Daredevil Villains #38: Angar the Screamer
DAREDEVIL #100-101 (June-July 1973)
“Mind Storm!” / “Vengeance in the Sky with Diamonds!”
Writer: Steve Gerber
Pencillers: Gene Colan (layouts #100) & Rich Buckler (#101)
Inkers: John Tartaglione (finishes #100) & Frank Giacoia (#101)
Letterer: Artie Simek
Colourists: Stan Goldberg (#100), George Roussos (#101)
Editor: Roy Thomas
We’ve skipped issue #99, which doesn’t have a villain. Instead, it has Daredevil and Hawkeye literally fighting over the Black Widow as part of a loose crossover with Avengers. Natasha is so unimpressed by this display of 1970s machismo that she sticks around in Avengers for an extra month and skips Daredevil #100 entirely, despite being billed as co-star on the cover. So, in her absence, Daredevil has an anniversary issue all on his own.
In trying to find an approach to the book that works, Steve Gerber’s first thought is to play up the location. If this is Marvel’s only comic set in San Francisco, then surely it’s got to be about the counterculture, right? And so issue #100 guest stars Jann Wenner, the editor of Rolling Stone, who spends a good chunk of the book interviewing our hero. Daredevil endorses Rolling Stone as a quality publication, but “didn’t think the counter-culture was interested in anybody who works with the police.” Wenner assures him otherwise: “Of course they’re interested! You work with the cops, but you’re fair! You want the system to work justly, up-front – and even people who oppose the system can respect that!”
You get the idea. Still, product placement aside, Gerber’s instinct is sound. All Daredevil’s previous writers have focussed on his love life, which, after all, was the driving engine of the book that Stan Lee created. Steve Gerber is more interested in the idea of Daredevil as a character who’s a believer in teh system but open minded about the counterculture. This will ultimately lead to the idea that Daredevil is a book about a character with a foot in both worlds, both lawyer and vigilante, and it’ll work better when Foggy Nelson is brought back to serve as an establishment foil. For now, without Foggy, Matt has to be the establishment representative, and so he often comes across as a centrist dad.
The Rolling Stone interview is cut short when Daredevil and Wenner suddenly have a shared hallucination. Since it’s an anniversary issue, this scene is principally an excuse for a parade of old Daredevil villains to make cameo appearances. The result is hardly a testament to the quality of the books’s rogues’ gallery: the pickings are so slim that Gerber resorts to giving Dr Doom a prominent role, because at least you’ve heard of him.
It turns out that similar incidents have been happening across San Francisco for the last couple of days, each time preceded by a terrifying scream. This is Angar the Screamer, in his original incarnation – a man in sixties hippie garb with the superhuman power to give people LSD trips by yelling at them.
And let’s be clear: That is not a gloss on the story. It’s not even a case of the drugs angle being implied so blatantly that nobody could miss it – although, yes, the story is called “Vengeance in the Sky with Diamonds”, and the hallucination sequences echo psychedelic posters. But there’s no implication here at all: Daredevil tells us, very directly, in dialogue, that Angar is a drug reference. “His power goes beyond hypnosis,” Daredevil explains. “He’s like a living LSD factory. If he can sustain the effect – well, who knows? He could ‘freak out’ the world!”
You might be wondering how on earth this got past the Comics Code. By 1973, the Code allowed drug references as long as they were negative. And Angar’s illusions are presented as disorienting and nightmarish. There are maybe a couple of points where some San Franciscans seem slightly less bothered about it than you might expect, but even the Rolling Stone characters seem to agree that at a bare minimum it’s an enormous nuisance. So far as we see, Angar only gives people bad trips. Any subversion here lies in taking a Code revisal that was presumably intended to allow instructive tales about heroin addiction and plots where Batman beat up drug smugglers, and using it to introduce an expressly psychedelic villain. But the story complies with the letter of the Code, and you could at least argue with a straight face that it complies with the spirit too.
Angar is easily the most dated-looking character in the 1980s editions of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, with his facial hair, headband, waistcoat and medallion. But even when he was created, he was meant to look out of date. Angar is an acid casualty who hasn’t come to terms with the end of the sixties – he looks nothing like the Rolling Stone staff who are presented as the contemporary counterculture. He was a peace-and-love flower child who saw the dream crushed by reactionary crackdowns. He hates the Man for destroying the dream, but hates his fellow hippies too for giving up on it. Really, he hates everyone, and yet he’s convinced himself that he’s the last bastion of a philosophy of love.
Angar got his powers from the same mystery man who created the Dark Messiah a couple of issues previously; we establish here that he’s a rich guy, and Angar literally calls him “the Man”. It’s at least strongly implied that whatever procedure he went through didn’t help his sanity. Angar’s instincts are to run wild and cause chaos with his new power. He talks about the world being at his feet, though it’s never entirely clear what he’s planning to do – holding the world to ransom doesn’t really seem to fit with his overall personality. At any rate, his shadowy mentor turns out to have an electrode implant that can keep Angar under control, and so Angar reluctantly agrees to stick to his actual mission of targetting Daredevil and the Black Widow.
This leads to a bizarre fight scene between Angar and the heroes in a psychedelic landscape, during which Angar protests that he doesn’t want to be there and wants to build a world of love. Eventually, Angar backs down when the Black Widow threatens to shoot him in the head at point blank range.
Angar shows up again for the climax of this storyline, as Daredevil finally reaches the Man himself. By this point, Angar seems to be completely out of his mind. But he does finally get to side with the heroes and defeat the Man, thanks to Moondragon telepathically channelling his powers into a targetted hallucination of unspeakable existential horror. Or, if you prefer, some black stuff coming out of an egg. Angar is supposed to have exhausted his powers for good at the end of the arc, but that’s a passing line of dialogue. Later writers apparently just didn’t notice it, or figured that readers would have forgotten it. Really, it completes Angar’s arc: he betrays his sixties dreams precisely because he clings on to them so obsessively, but ultimately switches sides to do something that actually helps.
Despite this, Angar went on to make a fair number of appearances over the years, as a minor villain with an unusual power that became less drug-themed over time. A connection with Screaming Mimi justified a few more appearances once she moved into Thunderbolts. He even has a Marvel Cinematic Universe version, though with defanged powers that cause catatonia. But Angar has largely wound up as a low level petty criminal, losing most of the garbled dreams that makes him distinctive in his early appearances. Gerber’s Angar isn’t a bank robber. He has bigger dreams than that. Incoherent dreams, to be sure, but bigger ones.
Even so, Angar is lucky to have stuck around as long as he did. He’s a character locked to the time of his creation – tied to the sixties, and intentionally behind the times from the start. He’s a very difficult character to adapt to the sliding timeline because there’s no obvious modern equivalent of the demise of flower power. A disillusioned Occupy Wall Street activist is just not the same character. And shorn of his context, Angar was inevitably going to become a blander gimmick villain as the decades went by.
I tend to agree with Michael: the X-Men animated series of the 90s was a response to the popularity of the comics, nor a driver of it.
The characters they chose were the star X-Men of the mega-popular Jim Lee era, which also helps explain the virtual absence of characters like Nightcrawler and Shadowcat, who’d been moved over to Excalibur, as well as Colossus’s relegation to an occasional guest character. (The mystery is why Psylocke was left out.)
Unlike BTAS, it didn’t really reinvent the characters or their world, but rather followed the popular characters and often storylines of the comics.
The only character it really boosted was a total obscurity, the Changeling, who was renamed and reinvented as Morph so they had an X-Man to kill off early on. But fans took to Morph, who had a lot more personality than the Changeling ever did, so the character ended up having a second life in the comics as part of the Exiles.
But otherwise, it’s hard to spot much of the X-Men animated series’ influence feeding back into the comics beyond Morph. It certainly didn’t do much for the Nasty Boys, Bolivar Trask, or the other lesser-known comics characters who were occasionally featured as guest stars or antagonists.
As to Poison Ivy: the Batman animated series helped Ivy by taking her away from her original gimmick as a cold-hearted seductress, a dated concept by then, and playing up the “avenger of the plant world” concept that Neil Gaiman had added in his Secret Origins story about her. That gave her a distinct, Bat-villains style motivation and madness, and, over time, even allowed the comics to add a sympathetic dimension to the character.
Both Ivy and Count Vertigo did get some excellent work done on them in the great John Ostrander Suicide Squad series, though that was always more of a cult classic than a big seller.
The Count’s problem is that his original enemy — Green Arrow — had changed so much in tone that Count Vertigo did’t really fit there anymore. That, and he’s got one of those gimmick powers where the hero either cleverly works around it or just powers though it, after which it’s hard to come up with a way he’s a plausible threat tot hat hero again.
Beyond that, the Timm/Dini revamp of the Mad Hatter, much enhanced by an extraordinary vocal performance from Roddy McDowall, didn’t make him all that prominent in the comics. The Hatter is still a relatively minor villain, although his profile is a bit higher than it was.
On the other hand (or the other other hand), X-Men TAS introduced the characters to a lot of kids, some of whom later migrated to the comics and even writing comics. Rogue was popular in the 80s and 90s due to comics. I’d argue that she remained popular to this day due to the cartoon.
@Krzysiek- yeah, but it’s hard to imagine a scenario where Rogue wouldn’t remain popular in the sense that Colossus and Nightcrawler are popular. By 1992, everyone thought of Rogue as one of the core new X-Men, along with Kitty, Kurt, Storm, Logan and Peter. There was no way she was going to fade into obscurity like Songbird.
Being regularly featured characters in that cartoon sure didn’t do much for Gambit and Jubilee when it came to landing parts in the live-action X-Men films.
Probably shouldn’t overlook the influence of Marc Silvestri redesigning Rogue from mousey to bombshell (arguably a gradual change started by Romita and completed by Lee).
“ As to Poison Ivy: the Batman animated series helped Ivy by taking her away from her original gimmick as a cold-hearted seductress, a dated concept by then, and playing up the “avenger of the plant world” concept that Neil Gaiman had added in his Secret Origins story about her. … Both Ivy and Count Vertigo did get some excellent work done on them in the great John Ostrander Suicide Squad series”
I actually had a good laugh about this recently, reading a SS issue where pre-revamp Ivy is part of a mission in Brazil or something and actually says “Ick! I hate the jungle!”
One of the best things about BTAS is you have the classic “the villain believes they are right.” Both Ivy and Ra’s are eco-terrorists and Ra’s wants to save the planet by reducing the human population.
Making the Mad Hatter (back?) Alice related instead of being hat related was a great move. Same with making The Riddler a computer game designer, arguably the natural evolution of just being a puzzle genius.
Without looking it up, wouldn’t Ostrander Suicide Squad predate BTAS?
I will concede that Rogue and Gambit were popular characters (and current X-Men) before the animated series began in 1992. I do contend that their appearances there (and to a lessor degree, 2000’s X-Men Evolution) at least helped them remain popular, or at least didn’t hurt. Admittedly, Rogue has likely benefited more than Gambit (or Jubilee), to the point that she was among the first X-Men to appear in cinema.
Onto B:TAS chat, I do agree that Ra’s Al Ghul and the more revised Poison Ivy do share some goals regarding their views on planetary action, to the point that I can’t think of many stories where they’d ever teamed up. I figure it happened sometime, with all the Batman comics published every year, but I can’t think of one.
In theory they should be natural allies. But I guess in practice, their own personal tics would come into play. Ra’s is unlikely to see Ivy as more than a minion or employee. Ivy, in contrast, tends to prefer to control men. But that’s still more interesting than the 5000th go around with the Joker, I guess.
@Mark Coale- yes, Ostrander’s Suicide Squad predated BTAS.
Ra’s trying to kill off most of the planet’s population for ecological reasons predates BTAS. He tried it in Bride of the Demon, for example.
@AMRG- In Lazarus Planet: Alpha, by Mark Waid, it was mentioned that Ra’s consulted with Ivy “more than once”.
You could certainly tell an interesting story with Ra’s, Ivy and Talia, either one where Talia gets jealous of ivy’s relationship with her father or a more adventurous/adult version where Ivy and Talia become a couple to try and dethrone Ra’s as leader of their organization (whatever it’s name is these days).
I wish I could remember more about the 90s Marvel cartoons to discuss them. I mainly remember the FF, Iron Man and Silver Surfer cartoons for their toy lines, including the giant Galactus and Fin Fang Foom figures
The X-Men cartoon probably didn’t affect the comics much, but it did bring the characters to the attention of non-readers in a big way. Which led to the movies, which did and still do have a huge effect on the comics.
I was drawing down on comic book collecting when TAS aired, so to me the popularity of the characters drove their casting. But I know at least a few people who are five years younger than me for whom TAS was their introduction to X-Men. For them, Rogue and Gambit and Jubilee are the original cast. (For me the original cast is the Byrne era).
It seems silly to speculate as to whether Rogue’s popularity would have persisted had she not be cast in TAS. I think if you go back to the letter columns, you’ll find that by the end of the ‘80’s she was the most popular character save, perhaps, Wolverine. IIRC, Claremont once said he delayed Rogue’s return from the Siege Perilous longer than any other character because he knew her popularity would string fans along.
I have a hard time imagining a world where Rogue isn’t cast for TAS. And if such a world could have existed for some reason, I doubt her popularity would have suffered much.
Jubilee, on the other hand, would probably have gone the way of her fellow GenX cast mates. Fringe regulars and/or canon fodder.
Whoa, I have no idea what that avatar photo is doing next to my post. I’ve never seen it before, and I certainly didn’t put it there. I’ve been posting here since the beginning and this is the first time I’ve had any avatar at all. Weird.
@Oldie- I think Jubilee would have persisted without the Animated Series. She was relatively popular as Wolverine’s second protege, after Kitty. That’s something none of the other Genx students had going for them.
Everybody who grew up on that damned X-Men cartoon seems to want to give it way more credit than it deserves.
“Well, TAS was what introduced me to the X-Men, therefore it’s what made the X-Men popular as they are today. Sorry, what was that? Chris and John who?”
Well, I’m from Poland. Marvel comics were only starting being published here in the 90s. (And by early 2000s the publishing company distributing them here has closed down, leading to a not insignificant gap without any X-Men books available). The cartoon primed a generation of young viewers for the movies coming several years later.
I presume my country isn’t unique, which leads me to think that yes, at least for some parts of the world the cartoon did a lot more than the comics.
@Oldie
Odds are that you mistyped your email address in your next-to-latest post and that happened to end up being the address that someone else uses for their Gravatar.
@Krzysiek
Fair enough, and I don’t deny that the animated series introduced a whole generation of kids to the X-Men. And I can concede that TAS was also responsible for getting the live-action film franchise off the ground again, finally (making TAS also responsible for Marvel selling their film rights to the franchise in ’94, so there’s that).
All of that said, this convo began with Rogue, and AMRG still seems to be under the impression that Rogue owes her prominent inclusion in the first X-Men film to her being a TAS feature character. It had nothing to do with that. Those first live-action films were made by Gen Xers. They grew up on Hanna-Barbera, not FOX Kids. Certainly, they were aware of TAS, but I’d be surprised if anyone involved actually watched an episode of it. It was the comics and (for the uninitiated) a four-page memo written by Chris Claremont describing the concept and characters that the filmmakers looked to for source material and inspiration.
Rogue was chosen by Singer to be a main character specifically because he liked her mutation, which he viewed as symbolic of alienation. He kept that core idea, and the rest of her was apparently part Kitty Pryde and part Jubilee (I don’t see it, but whatever).
The next two films saw the addition of Nightcrawler, Beast, Kitty, and Colossus as new X-Men members and the Angel as a plot device. That’s five characters, only one of whom was a main character in TAS.
That cartoon introduced the X-Men to a wider audience and got the films rolling, yeah, but it didn’t influence the films creatively, nor can it take credit for Rogue’s current popularity as a character. Kitty didn’t even appear on TAS at all, yet she remains one of the most popular X-Men characters to this day. Even if she’d been cast in TAS, it’s difficult to imagine her being more popular than she already is.
Although if Kitty had been cast in TAS, no doubt the FOX Kids generation of readers would be attributing her popularity to that damned cartoon, and just knowing that annoys me. And my knowing that it would annoy me annoys me because there are far more important things in life to be annoyed about, and yet this is what annoys me. It’s annoying.
@Moo — I sincerely did not mean to upset you so much.
XM:TAS had to have at least minor effect on at least some the early casting decisions of the original XM movie. George Buza, who voiced Beast, had a cameo in the movie (as the trucker who drops Rogue off in Loughlin City). While he is/was a character actor who’d had many roles in movies before and since, he at least seems to attribute the cameo to a knowing nod in most interviews or con appearances.
Various outlets also state that David Hemblen, who voiced Magneto in TAS, was considered for the role in the movie (along with Christopher Lee and Terrence Stamp, which is quite some company). At the time, Hemblen was co-starring in the EARTH: FINAL CONFLICT TV show and declined. Ian McKellen was cast not only due to his obvious talent, but because he and fellow co-star Bruce Davidson had worked with Singer on “APT PUPIL.”
I’ve no doubt Singer didn’t see the show and chose Rogue for the reasons he cited. I sincerely doubt anyone at Fox Studios minded his reasons for including her in the script, 2-3 years after she appeared in a hit cartoon on their own TV network.
Colossus never amounted to more than cameos in those movies, anyway, until the Deadpool trilogy (and even there, mostly the first one). Nightcrawler and Angel were mostly forgotten after X2 and X3, though the blue elf did get play in the First Class film sequels.
We certainly have come a long way since talking about Songbird. To be fair, I was not the first person to compare her to Rogue.
“I sincerely doubt anyone at Fox Studios minded his reasons for including her in the script, 2-3 years after she appeared in a hit cartoon on their own TV network.”
Okay, okay. The cartoon made Rogue who she is. Without it, she’d have amounted to nothing as a character. Same goes for the X-Men in general. All hail TAS for turning an obscure franchise that nobody cared about from a comic book that nobody was reading into a cultural phenomenon!
Happy?
Drat. I failed to mention Iceman. Another character who wasn’t featured regularly in the cartoon, and who figured even more prominently in those first few films than the other characters I mentioned.
Anyway, back to you, AMRG. You can go ahead and downplay Iceman’s usage in the films like you did with all of the other non-TAS characters I mentioned.
The people I know who are Jubilee fans all got on the X-Men train with TAS or later. Maybe she had a fan base before the cartoon, but I always thought it was a club of one—Jim Lee who was enamored of her. My small circle of geeks all rolled our eyes at the ersatz Robin because Logan isn’t Batman and never was.
@Oldie- Claremont, Hama and Scott Lobdell all seemed to like using Jubilee before the cartoon.