Daredevil Villains #3: The Owl
DAREDEVIL #3 (August 1964)
“Daredevil Battles the Owl, Ominous Overlord of Crime!”
Writer, editor: Stan Lee
Penciller: Joe Orlando
Inker: Vince Colletta
Letterer: Sam Rosen
Colourist: uncredited
It’s Daredevil’s first supervillain of his very own… for a fairly undemanding definition of “super”. And he gets a huge build-up, which suggests Stan Lee had hopes for him as a recurring villain.
The Owl is a Wall Street financier. The narrator tells us that he’s “merciless” and has “no friends … no loved ones… nothing to connect him with the human race save the fact of his birth!” What this means in practice is that he’s massively rich and powerful, everyone is afraid of him, and everyone already suspects him of corruption. For some reason, he’s actually changed his name to “the Owl”. Orlando draws him as a smug, sinister fat guy in an old fashioned suit (even for the time).
This could have been a workable set-up for the Owl – albeit a bit anti-capitalist for Stan Lee. He’s a rich criminal operating in plain sight and mocking the fact that nobody can prove anything against him. In fact, we know that’s a workable set-up, because it’s the Kingpin. But the Kingpin won’t debut until 1967. The Owl isn’t fighting for space with him just yet.
Unfortunately for the Owl, the first time around, Stan Lee doesn’t stick with the set-up. He blows it up almost immediately. The Owl is arrested for fraud. As a show of contempt, he picks a lawyer at random from the phone book, which turns out to be Nelson & Murdock, because of course it does. Matt takes the case – partly because he wants to learn more about the Owl, but partly because he actually believes that everyone is entitled to representation – and gets the Owl released overnight. According to Matt, the Owl “is charged with sheer animal power” and “almost limitless energy, all of it directed into evil channels”, which is an odd mix with the bloated fat cat that Orlando draws. But you can kind of see it, in a force of personality way.
Once released, the Owl skips town and heads to his “Aerie”, a gloriously absurd owl-themed building, which seems like an extremely sub-optimal place to hide out from the cops. He hires a couple of henchmen to pursue a new career as an outright criminal, using the fortune that he’s stashed away over the years. And the Owl then reveals his own super power by dropping his new allies through a trap door so that he can save him with his, um, “power to glide.”
Yes, glide.
It’s a well drawn sequence, and Lee sells it as hard as he can – “the power to glide with air currents … to drift and swoop, and plunge… like the bird which is my namesake!” But by the standards of the Marvel Universe, gliding is mundane stuff. We were fighting Electro and being shot into space just last issue. The fact that the Owl can glide is not something you can present as a game changing revelation. It doesn’t even really play much part in the story – he uses it in one panel to get into his boat. It feels like something tacked on at the last moment because Stan Lee didn’t quite have faith in the evil financier concept.
The Owl shows up with his henchmen at Nelson & Murdock’s office, intending to hire Matt as a lawyer, on the logic that he’s young, inexperienced, and probably gullible. Daredevil fights them, but surrenders as soon as they kidnap his secretary and romantic interest Karen Page. If you’re unfamiliar with early Daredevil, by the way, the entire regular cast is Matt, his partner Foggy and their secretary Karen, and their subplots run on the engine of a romance comic. Matt loves Karen, but cannot show his feelings because it would be wrong to impose on her and because he doesn’t like the idea of her feeling sorry for him. Karen loves Matt, feels sorry for him, and wonders why he’s so distant all the time. She also loves Daredevil (once she meets him), because who wouldn’t. And Foggy loves Karen, who vaguely thinks he might be an acceptable husband if Matt’s not on offer. And Matt keeps half-heartedly encouraging that relationship because he thinks so too.
But back to the story. The Owl celebrates his victory with a “mad, spine-chilling chortle”. As a good Silver Age villain, it apparently doesn’t occur to him to unmask Daredevil. Instead, he takes Daredevil and Karen back to the Aerie and sticks them in hanging cages, then invites all the other top New York gangsters round to his house to see them. Daredevil promptly escapes and frees Karen; the Owl escapes in a boat and is seemingly lost when it capsizes. As for the other mobsters, they do indeed drop everything to answer the Owl’s invitation, and show up just in time for the police to arrest them all.
There’s something to the Owl. He’ll return a few times – there are another four Owl stories before issue #150, after which he drops off the book’s radar. I’m focussing in this series on debut appearances, and I haven’t read his other early stories yet. But you can see why people keep trying with him, and you can also see why he’s never really clicked as a top tier villain.
The self-important ex-financier using his fortune and financial skills to master the underworld, with a slightly goofy yet creepy animal theme, feels like it would work for a Batman villain. You can imagine the Owl working in a Tim Burton style. If Stan Lee thought the Marvel Universe of 1964 had a space for a darker Penguin, that’s understandable. The Owl motif is a good one. But most of what works about the Owl will be done more effectively by the Kingpin in a few years time, and the gliding thing is just a distraction. He’s a dry run for a better character.
I agree with all your points but imagine how much better it would be if the Kingpin could glide!
I think he should bounce.
And for some reason the Owl didn’t have gliding powers in the TV series.
I can’t imagine why.
Not having read early Daredevil, I have a question: Are we going to get more Batman villain knockoffs? It seems like an easy comparison, especially since Daredevil actually has a bat-like power. I may be reading too much into this, but the Jester could be Joker-lite, Mr. Fear could be the Scarecrow. Or is that all coincidence?
Basically, yes. Jester won’t show up for years, and Mr Fear actually predates the Silver Age revival of the Scarecrow.
Mister Fear and the Scarecrow is very likely a coincidence — at the time Mister Fear was created, Scarecrow had only appeared a couple of times back in the 40s and fear gas wasn’t his gimmick yet.
The Owl is usually considered Daredevil’s fourth foe, after Kingpin, Bullseye and Typhoid Mary.
Part of the problem is that characters whose primary power is flight really aren’t that impressive in the Marvel Universe, where there are plenty of characters who can fly and have OTHER powers. This was the problem with both the Owl and Warren. The Vulture is the exception that proves the rule.
Bill Mantlo tried to make the Owl more of a threat by giving him Wolverine-like claws.Later writers have suggested the serum that gave him his powers mutated him both physically and mentally.
Part of the problem with the Owl as a villain is that the Vulture overshadows him as a bird-themed villain. And among organized crime villains, not only Kingpin but also Hammerhead and Tombstone overshadow him. Just look at Wells’ Spider-Man run- Owl is among the crime lords ,if you look closely, but Tombstone and Hammerhead get all the dialogue.
The Owl was supposed to be the villain behind the Alliance of Evil in Layon’s X-Factor. Layton’s idea was that the serum had mutated the Owl into a vampire that feeds on mutants. Harris thought the idea of the Owl as a major threat was ridiculous and had Simonson create Apocalypse. And the rest is history.
The Owl’s next appearance after Daredevil 144 is Marvel Team-Up 73, where Daredevil and Spider-Man team up against him. His next appearances are all Spider-Man stories- Marvel Team-Up 98 (Peter and Black Widow), Spectacular Spider-Man 73-75 (the Owl-Octopus War) and Spectacular Spider-Man 127. He then returns to Daredevil in Daredevil 264 (a fill-in). Then the Owl appears in Acts of Vengeance in Alpha Flight 79-80 and Fantastic Four 336. Fantastic Four 336 is particularly embarrassing- he’s one of several “lame” villains mind controlled into attacking the Fantastic Four as a practical joke by Doctor Doom but he’s miscolored blue.
After that, he returns to Daredevil in Daredevil 301-303. where Matt tries to redeem him. He then appears in another Daredevil- Spider-Man team up, in Amazing Spider-Man 396 and Spectacular Spider-Man 219, where Peter and Matt fight against Owl and the Vulture. Again, the Owl shows some signs of wanting to reform. Then he disappears for a few years. Then he reappears in ANOTHER Spider-Man/Daredevil team-up, the
Daredevil-Spider-Man limited series. At the end of that series, he tries to save Daredevil’s life but Daredevil tried to redeem him and he’s seemingly sucked into Hell. He then inexplicably reappears in Daredevil:Target and from then on, there’s no mention of him wanting to reform.
The Owl has had a lot of appearances in the past decade or so- enough to raise his status to a mid-tier villain, probably. He’s still primarily a Daredevil villain but has had more appearances in Spider-Man than any Daredevil villain except the Kingpin.
The Owl is kind of like a mash-up of the Kingpin and Vulture.
Countdown to Stilt Man: 5 more issues,
Mark Waid had a pretty good idea for the Owl, playing on the idea of the “wise owl” and the brid’s ability to see well in the dark.
His run had the Owl get turned into some kind of living electronic interface, able to “see” through any networked device. (I suspect he was influenced by a short run of 1970s stories about the Owl trying to steal a device that could let him drain human intelligence into himself.)
Unfortunately, the next time the Owl appeared, he was back to being written as the crazy guy who can’t quite manage as a crime boss for very long.
Also, following up on Michael’s wonderful and thorough list, the Owl’s 1980s and 1990s appearances against Spider-Man were enough to get him a cameo as one of the Kingpin’s rival crime bosses in the 1994-1998 Spider-Man animated series.
However, he was the only one of the crime bosses shown who never got an actual story to flesh him out.
Nonetheless, this was apparently enough for him to turn up as a miniboss in the Super Nintendo and Genesis/Mega Drive game based on the animated series.
That might make the Owl the first villain native to Daredevil‘s series to make the jump to other media. (The Kingpin was, of course, used in a number of Spider-Man cartoons dating all the way back to the 1960s.)
“after which he drops off the book’s radar.”
Daredevil puns. Nice.
I think Owl has a super villain daughter, which also doesn’t help distinguish him from Vulture, who has a supervillain granddaughter
Probably the worst thing about the Owl was that Bendis used him as a random villain trying to fill the power vacuum in New York vacated by the Kingpin. This wasn’t a bad story in itself; it’s just that it became the template Bendis then applied to every single Avengers story he wrote for 9 years.
If Spider-Man was a mix of superheroes with the teen comics that were popular in the early ’60s, I think the idea was that Daredevil would replaced the teenage stuff with more grown-up dramas – legal disputes, organized crime, courtroom intrigue.
Issue 1 was the origin story (a fairly grown-up tale of revenge and duty compared to what Spider-Man was doing at the time), and issue 2 had Electro and the Fantastic Four to establish the title in the Marvel universe, so Issue 3 is the point where Stan Lee gets to assert the status-quo and identity of the title going forward.
The idea of the Owl hiring Matt Murdock to represent him in court, while Matt is investigating his crimes as Daredevil is the kind of plot that makes maximum use of the frisson superhero action and courtroom drama — so it’s almost funny how little Lee does with it here. It’s almost immediately dropped for a bunch of stock-standard superhero beats (fight with henchmen, captured to save a damsel, escape from the evil lair).
The evil lair looks awesome, though.
There’s also a great bit in this issue about the practicalities of Daredevil carrying a change of street clothes around so that he can easily change back into Murdock – first by bouncing a bundle of “wrinkle-proof” clothes around the roof-tops, and then by building a special hood into his suit where he can carry a suit for court and some nice loafers.
Vulture’s granddaughter is a superhero who hangs out with Miles Morales, isn’t she?
And as far as I know, Owl’s daughter is Owlette from PJ Masks, also a superhero.
(No but the first one’s legit I think?)
The Owl’s daughter is Jubula Pride from Waid’s run on DD. The Owl, indeed, had her genetically modified so that she could fly.
In a universe where there are plenty more characters in the ‘organised crime boss’ space that the Owl has fallen into, I do think that he stands on his own. The characterisation of being too unhinged to actually hold onto any power for too long but still being a threat in how he’ll savagely try to cling onto any power he does get sets him out from other villains; he’s never going to actually become the Kingpin, but he is going to be a thorn in the side of everyone around him. Zdarksy used him very well in his Daredevil run.
Yeah, “Wannabe Kingpin” isn’t the most flattering of niches, but it’s one the Owl has been comfortably occupying for the last couple decades whenever a story required one.
I had somehow completely missed that he wasn’t named in this debut story (even when rereading it last week !). Maybe “Leland Owlsley” just isn’t that memorable…
I did enjoy that one Owl story where he reanimates a bunch of long-dead assassins to terrorize Hell’s Kitchen and the Daredevil Family, and then he puts on a suit of armor and reveals to Daredevil that he’s actually the long lost older brother of Matt Murdock.
It almost feels a little mean spirited to rag on these late-Lee characters when his well had so clearly run dry.
Almost.
I tend to think of ’68-’70 as the twilight of ‘classic’ Marvel; August ’64 is in the middle of Lee’s collaborations with Ditko and Kirby, so the well was still far from dry.
I mean, Kraven made his first appearance the same month over in Spider-Man, and September’s issue of X-Men was the debut of classic villain Unus the Untouchable … oh. I see what you mean.
There were lots pretty decent ideas to come in the next couple of years, but it does seem that at this point in time Marvel had over-extended their superhero line and not yet worked out how to keep the quality up, especially with X-Men and Daredevil as new books.
Arguably the electromagnetic fields that the Vulture generates to fly also gave him enough superhuman strength to go at it with Spider-Man.
Chris said: Arguably the electromagnetic fields that the Vulture generates to fly also gave him enough superhuman strength to go at it with Spider-Man.
And as I recall, that was implied as early as the John Romita, Sr. era.
Even so, the Vulture (Toomes) was sidelined for a lot of the Silver Age. He shows up three times in the Ditko run, then gets effectively killed off in favor of a younger Vulture, Blackie Drago during the Romita, Sr. run.
And while he returns about a year and a half later to beat up Drago and reclaim his costumed identity, that’s it for the Toomes version of the Vulture for nine years. He makes no appearances between 1968 and 1977.
It seems like it was Roger Stern who brought the character back in a big way, giving him a belated origin and using him several times within a few years. From then on, Toomes was a fairly regular Spider-Man villain.
@Alex Hill- Yeah, but while Zdarsky made the Owl a credible threat, he nerfed Hammerhead. And to restore Hammerhead’s credibility, Wells had him kill off Madame Masque, which he was allowed to do because Tony’s current love interest is a different former criminal named Frost with daddy issues. It’s like a cycle of nerfing.
@Nu-D, Aro- But what was unusual about Stan’s run on Daredevil is that he finished without creating a mastermind/archenemy for Daredevil. On Stan’s other titles, by the end of his run there was at least one mastermind/archenemy. X-Men had Magento, Thor had Loki, Fantastic Four had Doom as a primary but Wizard was a secondary, Strange had Dorrmammu, Hulk had Leader, Spider-Man had THREE (Dr. Octopus, Green Goblin and Kingpin). Captain America had Red Skull (brought back from the Golden Age and given an origin) and Avengers had Kang ( a redesigned Rama-Tut from the Fantastic Four). Even Iron Man had Mandarin, who was a very popular villain at first- the problem was that by the late 1970s, he was (justifiably) viewed as an offensive Yellow Peril stereotype.
Part of this is because Stan had better artists/ co-plotters to help with the other villains- Joe Orlando wasn’t Lee or Ditko. But the Owl’s failure as a character meant that Daredevil lacked a nemesis throughout the 1960s and the 1970s. Attempts were made to try to make Purple Man and Death Stalker into Daredevil’s nemesis but they didn’t work. So Matt didn’t have a nemesis until Kingpin was borrowed from the Spider books.
@Michale, Nu-D — I think the lack of a regular artist/co-plotter on Daredevil played a big part in this, too. Stan wasn’t just getting jobbers to fill in on Daredevil, it seems like he was really trying to lure in someone who could work at the level of Kirby and Ditko. Everett and Wood were of course well-known names even by the nascent fandom of the ’60s, and I wasn’t familiar with Orlando, and he’s not on the level of those guys but he was not slouch: staff artist at EC, designer of the Sea Monkeys (really!), story editor of Creepy … and then after this VERY short stint at Marvel, he freelanced at DC until they made him an editor in 1968, and he eventually became a vice president.
Bill Everett was a golden age veteran, but he had a full-time job outside of comics by the 1960s, and couldn’t handle the deadlines. Wally Wood’s personal problems are well-documented … I wonder what caused Orlando to leave Daredevil. Has that story been told somewhere?
Reading Daredevil #3 it seems possible that his rendition of the Owl as a goofy, golden age villain could be evidence that his vision of the title did not mesh with what Lee has in mind. It could have been any number of things though …
There’s some discussion of Orlando’s departure on Tom Brevoort’s blog here:
https://tombrevoort.com/2020/10/31/lee-ditko-orlando-rockwell-the-multiple-car-crash-of-tales-to-astonish-61/
It seems that Lee was not completely pleased with Orlando’s plotting, and had him redraw large portions of his pencils, while Orlando was not happy with having to come up with plots for the stories as well as doing the pencils. That creative friction is certainly evident on the pages of this issue…
What’s interesting is that if the Owl had introduced more successfully, he could have been DD’s main villain. The fact that the Kingpin, who shares many of the same characteristics, eventually filled that role highlights both how close they got with the Owl, as well as how spectacularly they failed to land the character.
I could infer that the Vulture possessed superhuman strength in his second appearance as he flipped the manhole cover in his assault and rapid-flight heist.
Steve Ditko is not present to receive an inquiry.
Am I misremembering someone’s joke, or is there actually a comic somewhere that establishes in canon that Owl and Wolverine share a barber?
Wally Wood’s run on Daredevil goes from #5 to #10 and is probably worth taking into account by people interested in the creative tension between Stan Lee and the artists that worked with him in that book and the candidates for main villains that resulted.
Wood’s run was short, but very consequential. There are hints that it could have been even more influential if he and Stan Lee were on better speaking terms. We will probably talk of that in the installments to come.
In any case, it seems to me that for the most part the lasting power of main villains discussed above is a direct function of how interested Stan was in the character. In this time period, Spider-Man was the last character he stopped writing. Daredevil sure looks a bit underappreciated by contrast.
“Am I misremembering someone’s joke, or is there actually a comic somewhere that establishes in canon that Owl and Wolverine share a barber?”
A little of both— there’s a gag from Assistant Editors’ Month or What The!? with Wolverine, the Owl, Beast, and Quicksilver talking about how much they love their barber.
I guess I didn’t realize Stan was still writing FF, Thor and ASM all the way into the early 1970’s. That’s what comes of being narrowly focused on the X-Men corner of Marvel. I figured by the time he was on X-Men he was mostly washed up as a writer, and he was mostly editing and self-promoting after that.
Luis-Still, Stan Lee continued to write DD until issue #49 in 1969. I was always surprised Lee stayed on the book that long, considering how quickly he left X-Men and Avengers, as he didn’t seem to have the same interest in DD as the other titles he continued writing.
He left Avengers in 1965 and only stayed on X-Men for nineteen issues.
Although, the commonality of the two books he seemed to drop quickly is that they are team titles. Maybe Lee didn’t like working on superhero teams.
Also, the last title he was writing was FF. He wrote Amazing Spider-Man until #110, while he wrote FF until #125. The two issues were written mere months apart in 1972, it is true, but those were his last two comics.
Nu-D-In fact, Stan Lee had a career renaissance in 1966 working with Jack Kirby. One of his two most creative periods began as he was ending his run on X-Men, with what many consider his best FF and Thor stories (and many would add his writing on Amazing Spider-Man would only improve with John Romita on art, starting this same year).
@Chris V.
I am, of course, aware of all that material. I just had an incorrect compressed timeline in my head, assuming it mostly was all published between ‘61 and ‘65 or thereabouts. Somewhere I just got the idea that his writing career dried up with the really very mediocre X-Men, and the glory days were all before that.
Let’s not forget the first volume of Silver Surfer, which was also produced during Stan’s “peak” period.
@Josie- Much of the first volume of Silver Surfer wasn’t produced during Stan’s “peak” period. Silver Surfer 13 came out the same month as Amazing Spider-Man 81, which introduced the truly awesome villainy of the Kangaroo, 🙂 The only really memorable characters Stan created from 1970-1972 were Agatha Harkness and Richard Fisk.
“The only really memorable characters Stan created from 1970-1972”
Silver Surfer ran from 1968-1970.
@Jose- Sorry, I should have worded that more clearly- I meant that by 1969, Stan was nearing the end of his creative powers.
Can’t help but wonder, did the set designer for Return of the Jedi have this Daredevil cover in mind when designing the layout of Jabba’s throne room?
[…] again. He won’t be revived for another couple of years. The fear motif is open for use. So once again, Daredevil gets in first with a version of an idea that another character will get right in a few […]