DAREDEVIL vol 1 #113-115 (September to November 1974)
“When Strikes the Gladiator!” / “A Quiet Night in the Swamp!” / Death Stalks the City!”
Writer: Steve Gerber
Penciller: Bob Brown
Inker: Vince Colletta
Letterers: Artie Simek (#113), Charlotte Jetter (#114-115)
Coloursts: Linda Lessmann (#113), Stan Goldberg (#114), Petra Goldberg (#115)
Editor: Roy Thomas

For our purposes, this is the end of Steve Gerber’s run. It doesn’t actually end until issue #117, but the last two issues are an Owl story. Gerber’s contributions to the rogues’ gallery end here, with the Death-Stalker.

Technically I’ve covered the Death-Stalker already. In issue #158, he will be revealed to be the Exterminator, a villain who had appeared in a single storyline in 1968. I haven’t read that issue yet, but since it’s removed from Death-Stalker’s debut by four years and three writers, it seems like a safe bet that Gerber intended the Death-Stalker to be a new character. So that’s how we’ll treat him.

The story emerges from a subplot which has been building for a while now, involving Foggy Nelson’s younger sister Candace, the token liberal in her family. Candace is a journalism student and she’s stumbled upon some documents about an abandoned research project involving Ted Sallis. None of the Daredevil characters know what Sallis is up to now, but we know that he’s the Man-Thing, and that Steve Gerber is writing that book too. This storyline isn’t a crossover, but it is an excuse for the Man-Thing to guest star.

According to the Sallis Papers, the US government was working on a serum to “change men into pollution-breathing monsters, so that the economy and the population could continue to grow despite the inevitable result of such unchecked growth.” This project went nowhere, since even Ted Sallis wasn’t stupid enough to stay involved with it. But the government still wants to perfect the serum, and use it to make soldiers who are immune to germ warfare.

Candace’s discovery leads to the FBI showing up at her door, and the Gladiator abducting her (and the papers) to the Florida Everglades – supposedly in the hope of finding Sallis and getting him to explain the formula. Daredevil gives chase, and at the end of issue #113, the Death-Stalker himself finally shows up as the Gladiator’s mysterious new boss. His character design seems not to have been finalised at this point: the cliffhanger gives us a clear view of him, something that won’t be hapening again. He’s a man in a grey-purple body suit, with a flowing cape, a hood that keeps his face in shadow, a belt with a skull logo on it, and great big flared boots.

By the next issue, though, things have changed. Aside from his chalk-white hands, the Death-Stalker is now a silhouette in a swirling cape and wide-brimmed hat. He has a mysterious “touch of death” power which can supposedly kill on touch, but which in practice he uses to knock people out. He can become intangible and he can teleport. Basically, he’s a ghostly type, or at least he’s doing his best to look like one. Daredevil isn’t sure what to make of him, although he can sense that the Death-Stalker is a real physical presence, so “actual ghost” is quickly eliminated as a possibility.

The Death-Stalker’s range of spectral powers pose a challenge for Daredevil, whose established fighting technique is to hit his opponents with a glorified stick. But it turns out that the Death-Stalker can only use one of his abilities at a time – so the trick is to dodge his attacks and then strike before he can switch to his intangibility power. He may not be out of Daredevil’s league, but he’s positioned as an especially challenging opponent.

In a narrow sense, the Death-Stalker’s agenda is clear. According to Gladiator, the Death-Stalker is “the head of the world’s largest espionage syndicate”. He wants the Sallis papers so that he can make the serum and sell it. Simple as that.

Yet he looks nothing like a spymaster character, and he doesn’t act like one either. This is clearly intentional –  Gladiator is infuriated and baffled by the behaviour of his new employer. Death-Stalker seems to treat everything as a bit of a game, and enjoys frustrating Daredevil. He’s also wildly threatening towards Gladiator, yet surprisingly cautious about actually killing anyone. That might be because the story doesn’t have any disposable characters for Death-Stalker to murder. But even so, he’s remarkably quick to accept that Candace doesn’t know anything useful, and to let her go. Gladiator calls him a “madman”.

The arc ends with Daredevil fighting the Death-Stalker in a chemical factory. The papers are destroyed in a conveniently placed vat of hydrochloric acid, which apparently gets everyone off Candace’s back. Death-Stalker himself falls into the same vat – on panel, with a big splash. But according to Daredevil there were no sounds of him dissolving, so he must have got away.

Basically, then, the Death-Stalker is a melodramatic mystery man with a memorable character design, a clear threat level, and a tendency to bang on about his death touch power even though he never uses it. That’s not such a bad start. But beneath the surface, there’s a lot going on that doesn’t fit together – why is his behaviour so inconsistent, and why does he care about something as mundane as the Sallis papers when he’s meant to be a quasi-mystical weirdo?

Gerber does a good job of selling the idea that all of these oddities are actually part of the character’s mystery. It’s not incoherent, it’s a grand plan! But was Gerber really setting up a grand mystery on his way out the door? It’s not like he brought the Death-Stalker with him to another title. The ending of issue #115 reads as if the real plan was for Death-Stalker to die in the acid, and it was dialled back at the scripting stages for Comics Code reasons. Maybe there never was a reveal planned, and Gerber just saw him as a bundle of surface-level tropes that would fit a Daredevil/Man-Thing story.

Death-Stalker was a moderate success for a few years. He made return appearances in Daredevil, as well as showing up in Ghost Rider and Dr Strange. After all, he had a strong design and gimmick, even if there wasn’t much going on beneath the surface. But perhaps when people kept using him, it became inevitable that at some point his mystery would have to be explained. And I can see why he ended up being tied to the Exterminator. Both villains had an “out of synch with reality” theme, and in the absence of anything better, a callback to a past villain at least counted as some sort of reveal. In the end, though, the Death-Stalker had the style to hang around for a few years, but not enough substance to last beyond that.