this thing is apparently an unexpected side effect of… who knows? A nominative determinism serum? He’s still a violent thug, but now he’s prone to bouts of insane anger, and he wants revenge on Daredevil for putting him in this position. There’s a fight, Daredevil escapes, Daredevil comes back again, and there’s another fight, this time in Times Square. Daredevil manages to knock the Man-Bull out by tricking him into charging head first into a building, at which point he turns back to normal. The police take him away, the end.

If that all sounds a bit underwhelming… well, bear in mind, about half of these two issues is devoted to Mr Kline, or to a subplot about a returning Karen Page, or to light comic shenanigans with the hippy couple. The Man-Bull is simply a prominent henchthug, and in the bigger picture, his role is to be one of the guys that Daredevil has to get past before he can face Mr Kline. With that in mind, there’s nothing wrong with the Man-Bull. He’s a big violent guy, with a reasonable motivation to keep fighting Daredevil. The original design is more memorable than later appearances might suggest. And there could have been something in his one redeeming virtue of loyalty to his followers; you could actually have done a redemption arc with this guy in the long run. Unfortunately, Conway jettisons that idea when the Man-Bull returns in issues #95-96, by having him turn on his remaining follower – not a good move for the character in the long run.

We’ll see the Man-Bull a few more times in Daredevil – he also shows up in issues #129 and #144, before the book quietly forgets about him. His real problem is that he’s been built to a template that may be new to this book (unless you count the Ox), but it’s over-familiar from Amazing Spider-Man. His monstrosity in these issues goes some way towards marking him out, but Marvel didn’t stick with it. When toned down into a straightforward animal villain, he does feel uninspired. And that’s harsh, because in his debut story, he did have some personality. He was entirely serviceable, but his more distinctive features slipped away.