Daredevil Villains #35: Mister Fear III
DAREDEVIL #90-91 (August-September 1972)
“The Sinister Secret of Project Four!” / “Fear is the Key!”
Writer: Gerry Conway
Penciller: Gene Colan
Inker: Tom Palmer
Letterers: Sam Rosen (#90), Artie Simek (#91)
Colourist: not credited
Editor: Stan Lee (#90), Roy Thomas (#91)
We’ve skipped five issues with returning villains, so let’s get up to speed.
Issue #85 is a Gladiator story and it doesn’t matter in the slightest. Issue #86 brings back the Ox, but it’s an important issue for other reasons: Matt Murdock and Karen Page briefly reunite, it all goes wrong, and they decide that they were never meant to be together after all. Matt then decides to move to San Francisco and pursue his relationship with the Black Widow which is where the book will stay for a while to come. The existing supporting cast are completely jettisoned. Karen joins the cast of Ghost Rider for a while, but doesn’t return to this book until issue #227. Foggy Nelson won’t appear again until the book returns to New York in issue #108.
In their place are the Black Widow, her sidekick Ivan Petrovich (who comes with Natasha as a package deal), and a bunch of new Californian characters mostly forgotten by posterity, such as irascible police commissioner Ironguts O’Hara.
Clearly either Conway or his editors decided that the book wasn’t working and that drastic steps were needed. After all, Daredevil had been on the verge of merging with Iron Man. So far, Conway has struggled to find a hook on Daredevil himself; moving to San Francisco doesn’t change that, but it does make Daredevil into Marvel’s token west coast book, and it means that the Black Widow can be mined for story ideas.
You might expect bold new villains for this new direction. That’s not what happens. For some reason, San Francisco is full of villains that Daredevil has fought before. So issue #87 is Electro. Issue #88 is the Purple Man. And issue #89 is Electro and the Purple Man.
That brings us to the return of Mr Fear – or rather, the debut of a new Mr Fear. The original Mr Fear is dead, and Mr Fear II was Starr Saxon, who is also dead (so far as Daredevil is concerned, anyway). We’re now on to Mr Fear III, Matt’s old law school classmate Larry Cranston, who practises law in San Francisco.
Matt is invited to join Larry’s firm. Larry shows up at Matt and Natasha’s house accompanied by another new supporting character, senior partner Jason Sloan. The story bends over backwards to imply that Sloan is the villain. His aura reminds Matt of the Owl and the Purple Man, and Natasha thinks there’s “something so evil about the way he moves”. This is never explained and never comes up again. Maybe the idea was that Cranston was trying to frame Sloan as Mr Fear – which would fit with his motivation – but it’s not at all clear how that works. (Jason Sloan does eventually turn out to be corrupt, but he’s more easily led and morally weak than actually evil.)
I’ve listed this as a two-part story, but that’s debatable. Most of issue #90 deals with an ongoing storyline about something the Black Widow did as a Soviet spy. That’s part of the build for the next villain, so we’ll come back to it next time. Mr Fear’s contribution to that issue is simply to give Daredevil and Black Widow random panic attacks while they try to get on with the main plot.
He doesn’t show up in costume until issue #91, and so the story is mostly about the fear gimmick, with very little to say about Cranston himself. As we’ve come to expect, Daredevil doesn’t confront Mr Fear until the last six pages. By that point our hero has already figured out that he’s dealing with a new Mr Fear, so he’s brought the antidote. This means that Mr Fear is just a lawyer in a borrowed costume, but he still puts up something of a fight against Daredevil, which the story tries to justify on the grounds that Daredevil hasn’t had much sleep lately.
Once unmasked, Cranston explains his origin. By sheer coincidence, he happened to be passing when Starr Saxon murdered the original Mr Fear, and the dying villain revealed where he kept his spare costume. Cranston’s tossed-off motivation is to get revenge on star lawyers like Matt Murdock and Jason Sloan – he thinks that they get all the credit while he does the hard work. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this in theory, but it’s a token motivation in practice, and it hasn’t got much to do with the fear gimmick.
Finally, Cranston meets a pathetic end. Having been caught on the roof of his office, he manages to break free and declares that he’ll be back for revenge. He plans to fly to safety with his jetpack. So he leaps over the side of the building. And then he remembers that he took off the jetpack three pages earlier, and plummets to his death. It’s Wile E Coyote level stuff.
Or at least, the clear implication is that Cranston dies. The story is weirdly vague about it, yet it’s hard to see how he could be anything else, or how Daredevil could have failed to notice the absence of a body. We’re told that Daredevil embarks on “long hours of aimless wandering” to digest what’s just happened. And the Official Handbook certainly thought he was dead.
Despite all that, more than twenty years later, Cranston resurfaced alive and well in Over The Edge #1. According to that story, he somehow escapes and builds a new life as a law professor at Columbia University. This led to him being reintroduced as a recurring villain in the #360s. Presumably someone just liked the fear gimmick and decided to use the Mr Fear who was already around. The gimmick is perfectly fine – it’s the Scarecrow, after all – but Cranston himself doesn’t bring anything new to it.
From the look of it, Gerry Conway saw Mr Fear as just another old villain who could fill time while he built up his Black Widow story, the main focus of his San Francisco issues. We’ll see next time how that worked out.
It really is odd how later writers took Cranston and made him one of Daredevil’s most vicious enemies, a guy who destroyed Matt’s ex-wife and left the Gladiator permanently insane.
In context, he was essentially a villain of the month, but I guess the idea that his civilian identity could be a foil to Matt Murdock was part of why he came back. That, and his successor as Mister Fear being even less interesting and threatening.
Joe Kelly probably made the most of Cranston as the anti-Matt Murdock in legal professional terms, picking up from Kesel’s aborted reintroduction of the character. But Kelly’s storyline is cluttered up with a tangled plotline involving a serial killer protected by his corrupt, politically powerful father. And then the story ends with the serial killer…digging himself out of his own grave? It ended up taking a lot of the focus away from Cranston’s efforts to frame Karen Page.
Ed Brubaker mostly just gave Cranston some power boosts and played up his sociopathic willingness to hurt people just to get at Matt Murdock. (In Brubaker’s run, the “evil lawyer counterpart” idea wound up attached to, er, Lady Bullseye.) Brubaker’s Mister Fear was built on the broader idea that someone who controls fear would be able to do especially subtle and nasty things.
And after that, the character hasn’t really turned up again as a Daredevil villain, and instead shows up as an especially loathsome part of ad hoc villain teams in various crossover spin-off miniseries. At a guess, this is largely down to writers wanting to ignore Matt’s brief marriage to Milla Donovan.
Especially after Brubaker’s use of the character, Cranston ought to be one of Matt’s most bitter personal foes, and he’s even been set up as such by at least two writers in long story arcs. Somehow, he just never quite makes it there.
In the longer term, I think Mister Fear III interesting case of a villain who doesn’t gel despite multiple revamps and big pushes by generally solid writers.
I think Brubaker widening Mr Fear’s powers and making him more sociopathic just made him another version of Purple Man, and, well, DD’s already him as a villain.
Things are pretty bad when you can’t make a fear-based villain work against the man without fear. That seems pretty basic. Maybe Conway should have tried a different opposite of “no fear” instead like Mr. Caution or Ms. Thoughtful Choices?
“Ironguts” strikes me as an aggressive nickname, but I like it. Evocative.
The square inset on the cover works better without that clunky white border.
Oh, and “Cranston”? Is that a subtle nod to The Shadow in some way?
The weird thing about Ralph Macchio bringing back Cranston its that he didn’t kill off the fourth Mr. Fear, Alan Fagan. That’s arguably one of the main reasons why Mr. Fear hasn’t taken off as a major villain- readers and writers get the two Mr. Fears mixed up. Whenever a Mr. Fear shows up and isn’t identified, readers get confused as to whether it’s Cranston or Fagan. A good example is the King In Black: Thunderbolts mini- the Mr. Fear is apparently supposed to be Cranston but he’s characterized like a loser, which is Fagan’s characterization.
I don’t know what the point is of having two villains around with the same name and similar costumes- it just creates confusion among the readers. The most obvious example is Cobra and his nephew, who is also called Cobra- often readers are confused which Cobra is appearing. Another example is 8-Ball. 8-Ball was killed in the Daughters of the Dragon series. But then he shows up as one of several villains fighting Spidey in Amazing Spider-Man 600, written by Dan Scott. It’s not clear if the mistake was Slott’s or the artist’s but Scott tried to cover for it by introducing a new 8-Ball who got his equipment from Roderick Kingsley Some years later, Jed MacKay was writing Moon Knight and he decided that Marc could use a supporting character who like Marc had been brought back from the dead, so he had the original 8-Ball show up, revealed that he had been brought back from the dead by the Hood and eventually reform. You’d think MacKay would just reveal that the “second” 8-Ball was really the original or Drop a Bridge on the second 8-Ball but he didn’t, so the second 8-Ball is still out there.
The other problem with Kelly’s Mr. Fear arc was that Cranston appears under his real name publicly, even though Macchio established that he was believed to be dead and was using an alias.
Brubaker’s idea was that Cranston had created a drug which would enable him to inspire loyalty in other as well as fear. There was precedent for this- Fagan used “the subtle scent which makes a man irresistible to a woman” on Betty Brant. (He didn’t do anything to her sexually- the incident served just to make Betty realize she’d become too dependent on the men in her life.) But this arguably made Cranston into more of a generic mind control villain. (And Brubaker did have Cranston use the drug to rape a female corrections officer to drive home how helpless Matt was in protecting the public from him.)
Hilariously, Sloane’s OTHER partner also turned out to be a super-villain. How bad a judge of character is Sloan?
Kesel and Brubaker were correct, this guy is the best Mr. Fear.
I love that his beef is not with Daredevil but with Murdock himself, who he has correctly regarded as insufferable since law school. I love that his response when asked how he found out Matt is DD is essentially “I thought about it for five minutes”. And I love him haplessly falling to his death.
Brubaker I think went a bit too far in essentially turning him into the Purple Man. But I would like to see the guy come back and be used again. He is a much more compelling arch-nemesis than Bullseye.
Fear-based villains always have a tough go of it, since most writers will default to having the heroes “overcome their fears.” Half the time this means thuddingly on-the-nose hallucination sequences.
Brubaker and Kelly tried to work around this by having Mister Fear III work more subtly by enhancing the fear and paranoia of others. That can work as an angle, but it would also get repetitive after a while.
I also think Mister Fear is a bit hard to fit into the kinds of crime thriller and noir storylines that have become the norm in Daredevil. He’s a great character for a slowly building atmosphere of paranoia, but then it’s going to turn out to be artificially induced by the guy in the skull mask, which tends to unravel the sense of a world gone rotten or mad. It’s not a corrupt society after all, it’s just those evil chemicals from the evil, evil man.
Brubaker’s prison story was very good, and made me think his Daredevil run was going to be great, but the Mister Fear story was a depressing slog. While Daredevil is a super-hero whose life gets torn apart with alarming frequency, that arc took too long and made Matt virtually useless. Poor Milla was blatantly fridged. Brubaker’s run got better, but never reached the heights of its first arc.
Boy do I really like the current Mr. Fear design with the like gorilla skull and tattered cloak.
So potentially stupid question: has anyone done a story where Mr. Fear uses his powers on everyone around Daredevil? I mean, it seems like there’s a story in Cranston trying to get to Murdock by making everyone else afraid of him.
The cover for Daredevil #91 shown above had an earlier draft which shows Mr. Fear with his hand around DD’s throat instead of the odd chin-grab he’s doing on the published version. Possibly a Comics Code-driven revision, since it seems a fairly direct bit of violent imagery for the era.
@Taibak: There was Mark Waid’s story with the villain Coyote making everyone in Matt’s life think he’d gone mad again and gaslighting Matt himself through some particularly nasty and ingenious teleportation-based powers, but it’s not quite the same thing.
I don’t think this particular idea has been done with Mister Fear, but there was Gerry Conway Batman story in the early 80s with a similar premise. The Scarecrow doses Batman with a drug that makes him emit a pheromone that makes other people terrified of him, even his closest allies.
The story is from Detective Comics #503.
It was done pretty broadly, as you can see from the synopsis linked above. These days, I suspect we’d get a subtler version, with the fear-inducing villain exacerbating the supporting cast’s wariness more slowly, alienating them from the main character, and perhaps graduating to people being paranoiacally hostile and afraid of the character.
Omar: That’s kinda what I’m looking for. I mean, there are VERY good reasons for people to be afraid of someone who dresses like the devil, can see in the dark, and beats the stuffing out of people; and very good reason for people to be uncomfortable around Matt Murdock given all the junk he’s pulled over the years. You’d think someone would have run with it.
And, yes, it should work very well with batman too.