Daredevil Villains #40: Kerwin J Broderick
DAREDEVIL #104-107 (October 1973 to January 1974)
“Prey of the Hunter!” / “Menace From the Moons of Saturn!” / “Life Be Not Proud!” / “Blind Man’s Bluff!”
Writer: Steve Gerber
Penciller: Don Heck (#104-106), Jim Starlin (#105 Titan sequence), Bob Brown (#107)
Inker: Sal Trapani (#104, #106), Don Perlin (#105), Sal Buscema (#107)
Letterer: Charlotte Jetter (#104, #107), June Braverman (#105), Shelly Leferman (#106)
Colourist: Petra Goldberg (#104, #107), Janice Cohen (#105), George Roussos (#106)
Editor: Roy Thomas
Throughout Steve Gerber’s run, a mysterious shadowy figure has been giving super powers to oddballs like Angar and the Dark Messiah. Now, it’s time for Daredevil to meet this arch villain. It’s Kerwin J Broderick, the senior partner of the law firm of Broderick, Sloan and Murdock.
Until now, Broderick hasn’t been seen on panel, but Gerber has been building him up in a subplot. Matt is hired to defend a group of kids who are charged with robbery, and Jason Sloan keeps telling Matt that Broderick wants him to enter a guilty plea. The expectation seems to be that Matt Murdock, of all people, won’t merely persuade his clients to plead guilty, but will actually ignore their instructions. It’s a strange arc, since Gerber seems to think that this sort of thing would be classed as “slightly questionable” rather than “completely beyond the pale”, meaning that Matt reacts to it as simply a troublesome work problem.
By the way, you might remember that before Matt Murdock joined the firm, its other partner was Larry Cranston, who turned out to be Mr Fear. So Jason Sloan was in business with two supervillains. This is a complete coincidence. The stories are totally unrelated. Jason just has terribly bad luck in choosing his partners.
In issue #104, Matt and Natasha finally meet Broderick when they go to a drinks reception at his mansion. Broderick sends one last hireling after them – for some reason, instead of creating a new villain, he imports Kraven the Hunter from Amazing Spider-Man. Kraven defeats Daredevil, chucks him off a cliff at the bottom of Broderick’s garden, and disappears from the plot, his role fulfilled
Daredevil lands safely in the water, and there he stumbles upon an elaborate underground labyrinth full of cosmic stuff. This is where he stumbles upon Broderick’s partner, the shadowy woman who we saw alongside him in Ramrod’s origin flashback. This is Moondragon (or rather, “Moon Dragon”), a character who will go on to much bigger things.
Moon Dragon had appeared once before, in Iron Man #54. In that story, written by Mike Friedrich, she’s a random evil scientist who goes by “Madame MacEvil”. She mostly seems interested in science experiments and in trying to capture Iron Man and the Sub-Mariner. This storyline completely retools her, and issue #105 gives her a four-page origin flashback drawn by Jim Starlin. Apparently, these were pages that Starlin had produced for Iron Man #57 (on which Gerber was going to be the co-writer) before Stan Lee removed him from the book. So basically, Gerber is shoehorning the unused pages into his Daredevil plot. And that’s why Moon Dragon was tied to a mystery character who had been in Iron Man a few months previously, something which feels utterly random if you don’t know the context.
This flashback ties Moon Dragon into Starlin’s Thanos mythology. She was raised in an enlightened monastery on Titan and developed her mind and body to their peak, only to flee to Earth after Thanos conquered the planet. She’s an enlightened human from an enlightened culture, in an exceptionally seventies fashion: “Unhampered by the lunacy you call ‘education’ – grades, exams, awards – my mind grew to full flower.” Ostensibly, the monastery practised an alien religion, but they’re blatantly Buddhist monks. They have shaved heads. There’s a statute of Buddha, even if he’s called “Kaluba”.
Moon Dragon has come to Earth because she’s convinced that Thanos is making moves against the planet. She’s become convinced that San Francisco is full of Thanos thralls, and she’s allied herself with Kerwin J Broderick because he’s a respectable establishment figure and must therefore be trustworthy. In theory, that’s the theme of Broderick’s character: he’s a crimelord who exists within the establishment and gets away with it because everyone trusts him so much. Officially he has no codename, but the narrator follows Angar’s lead and calls him “the Man” – in scare quotes. As San Francisco’s only superheroes, Daredevil and the Black Widow are doing too much damage to his operations. That’s why he’s been creating supervillains to take them down.
The only reason why Moon Dragon is on board with this plot is that Broderick has convinced her that Daredevil is working for Thanos. Once she actually meets him, she figures out the truth almost immediately. And that’s why I’m not classing Moon Dragon as a Daredevil villain: in plot terms, she’s more of a dupe. The trouble is that by giving her this role in the plot, Gerber undercuts her origin story. She’s a superior, enlightened human who’s so stupid that she got talking into giving superpowers to Angar and Ramrod, all in order to fight Thanos, who isn’t in the storyline at all. Sure, she falls for Broderick’s social position, but isn’t that precisely the sort of thing that enlightened people are meant to see through?
Once Moon Dragon switches sides, we’re left with Broderick as our sole villain. He’s unbothered by her betrayal, because she’s already served her purpose. He re-activates his henchmen from the previous arcs so that they can cause trouble again, and then unveils Terrex, a life-force-controlling green humanoid thing. Terrex is a doomsday robot from Titan that Moon Dragon brought with her.
Even though Broderick has apparently been a normal, under-the-radar crimelord for years, exposure to all this cosmic stuff has made him to raise his aspirations. He’s now completely insane, and he wants to be the monarch of San Francisco, “Kerwin the First, King of the Golden Gate!” To that end, he merges himself with Terrex, and becomes a giant green guy who can make things live or die.
This is all rather similar to Damon Dran. They’re both rich lunatics with access to technology; they both use those resources to turn themselves into super powered giants who march on San Francisco. But Gerber’s version has a bit more going on, thanks in part to the subplot threads with the other henchmen, with Angar in particular going off the rails and pursuing his own shambolic agenda. And Jason Sloan gets to redeem himself somewhat by showing up to confront Broderick/Terrex.
Broderick is defeated through the combined efforts of Daredevil, the Black Widow, Moon Dragon, Captain Marvel (who shows up in the last chapter) and Angar. The actual mechanics of that defeat involve a lot of 70s cosmic woo. Terrex is “a being of pure life”, you see. It follows that he can be defeated by “un-life”. Un-life is not death, which is merely the absence of life – un-life is the opposite of life. Unfortunately, there isn’t any un-life to hand, due to it being indescribable and unobtainable. So in the absence of proper un-life, the solution is to combine Moon Dragon and Angar’s powers in order to make Broderick think that he’s being destroyed by un-life. What that means in practice is a bizarre sequence of Terrex breaking an egg full of black goop over his own head. For some reason this turns Broderick back into a human, and kills him.
Broderick’s core concept is a corrupt pillar of the establishment, who was prompted to raise his game by Daredevil, and who fluked his way into the resources of Moon Dragon. That’s the part of the story that wants to make something of Angar finally taking down the Man, and even Jason Sloan standing up to the mentor he’s never questioned. But the story needs a bigger climax and so Broderick randomly becomes a lunatic who wants to be a giant green king. And on top of that, the whole thing gets tied in to a bunch of Captain Marvel concepts that don’t really fit with Broderick.
Moon Dragon hangs around to the start of the next issue, in which Gerber seems to be setting her up as a romantic rival to the Black Widow. In practice she gets written out almost immediately, and shunted over to Captain Marvel and Avengers. As for Daredevil lurches back to New York in the following issue. Broderick, despite his lengthy build-up, winds up overshadowed by a detour into the mythology of Thanos, who isn’t even here.
Some of the sliding scale really screws with a characters origin, like FF being tied to the space race or the Punisher being in Vietnam (but I guess any war would do).
I mean, the entire MCU has been rebooted a few times in the last decade, right? Secret Wars, for one. And maybe HoX/PoX?
So current stories exist in a revised timeline. The Reed appearing right now has memories and experiences similar to those we’ve read about for all these years; similar enough that writers can reference them as needed. Different enough that writers can ignore the details as necessary.
*I haven’t followed the post-HoX/PoX line closely enough to know how they’re explaining Moira, but I’m sticking with the view that the Moira retcon must have created an alternate timeline from the original 616. The retcon simply can’t be reconciled with the original stories and characters. So we”re in a rebooted MU, similar enough to the original that for the most part we can take the old stories for granted, except for what we’ve seen that’s new.
@Jason, Moo- it’s supposedly 15 years since the FF’s flight into space.
@Mark Coale- the reason the FF had to go into space has been retconned into fears of an alien invasion, not the Cold War space race.
The important thing with the Punisher’s backstory is the PTSD. When he was created, our understanding of PTSD was in its infancy and still closely associated with Vietnam veterans. It was even referred to as “Vietnam Veterans’ Syndrome” in medical literature. Now that our understanding of combat-related PTSD has advanced, the question of where the Punisher served becomes less important. That’s how you get a perfectly serviceable story about MCU Punisher serving in Afghanistan.
Similarly, it doesn’t matter why the Fantastic Four had to get into orbit, so long as they rushed. It could have been to beat the Russians, but it could just as easily be to beat the Chinese to an asteroid loaded with vibranium.
Honestly, Magneto is probably the biggest problem for the sliding timeline. At this rate, it’s probably only a matter of time before he gets reconned into a Bosnian.
@Michael- Still doesn’t solve everything. Even allowing for Magneto somehow maintaining relative youthfulness going into the 21st century, it still begs the question of just what the hell Magneto was doing with his time during the six decades between WWII and his Cape Citadel attack in X-Men #1. Biding his time? “I must conquer humanity. But not right away. Later. Much later. Like maybe in 2004, 2005. Something like that.”
Sadly, there will likely always be a genocide that you could Retcon into being part of Magneto’s origin.
I’m surprised they didn’t make Ultimate Magneto (if he exists) a survivor of something more recent than the Holocuast. Maybe they did and I never read it. But I think I’d have heard about it if they did.
@Moo- well, we have the same problem with Tyrannus, only worse. He supposedly became immortal and found Deviant technology in the 6th century but he apparently never bothered to try to conquer the surface world until over a MILLENIUM later. At least one writer has suggested he learned of the modern world through television broadcasts but that doesn’t explain why he didn’t try to conquer the world during the Middle Ages, for example.
Well, I don’t know (or much care) about Tyrannus’s timeline problems, but most of the headaches with Magneto’s history could be cured by retroactively placing an elastic period of suspended animation time into Magneto’s backstory. That, or some event that propelled him forward in time by an unspecified (for elasticity’s sake) number of decades.
The original Ultimate Magneto was, and I quote from a wiki, ‘the son of two Weapon X agents’. His father tried to kill him when his powers emerged, he reflexively killed his father. Later he killed his mother because she was torturing ‘Mutant X’ (Wolverine) as part of Weapon X… weapon x-ing as usual.
Anyway, Ultimate Magneto was terrible. Also in the end all the ultimate mutants were revealed to be byproducts of Weapon X trying to recreate the super soldier serum? I think?
By the end the original Ultimate Universe was very stupid.
In the new – well, newest, since Bendis kind of hinted the original Ultimate Universe was also somehow back but it was never followed up on – in the current Ultimate Universe there’s been no mention of Magneto so far. There’s not very many mutants so far either, and the X-Men are a group of Japanese teenagers.
“…in the current Ultimate Universe there’s been no mention of Magneto so far. There’s not very many mutants so far either, and the X-Men are a group of Japanese teenagers.”
Sounds like the description of an X-Men film made by an indy studio on a really tight budget.
A sliding timeline doesn’t really work for comics. It makes much more sense, if only fir the many topical references in our old stories, to think of it as stretchy. The characters have experienced 60 years of stories and 60 years have actually passed, but subjectively they only aged around 15 years. Since the timeline started to slow down around the time Franklin Richards was born, it is his powers that make them not wonder why they experienced so many presidents in such a short time, for instance.
I find the notion that the Silver Age happened in the 2010s far harder on the suspension of disbelief than that the characters age slower than actual time passes.
Also, characters out of circulation age faster than ones we read about constantly. Our own observing eyes cause part of the weird not quite magic going on.
Look, when you have a cliff hanger at the end of an issue, a month of real time passes in an instant of story time. The events shown in 12 issues between one Christmas and the next often don’t amount to more than a few non-consecutive days or a maybe a week. As readers, we’re always having to treat comic book time as stretchy.
You just have to think of real world events occurring on a compressed timeline. WW2 and Vietnam and 9/11 all occurred within about a 15-20 year window. The time gaps get compressed the farther back they are.
@Peter
“The characters have experienced 60 years of stories and 60 years have actually passed, but subjectively they only aged around 15 years”
So, the entire population of the MU have both real and subjective ages? That must be awfully confusing…
“Statutory rape? But your honor, she’s 60! She’s been alive for 60 years!”
“Only in real years. Subjectively, she’s still a minor. I, therefore, sentence you to 10 subjective years in prison, or 40 real years.”
@Oldie
“WW2 and Vietnam and 9/11 all occurred within about a 15-20 year window.”
Except the comics already disagree with you. For example, Captain America’s time spent in suspended animation has been repeatedly referred to as “decades” not “months” or “coffee break.”
The sliding timescale system is by no means perfect, but whether anyone likes it or not, it’s the system Marvel has been using and continues to use today. You can’t just “Imagine it as stretchy instead” Well, you can, but you’d be wrong.
I’m thinking I saw some kind of model of comic book time wherein things happen at different speeds/densities as you move away from the present moment. I want to say it was a Superman story, or an Al Ewing story, within the last five years or so. It sounded neat and I wish I could remember what it was.
When in doubt, just say “hypertime.”
Thank God Magneto got turned into a baby that one time! He can be any physical age you want now.
As for the past, he got into a fight with a time-traveling Dr. Doom or Kang or Dr. Strange and got dragged a few decades forward to right before he met Charles Xavier. Gabby Haller was a victim in a different war.
Or Apocaypse tried to make him a horseman, but Magneto got free and yadda yadda suspended animation with no memory of the experience.
Or his powers slowed his aging, because magnetism in the Marvel Universe can do pretty much anything.
@Mike
Either suspended animation or being forcibly kicked forward in time would work.
But if you just want to establish that he ages very slowly, you could just reveal that to be the effect of a secondary mutation unrelated to his magnetic powers.
Still, that would raise the question of why he didn’t attack humanity decades earlier. Even if he were aware that he aged slowly, you’d think he’d have gotten around to it sooner, which is why I prefer the other two scenarios to the slow-aging thing.
@Moo: initially, slow-aging Magneto wanted to separate himself from humanity. He saw what his powers could do, and was worried he’d destroy the world in his rage. He went into hiding and spent his time building various bases, maybe even Asteroid M. As the world got worse (in his view), he thought to channel his efforts into doing good. That’s the state he was in when he met Charles Xavier. They did their best to help people, but the world kept getting worse and Magneto started to wonder if his efforts made any difference at all…
@Moo, Mike Loughlin- Claremont explained that Magneto only started actively scheming to take over the world after his girlfriend Isabella was murder by people he trusted- that was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Personally, I think it’s better to just let the slow-aging Magneto scenario go. Your other two suggestions were perfectly fine. Taking decades off his age either by way of suspended animation or a time jump not only fixes most of the problems, but you also avoid a scenario wherein a dude with six decades worth of magnetism practice gets successfully thwarted by a pack of inexperienced teenagers on their first field mission.
@Moo: oh yeah, slow-aging is the worst option. I just like No-Prizing.
Lol. Fair enough.