DAREDEVIL #119 (March 1975)
“They’re Tearing Down Fogwell’s Gym!”
Writer: Tony Isabella
Artist: Bob Brown
Inker: Don Heck
Letterer: Dave Hunt
Colourist: Stan Goldberg
Editor: Len Wein

We’ve skipped issues #116-117, an Owl story which ends Steve Gerber’s run with a final trip back to San Francisco, in order that the west coast supporting cast can be formally written out. The Black Widow decides to stay there, but the book finds it remarkably difficult to give her the boot, and we’ll see her one more time before she officially departs. We’ve also skipped issue #118, which is a Gerry Conway fill-in issue featuring the Circus of Crime. It also introduces Blackwing as a new member of the Circus, but he gets a solo story shortly, so we’ll come back to him for that.

With that, we’ve arrived at the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Tony Isabella run, which lasted a whole five issues before he was removed from the book. Most of it is a HYDRA story, but Isabella kicks off by taking Daredevil back to his roots.

Well, that’s the idea. In practice, it takes forever to get to it. The first quarter of this issue sees Daredevil crossing town, musing about the Black Widow, taking the subway, and finally showing up for a meeting with Foggy and Candace Nelson. Finally, on page 7, Matt goes to visit Fogwell’s Gym, which is now under the management of Pop Fenton. Pop’s only previous appearance was in issue #68, when he was training Kid Gawain, a naive boxer who had fallen in with the vaguely defined extremist group Phoenix. Now, Pop has re-opened the Gym as a neighbourhood sports centre, determined to help the latest wave of immigrants into the neighbourhood in the same way that the Gym once helped people like him.

Kid Gawaine shows up too, but since issue #68 he’s found God and become a priest. Bear in mind that the sliding timeline still wasn’t firmly established in 1975, and so Isabella seems to think that Gawain has had a few years to change the whole direction of his life.

Obviously, the aim here here is to reconnect Matt with the working class sporting roots of his origin story, which had largely fallen by the wayside at this point. Pop Fenton and Kid Gawaine are not classic creations, but they are at least established characters who can offer some sort of link to Matt’s father and to the world of New York boxing.

Halfway through the issue, we get to the plot. Among the gym regulars is Juan Aponte, a talented bantamweight. He knows there’s no money in that division, so he wants to move up to fight as a heavyweight. It’s a doping story, basically. Aponte has made a deal with a mad scientist, whose treatments are increasing his size but damaging his mental stability. Fenton and Gawain want Aponte stopped from fighting for his own good, and for some reason Matt thinks they have grounds to get a restraining order. I have questions about standing, but whatever.

Aponte is due to fight that night, and he will not be reasoned with. But then, suddenly, he turns into a big bald giant called the Crusher, complete with costume.

The Crusher, then: Tony Isabella is one of those writers who can’t resist referencing an earlier story even when it doesn’t really add anything. And so the source of Aponte’s drugs is the corpse of the original Crusher, an Iron Man villain who only appeared in Tales of Suspense #91 and Iron Man #6 (1968). That Crusher, in turn, was a mad scientist called El Profesor who worked for a dictator called El Presidente, and who came up with a serum to make himself big and strong. He’s not exactly a lost classic, and there’s no real reason to tie this story to him. But hey, continuity!

Supposedly, Aponte’s personality is being subsumed beneath the Crusher’s. Except the original Crusher, regrettable accent aside, was rational and articulate. This guy just yells his name a lot and smashes things up. He’s a budget Hulk.

Daredevil makes no real headway against the Crusher, but the fight starts to bring the gym down around them both. Finally – and I mean “finally”, because it’s on the last page – Aponte sees Fenton and Gawaine about to be crushed by falling masonry. Shocked back to his senses, he throws himself into their path to stop them. For some reason that makes his serum wear off, and he turns back into a dying Juan Aponte. It’s not really clear why Aponte is dying – he was the Crusher when the masonry hit him, so it can’t be the impact. Is it just meant to be overload from the drugs, perhaps? Or is the idea that the weight was still on top of him when he turned back to normal?

Well, whatever it is, Aponte finally gets some dialogue as the issue ends. He says he wasn’t in his right mind, and delivers his dying line: “I wanted to be champ… I’m not champ. I’m just a punk kid. They beat me. They… uhhh!” In the final panel, Daredevil tells Juan that “nobody beat you, champ.”

He has so little dialogue as Aponte that he’s barely a developed character, and his death sequence feels unearned. He gains nothing from being linked to a minor Iron Man villain, and being a big strong dumb giant is not enough to stand out even in the Marvel Universe of 1975. Even Isabella can’t have found him that interesting – if he had, he’d have given the character more space, instead of spending so much time on the New York subway turnstile system. The basic idea of an athlete gaining cursed superpowers from dodgy steroids is reasonable enough, and the longer term project of connecting Matt to his roots is the right idea with hindsight. But there’s not much to commend this particular issue, or Aponte’s Crusher as a character.