Daredevil Villains #44: El Jaguar
DAREDEVIL #120 (April 1975)
“…And a HYDRA New Year!”
Writer: Tony Isabella
Artist: Bob Brown
Inker: Vince Colletta
Colourist: Petra Goldberg
Leterer: Ray Holloway
Editor: Len Wein
Aside from the Crusher issue that we covered last time, Tony Isabella’s short run on Daredevil consists of a HYDRA storyline. These few issues are certainly not enough to make HYDRA into Daredevil villains. But if Isabella had stuck around longer, they might well have wound up as a true import to his rogue’s gallery. Isabella’s big project here is to retool HYDRA for the seventies, and Daredevil happens to be the book he’s writing so here they are.
HYDRA had debuted a decade earlier in “Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD” (at that point, a feature in Strange Tales). They were a terrorist organisation led by Fury’s arch enemy Baron Wolfgang von Strucker, who had started life as a Nazi villain in Sgt Fury #5. In other words, as originally conceived, they were continuity Nazis. If not outright neo-Nazis, they were at least an example of the “escaped Nazi leader resurfaces in South America with a private army” trope.
But Strucker had been killed in Strange Tales #158, back in 1967. HYDRA had continued to appear, but my impression is that without their frontman, they’d drifted into mere generic super-terrorists.
Isabella’s approach is to dump the last remnants of the Nazi angle and just make HYDRA into a large criminal organisation. There’s an assortment of minor bad guys as the middle management, and a Supreme Hydra running the whole show. This version of HYDRA doesn’t stand for anything beyond a “cause of global domination”. They’re generic world conquerors in the Cobra mould, and if anything more than that was in Isabella’s mind, then it’s not apparent on the page. In lieu of an actual theme, they have an organogram.
The HYDRA ranks are mainly filled out with minor existing characters. The Fixer and Mentallo are there. So is the Sub-Mariner villain Commander Kraken. The least explicable inclusion is the Man-Killer, who at this point was a man-hating militant ultra-feminist. While this iteration of the character was excruciatingly of its time, she did at least have a clear philosophy and agenda, neither of which fits with taking a job in the generic, male-dominated HYDRA. But here she is anyway.
A few new characters are introduced too. One is Blackwing, and we’ll come to him next time. Another is Jackhammer, who gets so little to do that there’s no point devoting a post to him – he won’t appear again until 1990, when he shows up in Captain America. And then there’s El Jaguar.
El Jaguar is the leader of the HYDRA commando squad, and he does get a prominent individual role in his debut issue.Foggy Nelson is being invited to join SHIELD’s new oversight board, and El Jaguar’s squad are sent to kidnap him. It’s New Year’s Eve, and Foggy’s guests include Matt and Natasha, back for one last run in the book. Yes, I know the issue is cover dated April, but that’s how far out of synch the cover dates were with the publishing schedule in those days.
Natasha hasn’t forgiven Foggy for that time when he was blackmailed into prosecuting her for murder. She also spends issue fretting about whether being in love with Matt is compatible with being a “liberated lady”, in a storyline with gender politics that are painfully unsubtle even for the time.
None of this matters in the slightest to El Jaguar, who is only here for the fight scene. He and his crew crash in through the window, there’s a fight with Daredevil and the Black Widow, and Foggy is saved from abduction. The henchmen are captured, but El Jaguar puts in a relatively impressive showing before escaping.
For all the prominence he’s given, El Jaguar is a very generic character. As you might have guessed, he peppers his dialogue with words of Spanish, such as “Caramba!” He wears leopardskin trousers, he’s bare chested, and he’s wearing a jaguar-head necklace. He has pointy ears and odd-looking eyes, and seems to have mildly superhuman strength, at the level which might pose a problem for the likes of Daredevil but wouldn’t have Spider-Man breaking a sweat.
The most ill-advised aspect of his design is his gloves. Clearly the idea was that he would have brutal, slashing claws. If you squint, you can see an echo of Sabretooth, who won’t debut until 1977. But you’ll have to squint a lot, because El Jaguar’s big furry gloves look like novelty handwarmers.
Nor does he have the personality of a vicious killer. In fact, to the extent that he has a personality at all beyond “villain”, his signature trait is to be unusually concerned about the wellbeing of his men. Even though the rest of his squad are disposable greenshirts, El Jaguar doesn’t treat them that way. In fact, he gets genuinely protective when Daredevil is beating them up.
In the logic of Isabella’s HYDRA, that might perhaps have led somewhere. El Jaguar could have been the HYDRA divisional leader who treated his men well – the token noble warrior within HYDRA. Or he could have switched sides at some point. Or he could have built a power base of loyal nobodies within the HYDRA, which is probably the most interesting option. But none of these quite fit with him as a vicious claws guy.
El Jaguar appears throughout Isabella’s brief run, providing a recognisable baddie for Daredevil and the Black Widow to fight on their way to bigger things. But nobody seems to have found him very inspiring. After this storyline, he makes only one further appearance: he’s one of the nobodies in the Bar With No Name that get gunned down by Scourge in Captain America #319.
There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with El Jaguar – you could have developed him into a passable lieutenant if you really wanted. But his hook isn’t strong enough to make you try.
“ Another is Jackhammer, who gets so little to do that there’s no point devoting a post to him – he won’t appear again until 1990, when he shows up in Captain America.”
As part of a team that brought all the power-tool-themed villains together, because it was the Mark Gruenwald run.
El Jaguar was so minor, Rick Remender didn’t bother to revive him when he had the Hood bring back a bunch of the Scourge victims. So he ranks below even such, uh, luminaries as Mind-Wave and fellow lame cat-themed villain the Cheetah.
@James Moar: Other than Jackhammer, Were any of Karl Malus’s “Power Tools” actually previously existing characters?
And, hey, in the same run of Captain America, Jackhammer also got to turn up having some kind of destructive lovers’ spat with Poundcakes of the Grapplers. And he did fight Union Jack and company in that came-and-went-unnoticed mini by Christos Gage.
I’d be surprised if there’s any actual connection, but it almost feels like El Jaguar is a dry run for Spider-Man’s Puma. There’s a vague visual similarity, and they both have that noble villain thing going on.
@Omar- To be fair, there were a number of villains that Remender didn’t. bring back- the Enforcer, Melter, Hellrazor, Shellshock, Steeplejack, Grappler, Commander Kraken, the Rapier, the Vamp.
This storyline’s main significance is that it brings back Silvermane, Fixer and Mentallo for the first time since their introductory stories. But more on that next time.
Regarding El Jaguar’s cuddly-wuddly claw-gloves, it occurs to mje there’s another 1970s villain with a similar design decision: the Griffin, who started out with actual lion paws — and claws — grafted onto him in the Beast series in Amazing Adventures v.1 #15.
The Griffin gets by because he was eventually mutated into a nonsapient, quadruped animalistic state, so the paws really were just…paws. When he came back as part of the Hood’s gang, seemingly back to his original form, artists fudged his paw-claw-hands, making his digits look more finger-like and menacing and less furry.
Also, hilariously, Marvel introduced so may big cat-themed villains in the 1970s that the Cheetah, from Captain Marvel v.1 #48-49, had to have his name changed at the last minute from El Gato after Gerry Conway learned that name had already been used for a villain in Omega the Unknown. There’s even a little text about it on the letters page of the Cheetah’s debut issue! The Cheetah was also even more of a caricature of a Latin American than El Jaguar.
@Michael: That’s true, though we’ve seen multiple successors to the Melter. Hellrazor turned up again as a name used by one of the mysterious psychics who targeted the Osborn-led Thunderbolts in Warren Ellis’s second and final arc on that title, all of whom took the names of various Scourge victims. (And we nevcer did find out what their backstory was.)
The Grappler got to show up once more in a flashback to a previously unseen encounter with She-Hulk during the second volume of Dan Slott’s run. Finally, we’ve seen a couple of Steeplejack successors as part of Roderick (Hobgoblin) Kingsley’s legion of supervillain licensees.
I’ve always wondered if Commander Kraken’s involvement in HYDRAS from this arc inspired the creation of the Kraken as a HYDRA elite in the first Secret Warriors series. It’s odd that Remender didn’t bring him back. He seems like just the kind of wacky high-concept character — a classic pirate! who originally looked like Captain Hook! with a boat shaped like a giant squid! — who’d appeal to him the way the likes of the Hijacker, Megatak, and Turner D. Century clearly did. Maybe the Commander’s need for a big body of water to operate in made too hard to work into a plot, even even an increasingly demented one like Remender’s Punisher series.
Anyway, these other Scourge victims are way more interesting to talk about than El Jaguar. (Can’t wait for Mind-Wave, arguably the nadir of Marv Wolfman’s upcoming run of Daredevil and the worst imaginable follow-up to the introduction of Bullseye…though it wasn’t all Marv’s fault.)
So are Silvermane, Fixer, and Mentallo, but they’ll be more relevant when Blackwing comes up in this series.
El Jaguar’s biggest claim to fame would seem to be that he took the obvious name away from the character who eventually became known as the Cheetah. So many of the Latin American big cat names had already been taken that Conway decided to go with an African animal instead. Ocelot was still available.
I’m kind of surprised that Conway didn’t barrel straight though the awkwardness and call his character El Cheetah. I’m also surprised DC didn’t say “Um, excuse us“, but looking into it, Wonder Woman hadn’t used Pricilla Rich for ten years at this point.
What If…Submariner and Black Panther had a son who was a pro wrestler?!
Also, they still haven’t fixed the cover design. The big gap at the top is so weird.
@Omar- I’ve always thought that one of the reasons for Commander Kraken’s death had to do with his last appearance in Iron Man. Kraken finds out that Tony Stark is Iron Man and seemingly dies but turns up alive at the end of the arc. It’s odd considering that during the ’70s and ’80s Marvel was pretty strict about not allowing any of Tony’s villains except Madame Masque to find out Tony’s secret identity. So having this loser find out was odd and it’s no surprise that he was killed off in his next appearance. But that didn’t apply in 2009, when Remender brought the other Scourge villains back.
Of course, Remender killed off a lot of the Scourge villains he brought back, either in Punisher or Venom. Some of them had sucessors, so he had to kill them off (Cyclone, Firebrand) but others, like Hijacker or Megaton, didn’t have successors.
The revived villain who’s been used the most is the Fly. He’s still a Z-lister but at least he’s been rescued from being the joke that Assistant Editor’s Month issue turned him into (it had him eating garbage and drinking spilled soda).
Another revived villain, Mirage, has become a running gag where he keeps getting killed and revived. It might be fun to do a story where he fights Quentin Quire and they both keep dying and getting revived.
@Daibhid C- It was Conway who created the second Cheethah at DC, Deborah Domaine, a few years later.
@Michael: That Commander Kraken story was plotted by Herb Trimpe, so Conway was likely just scripting it per the “Marvel Method.” So it’s Trimpe who not only had Commander Kraken learn Iron Man’s secret ID, but also radically revamped him visually, making him almost unrecognizable as the character who’s appeared in Sub-Mariner and The Cat. And his cool kraken submarine was gone, too!
I suspect the radical revamp, along with the secret ID dangling plot, did indeed make the Commander the kind of overcomplicated, undercooked character Mark Gruenwald meant to weed out with the Scourge plotline.
Yet the much less interesting and much more poorly designed Captain Barracuda managed to live on a lot longer in scattered, generic appearances. Guy doesn’t even have, like a barracuda-shaped boat, or a barracuda logo, or anything. Just an eyepatch and a generic, kitschy sci-fi sort of costume. I guess it helps to be a Stan lee co-creation.
Another victim of Scourge from the same story, Shellshock, had also gotten a total visual overhaul, oddly enough for a comedy appearance in Marvel Two-In-One #96, whose plot comes across in part as a lighthearted pastiche of Fantastic Four Annual #3.
Despite ditching his “Mad Thinker, but in red coveralls” look and getting a snazzy, crab-shaped(?) mask, Shellshock is just there to be humiliated by Ant-Man (Scott Lang). And then Gruenwald summarily killed Shellshock off in his next appearance.
Mirage is funny, because he’s really just a poor man’s Mysterio. I assume the gag with his dying and returning is inspired by Cap faking is survival at the conclusiom of the original Scourge arc.
As to the Enforcer, I always figured the botch-up of his true iudentity was why he was fed to Scourge. Writers like Michael Fleisher mistook the red herring character from the Enforcer’s original storyline for the Enforcer’s true identity, not helped by the oblique way the Enforcer’s identity was revealed in his initial Ghost Rider appearances. Straightening it out would have been a headache, especially just to salvage a guy who’s gimmick had degenerated into “pistol-wielding gangster, but dresses like a supervillain.”
Part of why I lumped El Jaguar in with the likes of Marvel’s Cheetah and Mind-Wave is that, unlike the Enforcer or even the likes of Shellshock, El Jaguar never even got a real second story; he went straight from his debut arc to his death-by-Scourge, and even there he was a face in the crowd.
I enjoyed Gage’s Union Jack mini. To its credit, that did introduce the revamped, less stereotypically cringy Arabian Knight and a better look for Sabra. And it had great art… and Gage used a whole slew of fun villains.
I know Gruenwald later regretted the Scourge storyline for killing off so many potentially useful villains, but there were still a bunch who weren’t exactly missed…
@Omar- Weirdly, Captain Barracuda wasn’t used at all after Fantastic Four 219 until 2010, after the majority of the Scourge victims had been brought back.It’s odd that he was left unused for 30 years- maybe writers assumed Namor killed him at the end of FF 219 even though there was no indication that he wasn’t just unconscious.
So many cat themed villains you’d think we were talking about lucha Libre and not comics.