Daredevil Villains #48: Bullseye
DAREDEVIL #131-132 (March & April 1976)
“Watch Out for Bullseye, He Never Misses!” / “Bullseye Rules Supreme”
Writer, editor: Marv Wolfman
Penciller: Bob Brown
Inker: Klaus Janson
Colourist: Michele Wolfman
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Well, it took us 48 goes and over a decade of comics, but we’ve finally reached one of the really big names. We’ve had enduring second-tier villains like the Gladiator, the Jester and the Owl. We’ve had some villains who were big deal for a short time, like the Masked Marauder and the Death-Stalker. And we’ve had a whole bunch of one-off villains. But truly A-list villains? There’s the Purple Man, perhaps, but his claim to that status rests largely on stories published long after he stopped appearing in Daredevil.
Bullseye is in a different position. He still appears in Daredevil today. He’ll get his own minis. He’s a recognisable figure around the Marvel Universe. He’ll even make it to the Dark Avengers. But it’ll take him a little time. He made it into the first Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe but didn’t make the cut for the Deluxe Edition – which means he was ranked below the likes of the Death-Throws, a team of evil jugglers. He didn’t get back in until Update ’89. So why didn’t he click immediately?
In a sense, he did. He immediately enters Daredevil’s rogue’s gallery and starts making repeat appearances. As you surely know, Bullseye’s gimmick is that he has a perfect aim and can turn anything into a deadly weapon. In his first story, Bullseye’s plan is remarkably sensible. Using his skills, he’s going to make a name for himself as an unstoppable murderer, and then extort money from the rich. So in his very first scene, he shows up in the office of wealthy Mr Hunnicutt, and kills him by hurling a fountain pen into his throat. Bullseye follows that by spraypainting a target design over the corpse, along with a message saying “This is an example to all who refuse to pay Bullseye.”
An origin flashback tells us that Bullseye was an unusually bloodthirsty soldier in the Vietnam War. He’d always had a perfect aim. When his gun jammed, he killed an enemy soldier by simply throwing the gun as a spear instead. After the war, he became a mercenary, using his uncanny aim to master throwing weapons. It’s not a million miles from Garth Ennis’s version of the Punisher’s origin: homicidal sociopath finds his niche in wartime. Bullseye claims that he only kills for the intimidation factor and says that he’d rather just be paid. But he certainly seems to be enjoying himself.
As part of his brand-building efforts, Bullseye lures Daredevil into a public fight at a circus. Daredevil holds his own, but Bullseye gets to look impressive, and having made that point, he simply leaves. Then he shows up at the home of another wealthy couple to extort them. When they call the police, he tries to kill them. Fortunately, Daredevil is on hand; unfortunately, the story has run out of space, and ends with Daredevil defeating Bullseye in a rather routine three-page fight.
Still, Bullseye’s core elements are present and correct from the outset. He’s scary because he can kill you with anything. He’s a sadist who enjoys toying with people. That’s Bullseye, isn’t it? That’s the character that became a hit?
But at first, Marv Wolfman won’t quite commit to the purity of the concept. Like Captain America or Hawkeye, Bullseye is notionally not a superhuman. He’s just extremely skilled. This is, of course, absurd. He does things that are completely impossible. But they have to be things that at least feel like they could be done by a suitably talented genius, at least if you don’t think too hard.
So it’s not ideal that the very first thing Bullseye does is to shatter a skyscraper window by throwing a paper plane at it from the other side of the street. That’s the wrong side of the line. It doesn’t matter how good your aim is, you’re not throwing an ordinary paper plane with enough force to go through a pane of glass. At best, it’s a Karnak stunt, not a Bullseye one. It’s the next page that gets Bullseye right, when he kills with a fountain pen.
On top of that, Wolfman gives Bullseye with a sonic gun. This is truly bizarre. The last thing Bullseye needs is a gun. He can already turn anything that he finds lying around into a ranged weapon. That’s his whole gimmick! So if you’re going to give him a weapon, it should be something that he can fall back on in close combat. The dynamic of his fights with Daredevil is that Bullseye has the upper hand at a distance, but Daredevil can win if he manages to get close. So that’s where Bullseye could sensibly have been shored up. But a ray gun? Why?
There’s another issue, which reads even more strangely with hindsight. Despite being a creation of the mid 1970s, early Bullseye has a foot squarely in the Silver Age. Eventually, he’ll work as a smirking killer, much like the Joker. And that element is absolutely present from the outset. But in his first incarnation, Bullseye is also prancing around circuses and doing wacky stunts with paper planes.
The fact that Wolfman sees Bullseye that way becomes even clearer in his second story. In issues #141-142, Bullseye actually defeats Daredevil in combat, and has our hero unconscious. Bullseye doesn’t just kill the helpless hero, or even unmask him, but opts for the classic death trap. Fair enough, that’s the genre convention. But what a death trap. We’re not talking a bomb on a timer here, oh no. Bullseye ties Daredevil to a giant arrow, and then fires it at a cliff using a giant rooftop-mounted crossbow. This isn’t even Silver Age Marvel – it’s Adam West Batman. And here’s Bullseye doing it in 1976, the era of Wolverine and the Punisher.
In his earliest appearances, Bullseye is a genuine hybrid: a gimmicky throwback with a darker 70s edge. As it turns out, Bullseye works better when he’s played straight, or at least deadpan. He’s a killer who gets a kick out of his outrageous defiance of the normal limits of human skill, mocking everyone else who has to play by the normal laws of physics.
The core idea of Bullseye is strong, and he’s a natural opponent for Daredevil as another skill-based fighter. There are endless possibilities for his improvised weapons routine, and everything that makes him work is there to some degree from the outset. It was just mixed up with throwback elements that needed trimming away.
Bullseye’s gimmick in Wolfman’s first story isn’t fully solidified yet in another way. Wolfman writes him as a guy who turns any common object into a deadly weapon, but this goes beyond his aim. He also manages to nearly kill Daredevil by commandeering a human cannonball’s launcher at that circus, and int heir final battle he wields an umbrella as a hand-to-hand weapon (speaking of Adam West Batman-style stuff…)
It also takes Bullseye quite a while to fully ditch that gimmicky sonic pistol with the special ammo cartridges. He uses some of the cartridges as late as issue #160, his first Frank Miller0drawn storyline (written by Roger McKenzie).
I tend to think of his one Jim Shooter-penned appearance, Daredevil v.1 #146, as the point at which the character really gels. There, he sticks to thrown objects, steals a perfectly ordinary pistol early on for later use, and has an utterly psychotic level of ego, forcing Daredevil to fight him on live TV just to try to win back his rep as the deadliest man alive.
Frank Miller seems to have liked that story; he returns to it in both issue #159 and in the final Daredevil story he pencilled, #191, wherein a videotape of the fight from #146 plays a central role in a rather depressing, surprisingly mature plot. (For my money, it may be the best thing Miller’s ever written.)
It’s also interesting that Bullseye goes back into dormancy after Denny O’Neil’s attempt to revive the character, mainly so Daredevil can have a big fight with him in issue #200. While that story ended up being quite consequential for Wolverine, it’s not especially memorable, gives Bullseye an odd gimmick of being able to psychically home in on Daredevil, and is mostly just a buildup for him to be humiliatingly defeated.
After that, he vanished from the Daredevil book for years, and his next appearance is in, of all places, the “Streets of Poison” storyline in Captain America, almost seven years later.
Also, a slight correction: Bullseye did receive an entry in issue #2 of the 1983 original version of the Handbook, complete with a Frank Millar portrait. He was left out of the Deluxe Edition for some reason.
This may have been related to the early plans for Miller to kill Bullseye off in the much-delayed Elektra Lives Again graphic novel. Perhaps they figured he’d get a Book of the Dead entry? (Notably, Elektra does get a one-page entry in the Deluxe Edition among the living characters.)
Bullseye has been described as a former pitcher. He shares this background with Boomerang. In fact, the similarities between Boomerang and Bullseye have been pointed out more than once, with Fred feeling overshadowed by Bullseye.
This isn’t the only time we’ve seen windows broken with ridiculous ease in the Marvel Universe- Redwing also broke through a window during a Kingpin storyline in Captain America. What are windows made of in the Marvel Universe?
Bullseye tying Daredevil to a giant arrow wasn’t really that out of place for the Silver and Bronze Ages- Captain Boomerang tried to kill both the Flash and Batman by tying them to giant boomerangs. And Boomerang’s battle with Iron Fist involved a giant boomerang.
Where Bullseye really takes off is during the Miller era. He essentially becomes Matt’s second foe after the Kingpin- he kills Elektra before getting dropped by Matt and nearly killed. And after that he appears at the start of O’Neil’s run in the Lord Dark Wind arc.
However. after Daredevil 200. in 1983, Bullseye wouldn’t be seen until the Streets of Poison arc in Captain America in 1990. The reason has to do with the Elektra Lives Again Graphic Novel. It was supposed to come out in 1984 and feature a resurrected Elektra killing Bullseye before dying herself. But Matt is practicing law in that story, so it has to take place before Born Again. But it took forever for Miller to finish the Graphic Novel and as a result Bullseye was absent from the comics. Finally. Mark Gruenwald, who was the number two at Marvel, got tired of this and decided to use Bullseye in the Streets of Poison arc. The Elketra Lives Again Graphic Novel finally came out a few months later and was declared out of continuity.
All of this had a couple of interesting effects. Miller intended the Graphic Novel to be Elektra’s final appearance. But since it was out of continuity, Chichester decided that he could bring Elektra back in 1993 since it was ambiguous in Daredevil 190 whether she was resurrected.
The other effect it had involved Lady Deathstrike. Originally, in Alpha Flight. the reason she went after Wolverine was because she was trying to recreate her father’s adamantium bonding process and needed a previous subject to experiment on. But she couldn’t find Bullseye so she went after Wolverine. But after Bullseye was brought back. writers later claimed she was after Wolverine because it was a dishonor that her father’s process was used on Wolverine against his will. which is ridiculous.
Lady Deathstirke, by the way, joins Hallow’s Eve in the category of Women Who Killed Their Abusive Fathers And Were Treated Sympathetically By Their Creators But Turned Into Psychos By Later Writers.
These early Bullseye appearances are great, and it’s easy to see why he became a regular fixture. But by the end of Miller’s first run I was bored of the guy, and no stories since then have made him compelling as an arch-nemesis.
At the end of the day, he’s just a bad guy who kills people; he doesn’t challenge Matt Murdock’s worldview in the same way as the likes of Kingpin, Punisher, Bullet, Typhoid Mary, or even the Jester.
Thanks – I’ll fix the point about the Handbook when I get a chance.
Marv Wolfman clearly needed an editor who wasn’t Marv Wolfman. The cover is too wordy. Bullseye’s spray-painted warning is too wordy. He has a sonic gun but uses a paper airplane to break the window? I mean, come on — a second pair of eyes could have easily trimmed a lot of the fat off these stories.
After Streets of Poison, Bullseye appeared in Nocenti’s Daredevil in Daredevil 284-290. He then disappears for a few years after that until Punisher 101 in 1995.
Bullseye cemented his position as Daredevil’s number two villain by killing Karen Page in Kevin Smith’s Daredevil.
@Omar- Something similar happened with Iron Fist in the Deluxe Edition. He was killed off. then there plans to resurrect him in Avengers, then those plans got quashed when Roger Stern was fired in Avengers. But the result of all this was that Iron Fist would up not getting any entry at all because they weren’t sure whether to put him in the living section or the dead section. First they were going to put in the deceased section then they decided he might be alive. He finally got an entry in the 1989 Update.
But Bullseye wasn’t the only villain who didn’t appear in the Deluxe Edition. Chameleon and Hammerhead didn’t appear in the 1983 edition or the Deluxe Edition, although Hammerhead was mentioned in the Maggia section of the Deluxe Edition. (Both got entries in the 1989 Update.) In Chameleon’s case, that was because he wasn’t used for a decade after Amazing Spider-Man 186. In that issue, he was portrayed as a pawn of Spencer Smythe and after that no one wanted to use him for a decade. Finally, in 1988, David Michelinie gave him actual shape-changing powers and a few months later Gerry Conway had him try to take over the underworld in partnership with Hammerhead.
“What are windows made of in the Marvel Universe?”
Something nice and soft to let heroes without handy protective powers jump through them and not get lots of gashes.
What is the current status of bullseye spinal injury, he is not being used as an adamantium user/thrall in Wolverine is the because he has had it removed or it not a weapon as in the others or just that the writer either does not know or is not allowed to use him?
Also the Owl is an A lister from the moment he was revealed at the end of the first X-factor arc he was their top villain the horse men of the owl in fall of the mutants, age of owl in the 90s, his role on krakoa and the recent heir of the owl mini. He was one of the most popular characters in the biggest comics at the peak of the comic book.
> What is the current status of bullseye spinal injury,…
Who knows. He’s been killed and resurrected at least once.
I think he’s missing an arm now.
There’s another way key factor as to why Bullseye is a nice counterpoint to Daredevil, and I don’t see it often made. That’s how a chaotic, amoral Bullseye plays well against the strict and Catholic Daredevil.
Also, I imagine that Bullseye’s real name of Ben Poindexter was intentionally an attempt to be ironic. When did he get the name in the comics? In the postmodern age we live it, where creators hate to use codenames, I laughed out loud that Marvel’s Daredevil: Born Again live action series used his name in the courtroom scene– it was truly a funny juxtaposition.
@dannythewall: The “Ben Poindexter” name shows up for the first time in Daredevil v.1 #146, but it’s strongly implied to be an alias when first presented.
Bullseye, in civilian clothes, gives that name to a police officer after a non-costumed Matt Murdock gets in an altercation with him. Matt’s radar sense tells him Bullseye is about to bean a store clerk with a golf ball; but to the clerk and the cop, it just looks like a blind man attacking a stranger. The officer lets Bullseye walk, failing to recognize him.
How soon we forget one of 2016’s biggest movies, X-Men: The Owl.