Daredevil Villains #34: Mr Kline
DAREDEVIL #84 (February 1972)
“Night of the Assassin!”
Writer: Gerry Conway
Artist: Gene Colan
Inker: Syd Shores
Letterer: Artie Simek
Colourist: not credited
Editor: Stan Lee
We’ve skipped issues #80-81, which feature the Owl, acting at the behest of Mr Kline. That story also introduces the Black Widow to the cast, which will shortly lead to a radical retooling of the whole series. We’ve also skipped issues #82-83, where Daredevil and the Widow fight android duplicates of the Scorpion and Mr Hyde, built by, you guessed it, Mr Kline.
That brings us to this issue, where Daredevil finally meets Mr Kline after some six months of build-up. And defeats him in one issue.
Context, then. At this point, Gerry Conway was writing both Daredevil and Iron Man. Both titles gave Mr Kline an extended build up over the course of several months, with Kline sending an assortment of seemingly random villains to carry out missions with little or no discernible link between them. In Daredevil, he’s also a blackmailer, extorting money from Foggy Nelson for some vague and unspecified mistake. Eventually, after the whole arc is over, we do get an answer to this question: it’s something to do with papers that Crime-Wave prepared when he was working in the DA’s office circa issue #59, and that Foggy signed without reading them.
At first, Kline is depicted as an urbane man with a cigarette holder, invariably viewed from behind as he calmly monitors the progress of his many schemes. In issue #81, he turns out to be a robot – not a very interesting looking one, either – and inexplicably starts being called “the Assassin”, despite the fact that he doesn’t do any assassinating. His master plan somehow entails funding the mad scientist who creates the Man-Bull, framing the Black Widow for murder, making Foggy Nelson’s life a misery, and sending a guy called Mikas to fight Iron Man.
Oh, and there’s a pair of robot time travellers called the Final Sons of Man wandering around. Not in Daredevil or Iron Man, mind you. They show up in Sub-Mariner #42, which is also a Gerry Conway story.
The Iron Man stories never connect with this book at all, and Iron Man doesn’t even show up for the finale. Instead, Iron Man #45 has Kline musing about the success of his latest scheme, coupled with a footnote informing readers that Kline died in Daredevil #84 and needn’t trouble them further. So, yes, this is a horribly truncated ending to a story that had lasted more than half a year, as someone apparent woke up one day and said: hold on, what is this? Does this make any sense? Where is this heading? What? Who approved this? I did? I don’t remember that. I must have been drunk. Cut it short.
But this is a little unfair to Gerry Conway. At this point, a bit of publishing context is called for. A few months previously, Marvel decided to change the format of their whole line, raising the price from 15 cents to 25 cents, and adding an extra 15 pages of story. This grand idea lasted a single a month, after which Marvel abandoned the format change and changed the price to 20 cents. In the case of Daredevil and Iron Man, the plan had been to merge the titles – this got as far as being announced in Bullpen Bulletins. So if things had panned out as intended, Conway would have been building both titles towards a common storyline that they could resolve in their new shared book.
Once the merger was out of the way, though, Mr Kline was no longer required for that purpose. So the whole storyline is abruptly resolved, if you can call it that.
Mr Kline finally acts directly. He shows up in a Swiss ski lodge where Natasha is holidaying, posing as a Russian defector called Emil Borgdsky. Borgdsky claims to have invented a method to “cure certain forms of blindness”. Natasha immediately summons Matt to Switzerland. When he arrives, Matt quickly figures out that Borgdsky is (1) not human, and (2) Mr Kline. So, at night, Daredevil tracks down Kline to his secret Alpine base where…
…um, where he finds Kline on a video call with Baal, a super computer from 12,000 years in the future. In Baal’s timeline, humanity has been wiped out. Kline’s job is to alter history to prevent this apocalypse coming to pass, by averting certain key events. For example, by crushing Foggy Nelson’s spirits, Kline has ensured that he will never become Governor of New York, which would have brought about the end of the world in twelve thousand years. Strangely, Baal’s aim is apparently to preserve his own existence, and how that works isn’t really explained.
The original plan, it seems, was to restore Daredevil’s sight. This would (for some reason) lead to him retiring as a superhero, which (for some reason) would stop the annihilation of mankind at some point in the next 12,000 years. But when the villains spot Daredevil, plans change: sod it, just kill him. Well, the plot is being cut short. In the most explicit acknowledgement of what’s going on, Kline actually says “It’s a pity of sorts. Our other plans were so much more aesthetically pleasing…”
Poor Kline, after all his months of manipulation, winds up just firing laser beams at Daredevil. The Black Widow shows up to join the fight. And then the Final Sons of Man show up out of nowhere. They claim to be from a point even further into the future, and they’re here to stop Kline from altering history, thereby preserving their own timeline. They get rid of Kline in two panels, wave goodbye and “vanish, leaving two confused humans on the snow below”.
Obviously there are extenuating circumstances in this whole thing, but there are more fundamental problems too. The whole thing is cosmic overreach. At its core, it’s a workable time travel story. Mr Kline has come back in time to change history for the greater good. Is it okay for him to ruin a few innocent lives along the way? That’s presumably meant to be the theme, and thus far it’s workable enough. Plus, since almost anything might have an impact on the timeline thanks to the butterfly effect, you can use him to kickstart all sorts of plots while you’re building him up, before doing somethign big and sweeping with him at the end. And again, that’s basically what Conway is trying to do.
But twelve thousand years is far too long; it makes it too obvious that there’s no connection at all between Kline’s schemes and his supposed end goal. Maybe, at a push, I can buy that if Foggy Nelson gets into politics then it has knock-on effects on the policy of a major world power. But creating the Man-Bull? Mikos? Having the Black Widow put on trial for murder? The causal link doesn’t have to be clear, but beyond a certain point the whole thing just looks arbitrary. Because it is.
Besides, weird cosmic stuff is not Daredevil’s register. The concept is better suited to Iron Man, and would have been even better suited to Avengers or Fantastic Four. But Daredevil is hopelessly miscast. As a Daredevil story, this boils down to Matt looking befuddled while some robots fight each other. So even the germ of a good idea within Mr Kline isn’t a good Daredevil idea – which is a shame, as Foggy’s blackmail subplot is built up quite well at first.
The real importance of these issues isn’t the resolution of Mr Kline’s arc, but the introduction of the Black Widow as Daredevil’s new love interest. With the Iron Man merger off the table, she’ll be the focus of the next attempt to retool Daredevil, as the book relocates to San Francisco.
The Iron Man danglers page had this to say about Mr. Kline:
http://www.oocities.org/mh_prime/iron01.html
“The story ended so abruptly because readers were abandoning the two books — written at the time by Gerry Conway — in droves. It’s been said, in fact, that the Kline story actually did long-term damage to Daredevil and Iron Man sales in the 70s.”
I think the idea is that by forcing Foggy to prosecute Natasha, it demoralized him further and made him less likely to run for Governor, Of course, thet would have worked with anyone who Foggy knew to be innocent., so it’s not clear why Kline chose Natasha instead of just picking someone out of the phone book.
Mr. Hyde and Scorpion appear in Captain America 151. It turns out they’ve been prisoners of Kline the whole time and they assume it was SHIELD who captured them. Interestingly, two people who appear to be Mr. Hyde and Scorpion appear behind glass this issue- but they hsd to be more robots, since in Captain America 151, Mr. Hyde and Scorpion wake up in an intact mansion in what seems to be America, not a destroyed headquarters in Switzerland.
If they thought curing DD’s blindness would make him retiring from superheroing, then Kline and Baal know Murdock is Daredevil? So having Foggy prosecute an innocent fried/girlfriend of Daredevil’s could also cause a rift between the two of them. Then you could say there was some point where Governor Foggy passed some info to Matt or DD that caused a disaster (DD gets involved in some hostage crisis that turns out to have global ramifications?) and that doesn’t happen if Matt’s pissed Foggy prosecuted the Black Widow.
I don’t know, just spitballing. I think you could make this kind of thing work for Daredevil, but like Paul says, the timeline probably needs to be shorter, and probably keep it focused on a particular client. Someone Murdock is defending because they’re innocent of the particular crime they’re being charged with, but Kline says that leaves them free to commit a horrible act in the future (supposedly. Kline could be revealed to be lying, or just plain wrong.) I guess that’s just Deadpool 2, though.
OK, here’s my take on this story’s ending, it needs to be read with the perspective of a child. Imagine you are a twelve-year old kid reading DD at this time. Mr. Kline was initially written as a mastermind gangster type of character…perhaps one with access to robotic technology, but still, boring. Now, imagine reading DD #84 as the conclusion to this lingering mystery. Holy, this Mr. Kline isn’t some boring old gangster, he’s a robot from 12,000 years in the future sent back in time to change the past by a super computer which is, apparently, the dominant lifeform of this post-apocalyptic future. Not only that, but there are beings from even further up the timeline sent to stop Kline/Baal as it turns out that this road leads to an ideal future. Imagine how mind-blowing this would be for a kid in 1972. Forget if it makes sense to actually think about any of the clues which came before this finale.
Now, in order to attempt my recommendation, ingest a healthy amount of LSD before reading this storyline.
Baal-the-supercomputer has an even weirder motivation: he’s trying to prevent the future that leads to Baal’s own creation, since that ends with Baal as apparently the only sapient being on Earth.
In practice, the whole thing seems like a clumsy mashup of two Harlan Ellison ideas. The time-traveling robot idea seems a bit like Ellison’s Outer Limits script for the episode “Demon with a Glass Hand,” and the supercomputer as sole survivor in a postapocalyptic future resembles an idea from “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.”
Conway seems to have flipped things a bit, making the future computer suicidal, rather than omnicidal, and making the time-traveling robot evil, rather than good.
Hilariously, the end result is closer to the premise of the Terminator film franchise than Ellison’s stories, and Ellison successfully sued James Cameron over the film’s similarities. Maybe Conway should have sued, too?
It was actually the short story “Soldier from Tomorrow” (also adapted as an Outer Limits episode, “Soldier”) which Ellison accused Cameron of plagiarizing. Interestingly enough, the same story which Bill Mantlo actually did plagiarize in the Incredible Hulk which led to Ellison getting a lifetime supply of every Marvel Comic, a deal which I’m sure came back to haunt Ellison more than Marvel starting around 1991.
However illogical it may be, Baal isn’t suicidal – Kline says that “Baal is all that’s left, human – and to insure his own survival, he has sent me back through time – to change the flow of history that is causing his present dilemma.”
The idea seems to be that Baal wants to alter the timeline in such a way that he still exists, but the catstrophes that destroy the human race, and ultimately Baal himself, are averted.
That makes sense since it averts the dreaded temporal paradox where Baal changing the past so he is never created means that Baal could never have existed to send Mr. Kline back in time, so therefore, the future that leads to Baal’s creation must still be the current timeline. In the Marvel Universe, we know that this sort of paradox simply creates an alternate timeline, but this story was before that rule of Marvel time travel existed. Kudos to Conway for trying to avoid a logical inconsistencies leading to simple time travel paradoxes with his plot, regardless of how insane everything else ended up.
It’s really incredible that they kept making Daredevil comics at this point I’m history.
God must have been on the old hornhead’s side .
@Paul: That makes even less sense! But then, I also missed the idea that Kline initially wanted to cure Daredevil’s blindness, rather than just using a promised cure to lure him to his death.
There’s some weird stuff earlier with Kline thinking about eventually not having to obey Baal any more, and the Owl also rebels against Kline’s plans, so there’s some other kind of abortive theme going on there.
@Chris V: There is still the small problem that the Final Sons of Man are supposed to come from a time after Baal, but say that they’ve traveled to the present from “thirty centuries” in the future, putting them 9,000 years before Baal’s time (120 centuries later). Maybe Conway meant “thirty millennia?”
Daredevil not being the sort of hero that deals with time-travelling paradox stories does sort of fit. The disconnect reinforces the idea that Kline’s actions seem random from our perspective, but make perfect sense from his.
(There’s also a lovely meta pun you could do with DD being blind and Kline having perfect 20/20 hindsight.)
That’s not how it comes across, as you note, but it *could* have worked.
@Omar- Conway had a habit of not planning out his ’70’s stories very well The classic example is the Jackal. In his first appearance in Amazing Spdier-Man 129, he thinks about how he’s planning to “take over the city” and in the next issue he’s goading Hammerhead into trying to kill Dr.Octopus, hoping they destroy each other. The clear implication is that he’s trying to take over New York’s underworld. If he just wanted revenge for Gwen Stacy, then wanting both Dr.Octopus and Hammerhead dead makes no sense. Dr. Octopus WAS partially responsible for Gwen’s father’s death but Hammerhead never met Gwen. There’s no clear indication that the Jackal wants revenge because of Gwen until issue 146. After Conway was gone, the editors had to run a text page explaining the inconsistencies in the Jackal story because of Conway’s poor planning.
@CalvinPitt: I like the idea of Daredevil taking on a precognitive character who does Minority Report-style “pre-crime” attacks. Might work better as a rogue vigilante than a robot from the future, though…
@Michael: In the case of the Jackal, Conway’s original idea seems to have been “mysterious masked crimelord,” a riff on the Big Man, the Ditko version of the Green Goblin, and the Crime-Master. The Jackal’s costume even looks a lot like the Green Goblin costume.
Conway has stated that the “clone Gwen” storyline happened because Stan Lee and Conway kept being bombarded by fan demands to bring Gwen back, and Stan asked Conway to find a way to do it. Conway’s solution was to tell a story about why that wouldn’t work, and he recast the Jackal as a caricature of the folks who couldn’t let Gwen go and let the book move forward.
So the Jackal seems to be a case in which Conway was forced into a swerve of an initial concept because of outside pressures.
It may be more apparent in the Iron Man stories than in “Daredevil”, but the Mr. Kline stories were clearly half-baked even during publication. It feels like everyone is randomly changing mood, power level and/or motivation even within a given page.
Take for instance Iron Man #43. Kline appears to Mikas no less than three times to complain that it is taking forever for him to kill the captive Iron Man – and each time his appearance is somewhat different. It is a dragging story that may have played at some point at showing Kline himself being affected by slight deviations in the events of the distant past. But it doesn’t really use that idea – or any other. No wonder he is out of the book two issues later.
Interestingly, Conway leaves Iron Man’s, Daredevil’s and Sub-Mariner’s books in the space of a few months, in each case just short of the #50 and #100 issues. Of the three, I feel that Daredevil was the least meandering, which is faint praise. In the other two books he was just tossing random monsters and robots at the heroes to keep them busy.
They finally fixed the cover design! Looks good.
@Omar: Did Daredevil have any tie-ins to Civil War II? I think that would have been during Charles Soule’s run.
The late-90s Nighthawk mini-series used Daredevil as the counterpoint to Kyle Richmond, who was attacking people based on visions of crimes they were going to commit. Except those visions were a trick by Mephisto. Whoops. But that was focused on Nighthawk’s perspective rather than Daredevil’s, and they spent 2 of the 3 issues trying to escape Hell.
Omar> Maybe Conway should have sued, too?
I mean, he would have to own the stories first…
Funny to think of Marvel cancelling titles by means of a British-style merger. Great News, Faithful Ones!
@Joe S. Walker- that’s essentially what happened to Dr. Strange and Cloak and Dagger in 1986. They were both cancelled and then a split book called Strange Tales containing one Cloak and Dagger story and one Dr. Strange story an issue took their place.
@Michael – DC did it in the Silver Age, when the Atom and Hawkman became a team. THE ATOM & HAWKMAN took over THE ATOM’s numbering, but only lasted another five or six issues.
In the late ‘90s, Marvel published Man-Thing and Werewolf by Night comics, both of which were pretty good (art by Liam Sharp & Leonardo Manco, respectively). About a year in, the sales weren’t great. They combined the two books into an anthology series, I think it was another iteration of Strange Tales? I don’t think it went past the third issue. That’s the last time I can remember Marvel or DC trying to pivot two failing series into a new comic.
Of course, the most successful merger of two titles at Marvel wasn’t a split book, but rather a team-up: Power Man and Iron Fist.
More obscurely, and after the 1980s volume of Strange Tales, the three “Shadowline” series from Marvel’s Epic imprint were repackaged as a crossover called Critical Mass. Each issue was just a couple of the Shadowline series comics — right down to the page count and artists — that would’ve been published separately as parts of the crossover, but bundled together.
That brings to mind the related phenomenon of ending a few closely related titles by merging them into a crossover miniseries. The Thanos Imperative wrapped up the Abnett and Lanning Nova and Guardians of the Galaxy series, for instance, and it effectively replaced them on the publishing schedule.
@ Omar Karindu
Widowmaker (2011) was also a crossover miniseries that replaced the last issues of two different series, Black Widow and Hawkeye & Mockingbird, while also keeping the same creative teams in alternating issues.
I’m honestly kind of surprised that no author ever tried to tie Mr. Kline and Baal into the Cable mythos. Far future time traveling robots seem right up his alley.