Daredevil Villains #36: Damon Dran, the Indestructible Man
DAREDEVIL #92-94 (October-December 1972)
“On the Eve of the Talon!” / “A Power Corrupt!” / “He Can Crush the World!”
Writer: Gerry Conway
Penciller: Gene Colan
Inker: Tom Palmer
Letterer: John Costanza
Colourist: not credited
Editor: Roy Thomas
I’ve called these issues Daredevil #92-94, but you might have noticed that the cover logo quite clearly says Daredevil and the Black Widow. That starts with issue #92 and continues through to issue #106. During that time, editorial footnotes call the book “DD/BW”.
But according to Marvel, these title of this comic is was still Daredevil during this period. And they have a point. It’s not just a question of checking the copyright warning. The cover design of the time had the title in text just above the cover box, and that still just said Daredevil. The Stan Lee Presents captions on the splash pages still just said Daredevil. And for the most part, despite her equal billing on the cover, the book continued to treat Daredevil as the star and the Black Widow as a supporting character, albeit a prominent one.
The exception is the Project Four storyline, which culminates in these issues. But it’s a major exception. Gerry Conway introduced the subplot back in issue #87, as soon as the book relocated to San Francisco, and it’s been building ever since. In previous issues, we’ve learned that on her very first mission as a Soviet spy, the Black Widow and freelancer Danny French were sent to steal something from the mysterious Project Four. Project Four turned out to be a bunch of scientists working on a mysterious and allegedly powerful artefact. It’s a weird energy globe thing, and it’s the macguffin for the whole arc. Danny French has had it all this time, but he’s never figured out how to use it.
There’s a whole strand in here which doesn’t really concern us, about whether Danny French is a friend or an enemy. He seems to be intended as a loveable rogue character, or perhaps he just believes that he is. He’s also genuinely a bit of a creep, and he has sexist elements that were intended to give Black Widow something to push against in the early 1970s and make him thoroughly unlikeable in the 2020s. You could argue that he’s a villain of sorts. But he’s certainly not the antagonist, so we won’t be focussing on him.
Instead, the villain of this arc is Damon Dran. Over the course of the story, he becomes Damon Dran, the Indestructible Man. Perhaps Marvel could license him out to Viz.
Damon Dran is an insane and paranoid billionaire. It turns out that he funded Project Four in the first place, and he’s spent years trying to recover his lovely globe. At first, he’s a fairly standard wealthy criminal mastermind. He has plenty of henchmen and scientists working for him, and a lot of equipment, but Dran himself is just a middle aged guy in a suit. Gene Colan gives him a demented charisma, with frilled collars and an enthusiastic, supercilious grin.
Dran’s motivation is sketched out in narrative captions rather than being properly set up in the story. But the underlying idea is quite solid. He’s a rich guy who’s used to being able to buy his way out of the problems that everyone else has to deal with. But no amount of money can buy him out of the risk of nuclear war. Or can it? Dran could have deployed his vast resources to help prevent nuclear war from happening. Instead, he created Project Four, to give himself superpowers, so that he would survive a nuclear war. And that’s what the globe is for.
The nuclear war framing is very 1970s. But the modern real-world equivalent would be an insane, paranoid billionaire who feared climate change but, instead of doing anything about it, devoted his resources to terraforming Mars. So the concept has aged rather well, all told.
Issue #92 mostly consists of Dran trying to extract the globe’s location from the captive Black Widow and Danny French. There’s a detour in here where he sends a henchman called the Blue Talon to fight Daredevil. The Talon gets the cover slot of issue #92, but I’m not devoting a post to him, because he’s just a generic martial arts guy with a deeply unfortunate skin tone who fights Daredevil for a few pages and never shows up again. Dran is the main focus, even in that issue.
In due course, Dran gets his globe, and his scientists start to power him up. Issue #93 features a fight between Daredevil and a battlesuited Dran, which ends with Dran’s mansion exploding. But in issue #94, it turns out that thanks to the globe, Dran has become an ever-growing, indestructible giant. Having already achieved personal invulnerability, Dran decides that in order to be especially safe, he needs to rule the world, and so he marches on San Francisco. While it’s a somewhat bizarre raising of stakes, it fits with his motivation.
Gene Colan only does layouts on the Indestructible Man chapter, with Tom Palmer finishing the art. Conventional supervillain designs were never Colan’s strong point. But his Indestructible Man works well – not so much for the costume, which is routine, but for the fact that he still has a hazy, increasingly stylised version of Dran’s balding, ordinary head. It’s a weird midpoint between mundane and cosmic which not only sells the threat, but also suggests Dran losing touch with reality as he turns into a plodding giant.
Much of the final issue consists of the military shooting at the Indestructible Man – to no effect whatsoever, because he’s indestructible. It’s a little bit like the first Juggernaut story, pushing the Indestructible Man as an unstoppable force. In X-Men, of course, the solution was that the Juggernaut was vulnerable to telepathy. The Indestructible Man could hardly turn out to be vulnerable to radar, so the solution in Daredevil is that he still needs the Project Four globe to hover around him and provide him with power. And while he may be invulnerable, the globe isn’t. And so a story published in 1972 culminates in the heroes winning a boss fight by shooting the otherwise indestructible villain in his little red weak spot.
The other aspect of the story is that the Black Widow and Danny French both feel terribly guilty about having botched their Project Four mission and thus allowed all this to happen. Needless to say, it’s Danny who atones for his sins by dying heroically to bring down Dran.
The story strongly implies that Dran dies after his defeat. “Within short moments,” the narrator says, “Damon Dran is consumed by the energy he sought to control, and those who watch … are forced, toward the end, to turn grimly away.” But the art doesn’t show any of that. In 1983, George Perez brought Dran back as a Black Widow villain in Marvel Fanfare, and just declared that he’d survived with horrific scarring. He’s made a handful of appearances since then – he’s in a Captain America story in 1994, a Black Widow story in 2014, and the Black Widow & Hawkeye miniseries from earlier this year. He’s never returned to Daredevil. To the extent that he’s used at all, it’s as a Black Widow villain.
And you can see why. Although his concept is sound enough, it’s also easy to recycle for a more modern character. Damon Dran was never really a Daredevil villain – he was a Black Widow villain who happened to debut in Daredevil.
A horribly scarred enemy could be good for Daredevil. The irony being that the bad guy wants revenge for his ruined face, but to Daredevil he just “looks” like any other guy.
Loads of Daredevil villains are basically interchangeable martial arts guys. Blue Talon was ahead of the curve.
There’s a real run of “not really a Daredevil villains” during the San Francisco era. I am still awaiting Matt’s big rematch with Mandrill.
Damon Dran usually appears about once a decade- although, for some reason, he didnt appear in 2004.
I think the reason he doesn’t get used more is he’s just invulnerable- he’s not super-strong or anything, so he can’t be used in combat and he’s just a generic mastermind.
@Skippy- Daredevil did fight Mandrill again when he guest-starred in Defenders.
@Michaerl: Also, despite the scarring, he’s essentially gotten what he originally wanted after all. He’s indestructible! He’ll survive a nuclear war after all!
He’s become that laziest of all comic-book villain archetypes, the mastermind who can’t be bothered with a proper scheme because all he wants is revenge on the hero for thwarting his last revenge scheme.
Dran is another DD character who could use the Twilight Zone treatment. I think he’d do well if a writer wrote him in a similar plot twist to the episode “One More Pallbearer”. The treatment which gave him his indestructibility caused him to completely lose touch with reality, he hallucinates that the nuclear war happened and he’s the last survivor. He goes around lamenting that he got what he wanted, he survived, but now he realizes he doesn’t want to live alone forever in a devastated world. He can see his invulnerability as a curse with no way to escape it. His motivation in the future could have been revenge against DD and BW for not stopping him from gaining the invulnerability he sought. It would have made him a more interesting and less generic villain.
Someone needs to write a “Black Casebook” style story for the Conway and Gerber DD issues in the manner of Morrison’s Batman. Someone needs to revisit the concept of Baal.
What’s the indicia say?
I agree that Dran’s a pretty lazy villain. When Stephanie Phillips revealed him as the villain in that Black Widow & Hawkeye mini, my immediate reaction was, “Who?” I didn’t remember him until I reread the Ralph Macchio/George Perez story courtesy of a hardcover collection Marvel released in 2010. Dran made no impression, apparently upstaged in my memories by his chief leg-breaker, Snapdragon, or the big fight with the SHIELD guys in the Widow’s apartment at the start.
And Phillips, in addition to not really explaining anything about Dran beyond “revenge!” messes up the backstory. She includes flashbacks where the Black Widow, in her dark wig, fishnets and short cape look, is captured by Snapdragon and taken to the Soviet Embassy to be interrogated by an unscarred Dran. Yet he’s got to have received the indestructible treatment because Hawkeye shoots him with a blast arrow, one of which already knocked Iron Man on his ass, and the Widow remarks it won’t stop him long.
Dran’s really just a guy with the money to throw lots of other physical threats at the hero. And given he’s a dude from Natasha’s spy past that has beef with her, which describes roughly ~70% of all Black Widow stories, there’s nothing special about him as a foe for her.
(The other 30% of Black Widow stories are, “the heroes wonder if they can trust the Black Widow, because {insert sketchy thing she did.}”)
I’m honestly kinda surprised Damon Dran didn’t get sucked into Orchis from the Krakoa era. His whole gimmick of trying to evolve himself past nuclear war motivation would have fit in some of the c-listers that shored up their ranks, if only as money man. Sure, he was obscure but Orchis had the likes of Judas Traveller as a member for god’s sake.
It strikes me that the problem with so many of the “final boss” villains for so many of these arcs are, ill-defined or lazy aside, too BIG for a Daredevil comic. Maybe the reason so few have stuck around are because Daredevil is ostensibly a street-level hero, but he always seems to end up tackling a robot sent from the future it ensure its own timeline, or a giant indestructible billionaire who’s trying to survive a supposedly impending nuclear holocaust. Hell, in about 20 issues, even the Mandrill is trying to take over the United States. It really feels like a billy club and a built in lie-detector aren’t the best weapons against those. That should be an Avenger-level threat!
I wonder if this was to try to separate out DD from Spider-man… while Spidey occasionally fought aliens or Doctor Doom for some reason, his remit was almost strictly New York. And we’ve seen how easily Spidey villains slot in to Daredevil stories, even *before* Kingpin gets co-opted. So — MAYBE the idea behind the scens was, DAREDEVIL was the book you through Moondragon a cameo in, because DD and Widow could handle that kind of wierdness, and SPIDER-MAN occasionally saw the likes of, I dunno, Ka-zar or whoever — still weird, but at least the guy came from this planet.
@Derek Moreland: A lot of that is down to Daredevil being a C-list title without much identity of its own until the later 1970s. Creators tended to either not give it much love — as with the creators during Lee’s run as scripter — or brought in whatever they were interested in — as with Conway and Gerber.
Thus far in Paul’s series, Roy Thomas is the only writer who’s seemed interested in figuring out how to make Daredevil work as an ongoing title, rather than as this month’s story.
The same sort of thing happened to the Silver Age X-Men, which also lost Lee as scripter relatively early, spent a long time with writers just throwing in their latest weird idea, and only belatedly started moving back towards the original concept.
And, as with Daredevil, it took a much later creator with a singular vision to finally come up with the defining core concept and stylistic approach to the title.
I read somewhere that DD’s sales kept slumping with Gerber throwing in the cosmic stuff related to Moondragon. Gerber wanted to get in on the Starlin Thanos storyline fun, but fans of DD weren’t enthused. Marvel made some assurances that the DD comic would return to more grounded material in future issues while moving the comic back to a monthly schedule.
Even for all its flaws, the DD comic did gain an identity/style of its own under Marv Wolfman. It would take Miller to really bring out the potential, but it was waiting to be born.
I do think the Moondragon origin issue was Gerber’s strongest story on DD, thereby making it the strongest DD story going all the way back to Conway taking over, but it didn’t belong in Daredevil.
@Chris V: And, of course, Gerber, like Starlin and Steve Englehart, was part of the circle of Marvel writers who used to wander around Greenwich Village in the wee hours, spitballing stories.
Engelhart also tied his Avengers stuff in to the Thanos/Mar-Vell plot, but that was a more natural fit, especially since Starlin had already featured the Avengers in earlier chapters. And, of course, Starlin was game for adding to the DD stuff, and drew the pages with Moondragon’s origin. For that matter, Gerber also crossed over with Englehart’s Avengers in issue #99.
Gerber also picked up the book with the story of Conway’s last co-creation for Daredevil, the Dark Messiah, who was already a kind of pseudo-cosmic character. So it may be that Gerber felt a bit more justified in running with that tone, especially if it meant he could tie in to his buddies’ ideas.
“The nuclear war framing is very 1970s. But the modern real-world equivalent would be an insane, paranoid billionaire who feared climate change but, instead of doing anything about it, devoted his resources to terraforming Mars. So the concept has aged rather well, all told.”
Not that you have anyone particular in mind or anything.
However, unlike Starlin and Englehart, who were really high, Gerber assures that he wasn’t using drugs.
@Omar-Moondragon’s origin in Daredevil 105 was intennded for an issue of Iron Man that Gerber and Stalin planned to do circa Iron Man 55. It was drawn a year before the Daredevil story saw print. That’s why the Daredevil story is so inconsistent with the version of Heather’s origin we saw in Captain Marvel- Thanos is depicted as a child when she was brought to Titan, and her parents are depicted as being accidentally killed by a Titanic spaceship, instead of an adult Thanos murdering her parents, like in every other depiction of her origin. Also, Thanos’s and Eros’s mon has a different name.
Gerber and Starlin did work together on Iron Man #56 (completely unrelated to Thanos). A very entertaining issue of IM.
@Michael: Yeah, it’s clear that the early Thanos and Titan stuff wasn’t fully formed, and everything is revised a few times over as Starlin gets the opportunity to take his ideas further.
The first Thanos story from Iron Man v.1 #55 has all the Titan characters depicted with Thanos’s purple skin tone, Thanos himself is pretty standard galactic conqueror type, and the Destroyer is set up as Thanos’s brooding, implacable enemy.
Thanos is quickly rewritten as a kind of mutant unlike the other Titans, gains his unusual motivation regarding death, and Drax the Destroyer is sidelined in favor of Mar-Vell and almost entirely written out by the time Adam Warlock is Starlin’s protagonist.
It seems like Moondragon’s backstory was developed before Starlin had developed his origin story for Drax, which is obliquely hinted at in Captain Marvel v.1 #28 with a sequence entirely scripted by Starlin, and fully explained in issue #32, which also retcons Moondragon’s backstory a bit….and came out some months after Daredevil v.1 #105.
@Chris V: Ah, yes, the Rasputin story. A greta mix of the absurdist humor of both Gerber and Starlin.
I’m always so interested to read commentary about ’70s Marvel, but usually disappointed when I read the actual work.
Moondragon has been a personal favorite since New Defenders, though, so maybe I’ll cautiously approach her origin story in that Daredevil issue.
Speaking of Gerber, did anyone here read Gerber’s Exiles series for Malibu? I only know the story behind it (the phony solicitation for a 5th issue even though everyone involved knew the cast would be annihilated in issue 4 and the series would end right there). Just wondering if it was any good.
Not really. I’m probably the biggest Steve Gerber fan (Gerber on 1970s Howard the Duck and Man-Thing are my two most highly rated Marvel Comics’ publications). I didn’t find anything worth going out of your way to read in Exiles. I think the only reason anyone remembers it today is due to the fakeout in the final issue.
If you want to read a Gerber comic published by Malibu, or just a Malibu comic worth reading in general (there aren’t many worth the money), I’d recommend Sludge, if you haven’t read it already. It’s kind of like an urban version of Man-Thing (not as experimental, but well-written). No, wait. Actually, it’s also sort of Spawn done right, without the Hell elements.
Yeah, I remember Sludge being on the shelves. I remember all of those Malibu titles but I never sampled any of them. Between Marvel, DC, Image, Malibu, Valiant, etc. there were just way too many comics being published at that time (spec-boom) so nothing specific really stood out to me and I just stuck with what I knew (Marvel and DC).
I think the B&W boom–>glut of the ’80s made me overcautious also. I bought so much crap back then.
Seconding SLUDGE as the Gerber Malibu comic to check out. Art from Aaron Lopresti! Its one of the better looking Malibu books, as well as a solid read.
I know Gerber didn’t create him. but I really enjoyed Lord Pumpkin as a villain in that Sludge series. He had just the right kind of bizarre touches to be memorable; probably the best villain in the Ultraverse.
I think the only Malibu book I’d go back and read now would be Firearm, because it’s JDR. Although most of the line was serviceable 90s superhero stuff.
Malibu had a fair number of head-scratchers, particularly after Black September. But also some unusual, interesting choices.
It was perhaps overambitious in some respects, but I liked that the continuity crossed book boundaries so casually. Heroes would often meet villains and supporting characters “not their own” for no particular reason. I am not a fan of many of their artists either.
But there were some gems there. Sludge was a fine example of horror. Freex had some interesting group dynamics. Night Man and Hardcase had interesting character concepts and many good stories. Lord Pumpkin was an excellent, revolting villain.
“Loads of Daredevil villains are basically interchangeable martial arts guys. Blue Talon was ahead of the curve.”
***I was gonna say! Surely the first martial-artist villain to appear in a Daredevil comic is of some note, considering the series’ future.