Daredevil Villains #49: Mind-Wave
DAREDEVIL #133 (May 1976)
“Mind-Wave and his Fearsome Think-Tank!”
Writer, editor: Marv Wolfman
Penciller: Bob Brown
Inker: Jim Mooney
Colourist: Michele Wolfman
Letterer: Ray Holloway
Because we’re only looking at the Daredevil stories that introduce new villains, we’re going to get a very distorted view of Marv Wolfman’s run. He was on the series for nearly 20 issues, but he didn’t create that many new villains in that time. There are four new villains in his run, plus another one in an annual. The standout is obviously Bullseye, who we covered last time round. But there’s a gulf of quality between him and the others. For example, here we have “Mind-Wave and his Fearsome Think Tank!”
Mind-Wave is a man in a garish green and yellow costume who can read minds. He pilots a giant futuristic tank. The tank has satellite dishes all over it. Mind-Wave himself mans a gun, and two henchmen have their own little plexi-glass bubbles at the front. It looks like something from the GI Joe toy line, or maybe even Masters of the Universe. The narrator calls it a “clanking, titanium-steel destructoid”. Mind-Wave’s basic plan is to use the tank to create a distraction so that his henchmen can commit bank robberies.
This ridiculous conraption is called the Think-Tank – although aside from the pun, it has nothing to do with the mind-reading gimmick. Mind-Wave isn’t solely reliant on his big toy tank, though. Thanks to his powers, which might be something to do with a hi-tech helmet, Mind-Wave can sense what Daredevil is going to do before he does it. And he seems to have enough hand-to-hand combat ability to take advantage.
But in fact, Mind-Wave isn’t really a Daredevil villain at all. Because this is a team-up story, and Mind-Wave is really the arch-enemy of this issue’s guest star – Uri Geller.
Uri Geller made his name in the 1970s by claiming to have been given psychic powers by extraterrestrials. He would show up on talk shows to display his mind-reading, his ability to stop and start clocks, and his spoon-bending. There was a lot of spoon-bending. All of this, of course, was routine stage magic stuff, but Geller was adamant that he was for real, and he was widely believed.
On the letters page, Marv Wolfman tells readers that he’d met Geller, who had been able to copy a drawing without seeing it, and was therefore definitely a genuine and for real psychic. In a later interview, Wolfman claimed that he actually wound up writing this story because Marvel had already made a deal with Geller. Nobody else wanted anything to do with it, and as editor-in-chief, he had to take one for the team. He says he never believed Geller was legitimate, but he could hardly say so in the circumstances.
Whatever the truth about how this issue came about, it’s a notorious embarassment. It would be bad in any series, but it’s a particularly bad fit with Wolfman’s Daredevil. A major storyline at this point involves mysterious fake news bulletins spreading misinformation, starting with the sabotage of Foggy Nelson’s re-election campaign, and then moving on to bizarre conspiracy theories such as the survival of the Kennedy brothers, and the entire Vietnam War being a hoax. The Jester eventually turns out to be behind all this, and the intended moral is the dangers of gullibility. It is, shall we say, rather at odds with a story about Uri Geller, genuine psychic.
But even without that context, the story doesn’t work. Uri Geller doesn’t make sense in the Marvel Universe, in any title, period. He built his career by leaning on the mundanity of what he was doing. Everyone knew that basic mind reading tricks were a staple of stage magic, but Geller was convincing (to some people) because he kept everything on a small scale and stripped away conventional performance trappings. It was the modesty of his abilities that made them plausible. If he’d been vanishing the Statue of Liberty, it wouldn’t have worked.
So what do you do with him in the Marvel Universe? Professor X already exists. And the crimes that can be thwarted by deforming cutlery are few and far between. Wolfman’s solution is to give the Marvel Universe Geller Marvel Universe superpowers, and so for the purposes of this book, Uri Geller can bend steel bars with the power of his mind from the other side of the street. That solves one problem, but at the cost of creating another, by straying wildly from the real Geller.
Poor old Mind-Wave doesn’t exist to be a character. He’s there to be an evil “ESPer” so that Uri Geller has an opposite number to defeat. That, and the pun in his tank, is basically all there is to him. And even the pun was later re-used, to better effect, with Mentallo.
Mind-Wave never appeared in Daredevil again. You probably won’t be surprised to hear that his next appearance was in Captain America #319, as one of the nobodies in the Bar With No Name who got gunned down by Scourge – there’s a lot of failed Daredevil villains in that issue.
In 2009, Mind-Wave appeared in Rick Remender’s Punisher run, as one of a horde of Z-list villains sent by the Hood to take on Frank Castle, with predictably fatal results. Mind-Wave’s role in that arc is to be the Z-lister of the Z-listers – the guy who feels justifiably out of his depth even compared to the other Scourge victims. And it’s hard to argue with that, even though this issue would like us to believe that Mind-Wave had been a successful European supervillain in the past.
Marv Wolfman surely never intended this bozo to be a recurring character. Most likely, he just didn’t want to waste a good idea on the Uri Geller issue – and he certainly didn’t.
“even though this issue would like us to believe that Mind-Wave had been a successful European supervillain in the past.”
Europe, because in the Marvel Universe the existence of Weapon X makes ‘you don’t know them, they live in Canada’ too credible a boast.
I honestly think this is one of the worst issues of DAREDEVIL ever published, even when I read it off the racks as a young’un.
Ironically(?) enough, the second Mindwave (not “Mind-Hyphen-Wave”) was killed by Bullseye.
Also, was there some kind of toy component to the Marvel deal with Uri Geller? That would explain the silly tank and the garish costume. Or maybe Geller’s people had a simplistic view of what comics were like and insisted on those elements.
Bringing in real-life celebrities as guest characters only just works when it’s done for usually lame, mostly harmless comedy. The Spider-Man stories with Stephen Colbert and Barack Obama were thin, ostensibly comedic media gimmicks, relegated to backup story status.
Spider-Man teaming up with the late 1970s cast of Saturday Night Live is similarly an issue of harmless fluff, even if Chris Claremont largely failed at capturing the show’s humor and the cast’s personalities. It even has some miniscule continuity significance as the origin point of the teleportation rings that the Viper and the Silver Samurai use in several of Claremont’s earlier stories with them.
Likewise, Superman meeting Orson Welles isn’t remembered as being that much sillier than other 1950s stories. Less successfully, there’s Jack Kirby inexplicably putting Don Rickles in his Jimmy Olsen Fourth World stories.
I think one of the only times this sort of thing really worked as both a funny bit and as a functional issue of a title was the Avengers story where they appear on Late Night with David Letterman.
It’s the comparatively straight-faced stuff like this Uri Gellar issue, and the Punisher’s meeting with meeting Eminem was even worse. There’re also the really painful “very special episode” Outsiders issues from Judd Winick’s run, with the team briefly working alongside erstwhile America’s Most Wanted host John Walsh to fight chuld traffickers.
And then there’s Superman’s very unfortunately timed story with no less than John F. Kennedy helping protect the hero’s secret identity, from Action Comics v.1 #309, which managed to come out shortly after Kennedy’s assassination.
All in all, not a great track record. Comics generally do better with thinly veiled versions of real celebrities, since they can also be made to work as characters in their own right, unburdened by the demands of PR flacks and likeness licenses.
“In Europe”.
Now I can’t help but remember that Norman Osborn was presumably hiding in Europe at this time.
I don’t really want a story revealing the untold tales of joint villainy in Europe starring Norman Osborn and Mind-Wave.
Hopefully I will come to my senses soon.
The MCU managed to get a workable character out of Mind-Wave.
Granted, they had to strip away everything except his real name and his powers, turning him into a low-level telepath freaked out by his powers – but they still managed to pull it off.
The idea of Geller’s mind being connected to an alien computer in outer space with Hoova as his alien controller after being exposed to a silver light in the sky doesn’t sound odd by Marvel Universe standards. It sounds a bit like a Philip K. Dick idea, in fact. They just needed to introduce Hoova into the comics. May I suggest a vacuum shaped being?
Granted, the ability to bend spoons isn’t very impressive by Marvel Universe (or PKD) standards…
It might have made for a compelling story where Geller wonders why if his mind is now connected to an alien computer that his powers are so disappointing. Perhaps he learns that these aliens are using the equivalent of Apple II computers. Which, Geller would have never allowed for his likeness in this comic deal.
Marvel even had an entire series starring the Human Fly, the “real-life superhero”. That also faced similar issues of discrepancy between the Earth-616 and our reality.
@Omar: And let’s not forget Spider-Man and Deadpool and Penn and Teller. That was certainly a thing that happened.
@Taibak: Netflix (not the MCU, at the time) did make Erik Gelden workable, but they did it by basically creating an entirely new character and giving him Mind-Wave’s real name. Even the power is new: Erik isn’t a low-level telepath, he’s an empath who can sense people’s darker impulses (I had to think of Lorne from Angel, minus the songs).
In my view, Netflix only gave him the name as a red herring, so viewers who recognized Mind-Wave’s name would presume Erik to be revealed as a villain, which he wasn’t. (They pulled the same stunt with Jessica’s therapist Dr Maynard Tiboldt).
For the wrestling fans on the board, there’s also Superman meeting champion wrestler Antonino Rocca in 1962.
No love for Tony Stark having a friendly chat in a sparring session with his best bud Justin Trudeau ?
To add to Omar’s list, let’s not forget Cyclops explaining to Kevin Feige that he better not be sidelined in the MCU X-Men movie at the first Hellfire Gala.
And, if we’re counting the MCU, the early appearance of Elon Musk in Iron Man 2, though this was before we was rewritten as a villain.
And then there’s DC’s Superman vs. Muhammad Ali.
And some gratuitous celebrities-I’d-never-heard-of cameos in Millar’s Ultimates.
I have a certain fondness for the time in Mark Gruenwald’s Captain America when Ronald Reagan turned into a snake-man and fought Steve Rogers. Though even there I’d say Reagan comes off better than the real version.
I’m pretty sure (but not motivated to check) that Uri Geller is still doing his thing. Claiming he’s doing spy stuff for the government and whatnot.
I do have to wonder though, was Mind-Wave so garish and silly on purpose? If nobody at Marvel wanted to do the story, maybe they deliberately sabotaged it in a way that Geller’s publicity people would assume is normal for superhero comics.
I liked when Steven Engelhart had Dr. Doom buddy up to the United States during the Cold War, so Henry Kissinger showed up to tell the Fantastic Four to leave Latveria. Then, Kissinger won a Nobel Peace Prize.
I imagine Gerald Ford somewhere saying, “He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”
It also showed Reed’s true colours when he said the FF have never “bucked the United States government before, and they’re not going to start now.” Which became a convenient Reed excuse anytime he wanted to stay on the US government’s side (see also: Civil War), but just nevermind those instances where it was an inconvenience to Reed, like when they stole that rocket in FF #1.
I think Marvel did a Models Inc. mini-series in the late-2000s that involved (starred?) that Tim Gunn guy that was (is?) on Project Runway. Which at least seems like a proper combination of real life person and comic project.
To bring it back to Daredevil, Jann Wenner (Rolling Stone magazine founder) interviewed DD in a Gerber-written issue.
Sticking with the counterculture cool theme, Nick Fury’s far-too-young-for-him girlfriend at the time forced Nick Fury to attend a Country Joe and the Fish concert in the final issue of Nick Fury vol. 1 by “Groovy” Gary Friedrich.
The one superhero who reliably had successful real-world cameos is Herbie Popnecker, The Fat Fury.
Then you have the DC comedian books, Jerry Lewis met the Big Three and Flash in his book. Woody Allen met the Maniaks, iirc. Superman being in Candid Camera.
@ John, there was never a rewrite, the past couple of years have been a Villain reveal but even as far back as Iron Man 2 the Clues where all there.
@Sanity Utlimates use of Celebrities’ was typical over the top shock slock from Millar, no-one else would think the idea of Hulk trying to kill Freddie Prinze Jr.
The real world stories I never really enjoy are the Bullpen gets invaded stories, they always seem too smug and assume we know exactly how the writers and staffers interact and would react to Blaaster turning up at Marvel HQ. More fun to write then read.
It occurs to me that there’s a distinction to be made between stories where the real-world celebrity appearance is a key plot point and stories that just drop names or throw in cameos as in-jokes.
Cameos and name-drops can work just fine for what they are. I think it’s the stories that put the real-world, contemporary celebrity into the plot that usually range from mediocre to bad. And few things are worse than writers trying to incorporate real-world comedians. (Again, I think Roger Stern did manage to make David Letterman’s appearance work in Avengers v.2 #239, but more in plot terms than in capturing Letterman’s humor.)
@Alastair: The Bullpen appearances are usually on the more grating side of the in-jokey stuff. And they’ve aged very badly given how much more we know now about the ugly side of the business.
Once in awhile there’s a funny bit. For instance, amid all of its tiresome “look at us” moments, Fantastic Four v.1 #176 has one good gag. It’s the bit with the editor-in-chief’s door having a bunch of crossed out names and a note expressing bewilderment about who’ll be next.
But that works because it’s rather pointed self-deprecation, a Marvel comic acknowledging the utter mess that the company had become at that point. And it benefits from being a small background gag, one that it’s obtrusive like all of the creator cameos with dialogue.
@Alastair: I thought Freddie Prinze, Jr. wrote the issue where the Hulk killed him?
There was the Rutland, Vermont unofficial Marvel/DC crossover stories, featuring Englehart, Conway, and Wein. I found those comics to be fun.
The JSA/JLA crossover that featured the Earth Prime writers was odd but fun. I also love the mid 80s Superman issued that was a farewell/anniversary for Schwartz.
I’d like to believe that the story originally called for Moondragon, but Uri Gellar was put in at the last moment for the appearance deal.
John Byrne inserted himself into the trial of Galactus as the “chronicler” of FF adventures. Not exactly a celebrity cameo, but it was well done.
Steve Gerber on Man-Thing did the same thing as Grant Morrison did on Animal Man before Morrison, by revealing that he was the writer of the Man-Thing’s stories and inserting himself into the comic.
So did Chris Claremont in 1981.
My favorite self-insert from comic book creators are 1) Jack & Stan being turned away from Reed’ & Sue’s wedding in FF Annual 3; and 2) Claremont & Cockrum in X-Men 98, in which Claremont is describing the scene happening in the comic and Cockrum tells him to (I’m paraphrasing) shut up and run.
John Byrne’s self-insert in Fantastic Four was his nod to Assistant Editor’s Month, as I recall.
With the Marvel Sliding Timescale (DC’s continuity is essentially dead already at this point) , how will these issues be explained away in the future , particularly the one with the Avengers meeting David Letterman , since late-night USA comedy talk shows are arguably dying out , partly for being too un-PC nowadays?
Different Multiverse. The easy solution to 2025 continuity problems.
@Jdsm24 and Mark Coale: Maybe Nick Fury shared the Infinity Formula with a *lot* of people?
The Official Marvel Indices refer to all of these sorts of things as “topical references,” and assume that under the sliding timeline references to specific current figures and events, and even seasons that don’t work with compressed continuity don’t count. Just assume it was some current light entertainment/late night host or some in-universe equivalent to Letterman.
At DC, that’d probably be a mainline continuity version of David Endochrine of The Dark Knight Returns. But then, DC used to have a regular stable of in-universe counterparts of real celebrities, mostly in the Superman books, who even recurred. Johnny Nevada was their equivalent of Johnny Carson, Lola Barnett was their Rhona Barrett, and so on.
Even post-Crisis on Infinite Earths, Link Rambeau was Rush Limbaugh as a Daily Planet columnist. heir generic late-night host character was a guy named Whitty Banter. At one point, Lex Luthor’s period as a younger clone of himself with hair, pretending to be a secret son raised in Australia, was something of Rupert Murdoch parody.
Chuck Dixon also had some of these characters in his DC stories. I remember a Larry King lookalike who recurred, as well as a different recurring Rush Limbaugh stand-in. (This being Chuck Dixon, his Limbaugh stand-in was generally portrayed as sensible and correct.)
This leaves out DC’s old one-off celebrity spoofs such as Les Vegas (Chevy Chase), Wade Halibut, Jr. (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.). The wildest one was probably Peter and Laura MccCartney (Paul and Linda), where the plot twist was that they performed as their own opening act, the Woodworkers (The Carpenters).
Brian Cronin had a whole series of columns on this at the old ComicBookResources/CBR site. You can find most of them using the Google search string: “my name it is nothin” site:cbr.com
The folks at the old DC messageboards also once put together a big list of all the DC celebrity spoof characters, but it seems to have vanished from the web with those forums’ closure.
Correction: The Daily Planet‘s recurring Limbaugh spoof was Dirk Armstrong.
Link Rambeau was Chuck Dixon’s version of Limbaugh, who turned up several times, mostly just by name or as a voice from a radio, in his Batman titles of the 1990s.
Denny O’Neil introduced a Rupert Murdoch stand-in to the Marvel Universe named Rupert Dockery during his Amazing Spider-Man run. I don’t think he’s really been used after O’Neil, which is surprising, considering that was the early-1980s and how much more topical Murdoch got after that point.
Yes, someone like Letterman can always be replaced with Jimmy Fallon or whoever is on Netflix filling a similar role (I haven’t watched those shows since Jay Leno in the ‘90s). I don’t know if the phenomenon of someone like Uri Geller can ever be replicated after the 1970s. It is the Marvel Universe though. Just figure that Hoova tried again with multiple humans after Geller failed on his mission. It’s the Marvel Universe: humans being contacted and influenced by space aliens was an everyday occurrence in the 1960s and 1970s, or with sliding timescale the early-2000s now.
Wasn’t it revealed that something in Nick Fury’s DNA allowed the Infinity Formula to only work on him? Was that revelation ret-conned at some point?
@Chris V.: I’d agree that Geller was a very specific sort of celebrity possible only in a very particular stretch of time. It’s not as if you can just sub in Criss Angel and get the same sensibility.
In this case, I suppose that in continuity terms, he’d be a sort of generic psychic guy, not a celebrity, under the “topical references” rule from the Marvel Index series.
As to the Nick Fury thing, that was really just a joke, since it’s a popular fan theory that the other Howling Commandoes stuck around because nick must’ve share dit with them.
I don’t know about the DNA idea, but the story that introduced the Infinity Formula had it as a periodic dose Nick needed to take, and the scientist who initially used it to heal a wounded, World War II-era Fury was extorting him out of huge sums for continued access. That story ends with the Contessa ending the blackmail and giving Nick a dose of the Serum herself. So, as originally conceived, Nick wouldn’t have been able to give it to others.
Since then, the Infinity Formula has been reimagined and retconned to pieces. There’s a story that treats it as something that has become part of Nick’s DNA and now just replicates in Nick’s body. Then it’s used in separate stories circa the Fear Itself crossover to save the lives of both Mockingbird and Bucky Barnes.
Hickman’s SHIELD series also retconned it as a weaker variant of Isaac Newton’s alchemical discovery of the Elixir Vitae.
And then, in original Sin, it seems like it didn’t work all that well to keep Fury young. But later stories ignored the aged Fury of that crossover and gave us the usual Steranko-mode Nick, Sr.
So it can probably be whatever anyone wants it to be these days, as long as it keeps people young and fit beyond their years in some vague, flexibly presented manner.
I know this issue is notorious, but when I finally read it, I didn’t see what the big deal is. If you just look at the “Uri Geller” of the comic as an original character in the comics, then it reads no differently from any “introduce a new hero in the adventures of an established hero” type of deal. As Wolfman had already done only a few issues earlier in this series with Torpedo.
All one has to do is ignore the fact that Uri Geller is a real life celebrity. I know that’s difficult, given how relevant and omnipresent he’s been in the media for the last half-century … but it can be done.
I agree. I found it a mediocre issue, but hardly the worst issue of DD. Like I said, Uri Geller is hardly out of place in the Marvel Universe. Compared to the issues where Matt pretended to be his own hipster twin brother, or the early-‘90s issues where he faked his own death (again) and started wearing the black armour, Uri Geller showing up hardly made me blink. Those were terrible comics.