Daredevil Villains #39: Ramrod
DAREDEVIL #103 (September 1973)
“…Then Came Ramrod!”
Writer: Steve Gerber
Penciller: Don Heck
Inker: Sal Trapani
Letterer: Artie Simek
Colourist: George Roussos
Editor: Roy Thomas
We’ve skipped issue #102: it’s a fill-in by Chris Claremont and Syd Shores, and the villain is Stilt-Man. And now, back to the storyline in progress.
Daredevil has been working his way through a series of new supervillains, all created as henchmen by a mystery archvillain. Daredevil has already faced the nebulously religion-themed Dark Messiah, and psychedelic oddball Angar the Screamer. Ramrod is the next in the series.
What is a ramrod, anyway? Good question! Well, it’s a stick for ramming things into a gun barrel. You probably have one at home for your own musket. But in America, it also means a foreman who’s a strict disciplinarian. That’s presumably the sense that Steve Gerber had in mind, since Ramrod’s extremely token origin story has him as an obnoxious foreman on an oil rig. When he gets crushed by an oil drum, he’s taken to the same hospital where Mordecai Jones became the Dark Messiah a few issues back. The same shadowy villain carts him off, gives him superpowers, and tells him to kill Daredevil.
At first, Ramrod seems genuinely shocked at being asked to murder someone. After all, he’s just an annoying manager. He’s not even a criminal, let alone a killer. But he’s threatened with death unless he complies, and soon enough he comes round to the idea. As a petty tyrant, he delights in showing off his new power.
After all that, it turns out that his first mission isn’t to kill Daredevil after all. Instead, he’s asked to steal back some papers. (Don’t worry too much about the papers – they’re just a macguffin.) Unfortunately for Ramrod, Spider-Man happens to be visiting this month, no doubt because Daredevil needed whatever sales help it could get. And so Ramrod takes on Daredevil, Spider-Man and Black Widow at once, with mixed results – he’s powerful enough to do it, but dim enough to keep forgetting that he’s meant to be stealing the papers, not having a fight for the sake of it.
It turns out that Ramrod’s weak spot is his face, which shouldn’t have taken a genius to work out, given that it’s the one part of his head that isn’t steel plated. But that doesn’t actually play much into the finale. Instead, Ramrod climbs a building, gets taken by surprise, falls off it, and plunges headfirst into the ground. There, he gets ignominiously stuck with his legs waving around in the air. Presumably he gets carted off by SHIELD or someone. Like the Dark Messiah and Angar, he returns as a loyal henchman for the final chapters, only to get beaten again.
Compared to his predecessors, Ramrod is normal. No religion. No magic. No illusions. No drugs. He’s just a cyborg. He has a metal skeleton. He has the strength of ten men. He has some sort of metal skullplate. And that’s pretty much it. But it’s enough for him to smash through the walls of American houses and tear the place apart while the heroes stand around looking aghast. He’s a kind of budget Juggernaut, toned down to Daredevil’s power level.
When you look at these newly created villains in the round, the storyline doesn’t make much sense. If you can create a basically useful henchman like Ramrod, why would you bother with the religious maniac or the acid casualty? If you’re into giving people weird psychedelic powers, why are you making a boring old cyborg? Charitably, you could argue that they all get powers based on some aspect of their original personalities, so maybe their creator doesn’t have a choice about what happens to them… but that’s being very charitable. They feel like three disconnected ideas that got tacked on to a wider plot where only Angar really fits.
But in this context, Ramrod works better than you might expect, simply because of the contrast with the wilder ideas around him. This storyline involves an acrobat who thinks he’s Jesus, a man with LSD powers, and (still to come) a bunch of semi-cosmic concepts on loan from Jim Starlin. And in amongst them all is Ramrod. He hits things. To defeat him, you hit him back. There is no high concept. There are no oddball powers. There is nothing cosmic. There is no big idea. There is only a simple question: what if an asshole became a cyborg?
Ramrod never appeared in Daredevil again after this storyline, but he did make a handful of appearances in other books. Only one of them is truly a Ramrod story, though: Amazing Spider-Man #221 (1981), by Denny O’Neill and Alan Kupperberg. In that issue, Ramrod is still a physical threat to Spider-Man, but he’s already well on the way to being a joke character. He’s angry about the failure of his country and western career, and he gets beaten with an electromagnet.
It’s all downhill from there; his remaining appearances are occasional cameos, usually padding out the numbers at the Bar With No Name. Ramrod is just a very slightly recognisable villain who can fill out a crowd.
It’s hard to say that he deserved better – he’s just a big strong guy, and outside the context of his original story, that would have seemed uninspired even in 1973. He never even gets a real name. Power inflation has killed off any hopes he might have had of finding a niche; a vanilla cyborg is barely even a gimmick any more. His bland character design, which is basically just a guy with a skullcap, doesn’t help his cause.
There’s a world where he might have worked. He does have some charisma – in his debut, he’s having a grand old time throwing his weight around. He never gets the chance to be the awful boss that his name implies, because he doesn’t have anyone to give orders to. Maybe there’s a world in which he finds a niche as a colourful lieutenant, or a middle-ranking HYDRA member. But that’s not how he turned out. He’s just a generic henchman, even if he works in context.
Ramrod is similar to Man-Bull, although Bull has a lot more personality. Sometimes you just need a big strong guy. It’s weird that Daredevil writers regularly bring in the likes of Tombstone or Rhino instead of using Daredevil’s own big strong guys.
Mind you, when they do remember Daredevil’s own rogues, the big strong guy tends to be Bullet.
Ramrod’s next appearance after Amazing Spider-Man 221 was in Fantastic Four 335. where he was one of several lame villains mind-controlled into attacking the Fantastic Four by Dr. Doom as a practical joke. Notably. he defeats himself by tripping.The problem is that he’s knocked out by landing on the back of his head, not on his face, which shouldn’t be possible- it’s only his face that’s vulnerable.
As was discussed in the Angar the Screamer comments, Ramrod may be another reference to late 1960s and early 1970s political culture.
In this case, he may be a reflection of the Hard Hat Riot of 1970, when a number of construction and trade workers in New York City mounted an anti-student demonstrator, “America: love it or leave it” sort of protest and briefly attacked several buildings, including city hall.
The demonstration was a response to anti-Vietnam War student demonstrations, and the Hard Hat Riot participants received considerable public support after the fact from then-President Richard Nixon.
That same year, 1970, saw the release of the film Joe, which co-starred Peter Boyle as a disgruntled factory worker who shoots and kills a number of hippies — portrayed as drug dealers and thieves — and encourages a business executive to do the same, leading the executive to kill his own daughter.
The title character was meant to evoke horror, with his actions being seen as less about fighting drugs and more about his anger at liberals and the younger generation. At one point in the film, he uses a homophobic slur, claiming that “Forty-two percent of all liberals are [homophobic slur, that’s a fact.” He also expresses racist sentiments multiple times. But some audiences apparently cheered for the character in the climax, when he guns down the hippies who have robbed him.
The day before the Hard Hat Riot, in fact, a railroad worker in Detroit actually did murder his own daughter and her roommates, who were apparently part of the counterculture, and came heavily armed, apparently intending to kill more. He received multiple letters of sympathy. The judge actually issued instructions to exclude people who had seen the movie Joe from the jury, and he issued the killer a light sentence.
Now, on the surface, Ramrod seems pretty distant from most of this. He’s an oil rig worker, though he does look like a stereotypical “hard hat” in the flashbacks. And he’s not that political in his speech.
But in the climax, he remaisn loyal tot he master4 villain — literally called “the Man” — even after Angar turns on him. And unlike Angar and the Dark Messiah, he’s not depowered, and remains in his transformed, supervillain state. So the implication is that he’s the one henchman character who’s on board with the villain.
So Gerber may be making a loose, somewhat inchoate comment with the character, perhaps especially in how his initial reticence to serve as a killer gives way to considerable enthusiasm.