Daredevil Villains #37: The Dark Messiah
DAREDEVIL #97-98 (March-April 1973)
“He Who Saves” / “Let There Be – Death!”
Plotter: Gerry Conway
Scripter: Steve Gerber
Penciller: Gene Colan
Inker: Ernie Chua
Letterers: John Costanza (#97), Shelly Leferman (#98)
Colourists: not credited (#97), George Roussos (#98)
Editor: Roy Thomas
We’ve skipped issues #95-96, which are a rematch with the Man-Bull. That brings us to the final Gerry Conway story, which is also the first Steve Gerber story. Although he’s only the scripter, these issues kick off a storyline that runs through to issue #107, and so they’re more a part of Gerber’s run than Conway’s. Spoiler: it’s another of those arcs where Daredevil takes on a series of lesser villains before facing the final boss at the end.
Steve Gerber was still fairly new to Marvel at this point. His first comics were cover dated December 1972. But they included Adventure into Fear #11, the start of his Man-Thing run. Later in 1973, he debuts Howard the Duck. So some of his signature work is happening at the same time as his Daredevil run. In comparison, Daredevil is a minor entry in his bibliography. He plays this book fairly straight, at least while it remains set in San Francisco. Things change when the book moves back to New York, but we won’t get to that for a while. At this stage, there’s a bit of weirdness, but for the most part Gerber’s Daredevil remains within normal parameters for 70s Marvel. This is Steve Gerber showing that he can also be a safe pair of hands.
This may not be what people look for in a Steve Gerber comic, but he has good ideas about how to make Daredevil work. Stan Lee and Roy Thomas both thought Daredevil was about Matt and Karen Page; Gerry Conway built heavily around Matt’s relationship with the Black Widow. Steve Gerber is far less interested in Matt’s love life, and much more idea-driven. His Daredevil is less angst-ridden and more philosophical. For him, this is a book about an establishment hero with one foot in the counterculture – it’s set in early 70s San Francisco, after all. Eventually, this leads Gerber to see the tension in Daredevil being both a lawyer and a vigilante, something that his predecessors have glossed over as a problem, if they even recognised it as a contradiction at all. Gerber is the first Daredevil writer to see it as a potential theme.
All this lies in the future. It’s worth mentioning, though, in order to provide some reassurance about where we’re going in the coming instalments. Because issues #95-96 are not a good start.
The book opens with street acrobat Mordecai Jones entertaining bystanders. He gets distracted by a dog, and cracks his head on the pavement. What little we see of Mordecai before his accident presents him as a simple man who enjoys performing – the narrator talks about his “uncomplicated mind”.
Daredevil takes care of Mordecai until the ambulance shows up. It’s immediately obvious that something has changed in the scripting. It’s not just that Gerber’s narrator is a lot less baroque than Conway’s. The ambulance crew give Daredevil a telling off for moving the boy – not because he might have a neck injury, but because of “union rules”. We’re into a phase of seventies cynicism now, with Daredevil positioned as more of a bruised idealist in a dispiritingly irrational world.
Mordecai is taken to hospital and left in a corner. The narrator explains that all the medical staff are far too busy completing very important paperwork to actually treat the patients. In this case, that really does seem to be what Colan has drawn and presumably it’s what Conway asked for in his plot. A shadowy villain wheels Mordecai away in plain sight and straps him into some Kirbytech which gives him superpowers. Well, I say Kirbytech – it’s actually fairly ordinary looking stuff. There’s a cassette player involved. But given the way this storyline turns out, apparently it’s Kirbytech.
Later in the issue, Mordecai reappears with golden skin (think Adam Warlock), a black costume, and a weird black aura . He introduces himself as “Mordecai Jones, the Dark Messiah”, and says things like this:
“Stand ye back, o crowd, or I shalt stride on thee as easily as I might ‘pon water. For holiness resides within this forceful frame! And where I walk, choirs of angels shall sing hymns of it everafter!”
The story couldn’t be much more emphatic in positioning him as as a Christ figure. “To my kingdom I come”, he says, “and my will shall be done.” He breaks all San Francisco’s criminals out of jail and declares himself their new leader. He claims to have risen from the dead and to have the power to kill by sight alone. And he calls Daredevil “my friend” without any apparent irony. Quite reasonably, Daredevil decides that the Dark Messiah is just a lunatic. But this insight doesn’t help much, because the Messiah comprehensively outpowers him.
The Dark Messiah takes his followers to Golden Gate Park, which he then seals in an energy dome. Daredevil manages to get in anyway, which the Messiah declares to be blasphemy. Then he brings out his Disciples of Doom, who are called Josiah, Macabee and Uriah. Apparently, he’s given super powers to three more random criminals, who also believe that he is the messiah. After a fight, Mordecai apparently decides he doesn’t want to turn Golden Gate Park into a holy land after all, and just leaves. .
The obligatory rematch ends with the Disciples being knocked unconscious and turning back into normal humans. Just in case any readers were still trying to make sense of the plot, Daredevil tells us all not to bother: “As usual, any resemblance between what just occurred and logic is purely coincidental!” But Mordecai is confident that everything that’s happening is contributing to his plans. Somehow. Whatever those plans are. It’s never clear.
Daredevil raises the objection that real messiahs don’t use henchmen and don’t fire eye beams, which is true, but again doesn’t seem to affect the story much. Eventually, Daredevil recognises the Dark Messiah as the acrobat from the start of the story, and reminds him of his true identity. Mordecai then has some sort of crisis of identity and vanishes in an explosion. And that’s it.
The wider storyline is about who created the Dark Messiah and why. We will eventually get an answer to that, but it’s not one that explains very much about these two issues. We certainly find out who gave Mordecai his powers, and in a very general sense we do find out why he wanted to create some secondary villains. But quite why he thought it was a good idea to create a lunatic who thought he was Jesus, or what the Dark Messiah was trying to achieve in these two issues, or why the Dark Messiah is willing to follow his creator’s instructions, all remain entirely obscure. The other villains created as part of this arc seem to get powers that are somehow linked to their personalities, which might suggest that their creator doesn’t have control over what powers they get – but even that pattern doesn’t fit Mordecai, who was an acrobat, not a street preacher.
He’ll show up again in the climax of this storyline, when the big bad throws all of his underlings at San Francisco for a second time, but his role in that story is little more than a cameo. This two-parter only really works if you’re prepared to accept that the Dark Messiah doesn’t need a motivation or a coherent agenda. He’s just a raving lunatic. But that’s not very saisfying. All the religious references might lead you to expect some sort of story about religion or cult leadership, say. But there’s none of that.
The Dark Messiah never appears again after this storyline, and it’s very obvious why not. If you’re feeling charitable, his story never gets around to making whatever point about religion his creators had in mind. But it feels more like his religious trappings are there to disguise the fact that the story isn’t about anything at all.
From reading the summary, not the actual comic, he also sounds kind of Manson-ish.
Oh boy, is the next (and last, I believe) apperance of Dark Messiah ever puzzling.
This guy is the very definition of a character with powers but no purpose.
Gerber likes to allude to real social issues and hot-button events, usually at a few years’ remove and with an absurdist take.
So, in addition to the Manson-esque qualities that Mark Coale notes, the Dark Messiah’s takeover of Golden Gate Park seems to echo the real “People’s Park” protests and takeover of 1969 in nearby Berkeley, which were rather violently broken up by then-governor Ronald Reagan.
Gerber’s story seems to merge those events with the more positive 1967 “Human Be-In” that actually happened at Golden Gate Park, and is associated with the “Summer of Love.”
This seems to me to be a comment on how later events like the Manson Family murders and the People’s Park debacle represented the external and internal corrosion of the hippie movement.
In future issues, there also seems to be an abortive idea that the mysterious mastermind here has been deliberately exacerbating social tensions. A couple of issues after this story, for instance, well see that the mysterious mastermind behind the Dark Messiah has also set up some ant-establishment kids as a robbery gang, which Daredevil thinks is a setup to get them caught and scare people.
The next couple of new villains also seem to reflect social groups that were in conflict in the early 1970s, but there’ll be more opportunities to comment on that when those entries show up in this series.
And in any case, all of this vague thematic stuff gets thrown out the window when the story takes a weirdly different turn in its final few issues, though.
Now that Daredevil has had several generous injections of Catholicism, you could probably bring the Dark Messiah back and do something with that. That was still a long way off in the ’70s, though.
You still have the problem that he’s way too powerful for DD to reasonably fight, ofc. The two kinds of DD villains are, broadly, “trivially easy for a blind ninja to beat” and “utterly impossible for a blind ninja to beat”.
Omar-I’m not sure it is an abortive plan so much as just woefully underdeveloped. Considering the identity which the mastermind behind this arc goes by, I’d say it was always Gerber’s intention to show a manipulative powerbroker using mass societal fears to gain power (it depends on the meaning you give Ramrod). The kernel of those ideas are still there in the final issue of the story-arc. The breakdown happens at the end of the story when I get the feeling that Gerber wasn’t sure how to set up the endgame in a superhero comic, so it went off the rails.
@ChrisV: I definitely have some thoughts on what Ramrod might refer to, though “construction worker turned violent in the early 1970s” isn’t the toughest cultural reference to parse.
As to the breakdown of the plot and themes, I wonder whether Gerber started out with the intention of tying in to the Thanos saga, especially since the high concepts there don’t fit very well with the kind of social commentary that was there at the start. (I do think one part of the method of the mastermind villain’s final defeat has some thematic resonance, but it’s jumbled by all the Thanos saga stuff.)
There’s not much to hint that our mastermind has a partner until issue #103, when Ramrod, the third and last of the minion villains, is created. Prior to that, we only get one shadowy evil figure in the villain origin flashbacks, not two.
So maybe Gerber didn’t start out planning to drop in Moondragon? It certainly wouldn’t have been part of the plot he picked up from Conway.
See, that interpretation of Ramrod doesn’t fit well with Gerber’s other commentary (unless the thinking was violent union activity, which wasn’t exactly relevant in the 1970s US). I think of Ramrod representing unions to create a cohesive whole with the mastermind’s other creations. The problem is that Ramrod was a foreman on an oil-rig.
If Ramrod represented unions, then the story mostly works to read as the mastermind manipulating the societal fears of the “silent majority” as a commentary on a Nixon or a Reagan. If Ramrod isn’t read as representing unions, then the mastermind’s creations don’t really hold up with the seemingly wider theme.
The “silent majority” is exactly it: I’m thinking of the “hard hat riot” of 1970 and its aftermath, as well as the public’s response to the 1970 film Joe, starring Peter Boyle as a disgruntled factory worker. (A line of dialogue in Ramrod’s origin flashback may be even be a direct reference to that movie.)
I think of the mastermind as playing with all sides of the period’s culture war. But it’s also worth noting which characters stay on his side in the final part of the story, and which characters turn on him.
And there’s also Gerber’s choices of which characters Moondragon can revert to their original forms, with the Dark Messiah’s former self even referred to as “innocent youth” in issue #107, and which characters can’t be restored to some kind of innocence by the end.
The “hard hat riots” were against anti-war protestors and embraced by the “silent majority” as the “common man” standing up against the counter-culture and radicals (much like the movie Joe presents).
The idea of a culture war does seem to work, but it is odd that only one of the mastermind’s villains is a “straight”, while the others are representative of the counter-culture. The forces that a Nixon or Reagan were using to galvanize their “silent majority”.
So, I’m unsure that interpretation holds up, especially when the mastermind’s master plan ends up revolving around the representation of environmentalism.
I love these Daredevil villain posts. You never know where the comments are going to lead, but it’s usually interesting, and only occasionally about the actual (usually lacklustre) villain.
@Chris V: I think that Gerber sympathizes with outsiders and folks he thinks have been used and abused by powerful people.
But otherwise, he tends to avoid strong political stances, and usually just wants to point out the absurdity of American society in general.
There’s a general kind of “oddballs gotta stick together, and don’t trust anyone with too much power” idea in most of his work, but nothing much more ideologically specific than that.
And with Daredevil, Gerber seems to have seen the whole thing as a trainee writer’s assignment. As he says in his retrospective interview at the Man without Fear site linked here: “In those days, DAREDEVIL was one of a couple of books that were routinely assigned to new writers. The book sold fairly consistently, but not very well, so there was nothing major at stake if the writer flubbed it. It served as a low-risk arena in which writers could hone their craft.”
So perhaps this is just Gerber practicing with the absurdist satire superheroics he’d use more consistently and coherently in stuff like Defenders and his later Man-Thing work.
If I had to assign some greater meaning to the final boss villain of this storyline, I’d guess Gerber was thinking more of the institutionalization of the environmentalist movement than actual ecological goals.
The main villain – the ultimate “straight” — essentially weaponizes green power by the end of the storyline. He takes something whose power is a connection to all life and turns into a narcissistic extension of himself and his need for total control.
Man, if we’ve gone though all this here, what are we gonna say in the comments for the next couple of villains?
Daredevil villains. Thunderbolts. Incomplete Wolverine. Hmmm…
How’s that index of Claremont’s X-Men run coming along, Paul? You did say “But we’ll get to that later” in your closing for the Silver Age run. Well, (checks calendar) we’re quite well into later by this point. And yes, I’m aware you don’t owe us anything, and who the hell am I to make demands of your time? I’m an immature, entitled comic book fan, that’s who, and I’m going to continue to behave accordingly until that index happens.
And don’t be mad at me. I’m your demo. You chose this.
I agree with Moo.
We are issuing unenforceable demands on your time.
Give in! Appease us!