DAREDEVIL #9 (August 1965)
“That He May See!”
Writer, editor: Stan Lee
Layout penciller: Wally Wood
Finisher: Bobby Powell
Letterer: Sam Rosen
Colourist: Not credited

You can tell that a 1960s Stan Lee character is a real dud when they never appear again. These are the early, foundational issues of long-running books, and later creative teams frequently mine them for ideas. A certain generation of creators idolised the Silver Age and loved to draw on its forgotten corners. So when even they don’t touch a character, well, there’s probably a reason.

All the Daredevil villains we’ve met until now have returned in later stories – except for the Fixer, but he’s a special case, because he dies in Daredevil’s origin story. Even the Matador gets a few further appearances. But no one has gone back to Klaus Kruger.

Duke Klaus Kruger is the “hereditary ruler of the tiny principality of Lichtenbad”. He’s visiting New York for undisclosed reasons, which somehow is front page news. By a remarkable coincidence, Klaus knew Matt and Foggy at law school as a foreign exchange student – the art for this flashback shows him in a lab coat with test tubes, which suggests someone wasn’t quite thinking this through. By a further remarkable coincidence, the world’s top eye surgeon, Dr Van Eyck, has recently emigrated to Lichtenbad. So Karen Page phones up the Duke, which apparently is a thing you can just do, and asks if he can help Matt get his sight back.

This subplot has been building in the background for a while now. Karen keeps badgering Matt to get an operation to restore his sight. Matt keeps coming up with excuses, supposedly because he doesn’t want to risk losing his powers. But could Matt also be using his blindness as an excuse for keeping his distance from Karen? That’s the basic angle.

Klaus shows up at the offices of Nelson and Murdock. He claims that “when this young lady told me you had lost your sight, I knew I had to take you back to Lichtenbad with me.” Of course, Matt was already blind when he was at university, so either Klaus wasn’t paying much attention at law school, or Stan Lee isn’t paying much attention now. Matt and Klaus didn’t even know each other all that well, so Matt is surprised at this sudden interest in his wellbeing. But can also tell that Klaus is lying, so naturally he decides to take up the offer and see what the deal is.

Lichtenbad turns out to be a walled city with a giant medieval fortress at the centre. To be fair, we can see a massive airport and industrial areas of town in the background, which is unusually sensible by Silver Age standards. But naturally, the bit we’re interested in will mostly be the big old castle. As soon as Kruger gets off the plane, somebody tries to shoot him while yelling “Death to tyrants! Long live freedom!” But Kruger is wearing a bulletproof vest, and he fells the assassin with “one karate blow”. Matt immediately realises that this is a dictatorship. Somehow, this state of affairs has entirely escaped the notice of the global media, something the story never even tries to explain.

Dr Van Eyck really is in Lichtenbad, but he’s far too scared of the Duke to talk politics with Matt, and so he cracks on with his medical examination instead. That night, Matt explores the city as Daredevil, and finds some local rebels – again, they’re quite modern looking for Silver Age Europeans. But they’re promptly rounded up by the Palace Guards, who are robots designed to look like medieval suits of armour. These robots, we’re assured, are everywhere, and unstoppable – Kruger is too paranoid to rely on human staff.

The Palace Guards capture Daredevil, but Kruger doesn’t recognise him, and assumes he’s an especially flamboyant rebel. Thoughtfully, he doesn’t unmask Daredevil (“Your identity means nothing!”) and throws him in jail with everyone else. Kruger then explains his plan: He’s slowly bringing the greatest men in every field to Lichtenbad, in order to force them to serve him. “Aided by their brains and talent, and my own wealth and cunning, I shall build a robot army which shall conquer the Earth!” So far as the story shows us, all he’s actually got is an eye specialist and a trial lawyer, and quite how either of them is going to help with the robot army is left as an exercise for the reader’s imagination.

On hearing Klaus’s plan, Daredevil decides that he is “nutty as a fruitcake”. But our hero boldly ups the stakes by reminding us that “so was a little housepainter named Hitler, and look at the damage he caused.” True enough, but then Hitler had the military might of a major nation, while Kruger has some animatronic knights and a reluctant ophthalmologist.

Daredevil escapes and frees the rebels, and even finds time to change back to Matt Murdock for a quick chat with Van Eyck. This time Van Eyck asks for help, but instantly gets carted off by the Palace Guard, who are nothing if not efficient. By now, however, the public are in open revolt. Daredevil fights Kruger on the battlements of his castle, and Stan Lee makes one last push to sell the character. He’s born to rule and destined to command, he says. He can beat Daredevil with “one karate chop – that is all it will take at the hand of a master such as I!” In 1965, the very notion of karate was presumably highly exotic. Even so, what the art actually shows is a lumbering man in period costume waggling his hand in the air. It’s not very impressive.

With the rebels somehow winning – weren’t those robots unstoppable ten pages ago? – Kruger feels beaten. So he decides to blow up a previously unmentioned nuclear reactor and wipe out humanity. Seriously, all of it. But Van Eyck heroically sacrifices his life to shut down the reactor, and since he was the only person skilled enough to perform the necessary operation, Matt will stay blind for now.

Daredevil tries to persuade Kruger to get psychiatric help, but the big lug charges at Daredevil, misses, and plunges over the side of the battlements to his death. I mean, there’s no body, and it would be child’s play to bring him back, but nobody has. “Perhaps it’s better this way!” says Daredevil, without even waiting for the thud. “In death he may find the peace that could never be his while he lived!” If Stan Lee really thought that was the theme of the character, he left it very late to mention it. More likely, he was just casting around for a semblance of weight.

Silver Age Marvel has quite a few European microstates, but Lichtenbad – a small European principality, not part of the Communist bloc, ruled by a monarch, with German-sounding names – is very obviously Liechtenstein. Whether Liechtenstein would have meant a great deal to American readers in the 1960s, you have to wonder. At this point in time, it was apparently best known for periodically selling off the royal family’s art collection to try and solve the country’s financial problems. Unlike Kruger, Lichtenbad does actually appear again – it’s the setting of U.S.Avengers #4, at which point it’s become a Frankenstein pastiche.

At best, and this is being very charitable, Kruger is half formed. He’s a paranoid dictator with a plan to take over the world by very, very slowly accumulating geniuses who don’t want to help him. If there’s anything to him, it’s the idea that something has driven him insane, but we’re given no clue about what it might be, and it feels more like handwaving to explain why his plan doesn’t make sense. But perhaps his bigger problem is that he’s an old college friend of the hero, who’s the absolute monarch of a tiny European country, who believes he deserves to rule the world, and who has a horde of self-built robots to do all the hard work for him. There is literally no reason to use this character when Dr Doom already exists. Kruger is Doom without the motivation or the back story or the design or… well, the interest. No wonder he was never used again.