Daredevil Villains #10: The Plunderer
DAREDEVIL #12-13 (January & February 1966)
“Sightless, in a Savage Land” / “The Secret of Ka-Zar’s Origin!”
Writer, editor: Stan Lee
Layout penciller: Jack Kirby
Finishing penciller, inker: John Romita
Letterer: Sam Rosen
Colourist: not credited
DAREDEVIL #14 (March 1966)
“If This Be Justice…!”
Writer, editor: Stan Lee
Penciller: John Romita
Inker: “Frankie Ray” (Frank Giacoia)
Letterer: Artie Simek
Colourist: not credited
However questionably, Stan Lee apparently felt that Wally Wood’s run on Daredevil had gone awry. Wood’s replacement was John Romita Sr, doing his first work for Marvel. This time, Lee took no chances, with Jack Kirby doing the layouts for Romita’s first two issues before Romita (who says that he only wanted the inking work at first) took over as penciller. He didn’t stick around on Daredevil for long, but that’s because he was swiftly promoted to Amazing Spider-Man.
As for the story direction, Lee seems to have been toying with drastic action. The previous arc ends with a tacked-on epilogue in which Matt and Foggy suddenly realise that they’ve been so preoccupied with the plot that they haven’t been doing any legal work and they’ve run out of money. They need to downsize. So Matt announces that he’s leaving, and the whole thing plays like it’s setting up a new status quo.
It isn’t. Instead, Daredevil spends three issues exploring the back story of Ka-Zar, before Matt simply returns to the office, with no mention of why he left in the first place. It’s been three months, the kids will have forgotten.
I don’t plan to cover villains who are mainly associated with other characters, but there are exceptions. Electro was an exception because he was Daredevil’s first supervillain. So are characters like the Kingpin, who start out elsewhere but become Daredevil regulars. The Plunderer is an exception because, really, he is a Daredevil villain. There is no Ka-Zar series, not yet. His first two stories both appear in Daredevil. He counts at least as much as any one-off Daredevil villain.
At this point, Ka-Zar had only made one previous appearance, in X-Men #10. He’s a revival of a Golden Age character of the same name, who was a straight Tarzan clone. The new Ka-Zar has an added element: his jungle is the Savage Land, a lost world where dinosaurs still roam. In other words, he’s no longer a straight Tarzan clone – he’s Tarzan crossed with Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (plus a dash of Joe Kubert’s Tor). This works out well for him in the long run, partly because it distances him from Tarzan’s colonial overtones, but also because it lets him tack to Jurassic Park and then to an all-purpose eco-primitivism when his parent archetype started running out of commercial steam.
At this point, though, Ka-Zar is a big blonde man in a loincloth who calls guns “thundersticks” and yells things like “Stronger than mastodon! Stronger than giant boar! Mighty is Ka-Zar! Lord of jungle!”
But what about this Plunderer guy? He’s a pirate who, by sheer random chance, attacks Matt Murdock’s holiday cruise ship. The Plunderer and his crew look like old-timey pirates and their ship looks like a schooner, but they have hi-tech weaponry. Even so, Daredevil is beating the henchmen single-handedly until the Plunderer threatens to chuck the cruise ship crew over the side into the “shark-infested waters”. So Daredevil surrenders, and the Plunderer takes him prisoner, aboard a schooner which turns out to be a hi-tech submarine. (If you’re wondering how the people left on the ship fail to figure out that Matt is Daredevil… yes, me too.)
The idea at this point in the story seems to be that the Plunderer is an engineering genius who turned to piracy in order to prove the superiority of his ship designs. That’s why he goes around attacking ships without actually stealing anything from them. He’s also obviously positioned as a man of honour.
He sails to the Savage Land, via an undersea tunnel which he claims to have discovered while hunting for Atlantis. This leads to a bit of running around in the Savage Land, as Daredevil loses his powers for a bit until Ka-Zar restores them with (ahem) “juice of ju-ju plant”. It turns out that the Plunderer is there to capture Ka-Zar, who is actually his brother Kevin. Yes, the blatant Tarzan clone turns out to be the lost child of a British aristocrat! Who would have thought it?
Even though he was positioned as a man of honour in act one, the Plunderer doesn’t care about Ka-Zar at all. He’s only interested in his brother because they have the two halves of an amulet which, it turns out, was created by their late father Lord Plunder, and can provide access to a mystery substance that he discovered. This strange metal destroys other metals, and could be the most powerful weapon on Earth. (Marvel will eventually christen this stuff “Antarctic vibranium”.) The Plunderer traps Ka-Zar, and everyone sails back to England.
At first the Plunderer sticks with the pirate motif. He throws Ka-Zar in a dungeon and tries to force Daredevil to persuade Ka-Zar to give up his half of the amulet. Which I suppose is at least a kinder approach than just shooting Ka-Zar dead and looting the corpse. Maybe the Plunderer does love his brother after all.
Meanwhile, spies within the Plunderer’s organisation spread word of the amulet’s discovery. All sorts of people start chasing after it, so that they can get their hands on the metal.
Daredevil and Ka-Zar escape, but the amulet winds up back with the Plunderer, who frames Ka-Zar for murder. The story then takes a bizarre left turn: the Plunderer uses the mystery substance to make a special weapon that can destroy all metal. He then switches gimmicks entirely to become a caped supervillain, still calling himself “the Plunderer”. He outfits his henchmen in nearly identical costumes, complete with capes, for no terribly clear reason. They don’t carry his special anti-metal weapon, but their own weapons are mysteriously immune to the effect. How can this be? Well, they’re made of plastic, which I imagine was less of an anticlimax in 1966. Daredevil defeats the Plunderer, who exonerates Ka-Zar, because at that point, why not.
These issues are quite good fun, and entirely mad. I’ve glossed over an entire subplot about Foggy being brought over to help defend Ka-Zar in an English court (because that’s how rights of audience work!). Ka-Zar’s fish-out-of-water schtick is often entertaining. But even as a Ka-Zar villain, the Plunderer is a bit odd. In his favour, he has the back story and the aristocratic rivalry. He’s the brother who grew up with everything Ka-Zar didn’t, so you can play off that. But he’s also a jumble of unrelated concepts fighting for space. He’s an anachronistic pirate – no, he’s a man of honour – no, he’s Captain Nemo – no, he’s a generic supervillain with plastic guns… Pick one and stick with it!
This is Daredevil‘s first 3-parter, but it’s still ultimately a Ka-Zar story. It’s obvious why Ka-Zar and the Plunderer didn’t stick around as Daredevil regulars: they have no connection with anything else in the book. In that context, this whole thing is a detour.
I’d say the Savage Land is Tarzan meets The Land that Time Forgot by way of At the Earth’s Core influence, so you can keep the Burroughs connection.
This works out well for him in the long run, partly because it distances him from Tarzan’s colonial overtones
Although, from that perspective, the title “Lord Plunder” is, if anything, too on the nose.
Gotta love how out there the Plunderer is. He makes so little sense that he ends up being a fairly versatile villain, facing everyone from Namor to Rom.
The Plunderer never really caught on as a villain. Part of it might be the name- Parnival Plunder? Part of it is the jumble of concepts, as Paul mentioned.
And keep in mind that Klaw was introduced in the Fantastic Four, even though he’s the Black Panther’s nemesis, and he became a repeat enemy of the FF, even joining the Frightful Four a few times, as well as a major villain in the Marvel Universe. The problem is that unlike Klaw, the Plunderer is just a horrible character.
Plunderer as an honourable submarine pirate was great. Once he puts on the costume he becomes generic and forgettable, though.
Ewing used the Plunderer in one of his Avengers books. Mighty? I don’t remember him having a pirate schtick in those comics.
Yes, it was Captain America & the Mighty Avengers. Plunderer was (somehow) one of the people who were inverted by the events of AXIS. He became a modern-day Robin Hood figure. He was attempting to rob a corporation to help orphans, but Cap stopped him.
Ewing brought him back in his New Avengers run as a delusional loser (no longer “inverted”). I think that was the comic where the Plunderer was described as “the dandy highwayman”.
You can tell Stan is wildly over-correcting when the street crime drama book gets sent off to the Savage Land (and Europe) for three issues. And laying out big chunks of Ka-Zar’s setup too, for some reason. What an utterly bizarre detour.
JD: given that Kirby did the layouts for issues 12 & 13, I’m sure a lot of the inventive weirdness was his doing. I haven’t read these issues, but if 14 is where the Plunderer switches gimmicks, it could be because Romita and Lee decided that was the approach they preferred. If it happened before issue 14, linear plotting wasn’t always Kirby’s strongest skill.
Paul said: I don’t plan to cover villains who are mainly associated with other characters, but there are exceptions. Electro was an exception because he was Daredevil’s first supervillain. So are characters like the Kingpin, who start out elsewhere but become Daredevil regulars.
I think there’s an argument for spotlighting the villain of Daredevil #15, the Ox, even though he’s more associated with Spider-Man.
The Ox gets transferred over to DD’s book with that issue and goes through a pretty weird story that changes his status quo, and the villain’s next appearance is also a later Daredevil issue.
Considering the Ox’s appearance as one of Mister Fear’s henchmen in issue #6, and he shows up in Silver Age Daredevil almost as often as in Silver-Age Spider-Man.
And technically, the Ox who appears in most of Daredevil (1964 series) #15 isn’t exactly the same character as the one who debuted in Amazing Spider-Man (1963 series) #10….
Michael said: The Plunderer never really caught on as a villain. Part of it might be the name- Parnival Plunder? Part of it is the jumble of concepts, as Paul mentioned.
It gets even worse as later writers try to make him “work” in Ka-Zar’s title. In the 1980s series, for instance, Parnival comes back as a noncostumed baddie in a story mostly about how he’ failed as both a villain and a brother.
And, swinging wildly in the other direction, Mark Waid tries to make him a true thematic opposite of Ka-Zar in Ka-Zar’s 1997 series, with the unfortunate result of giving him vague (and never-shown) cybernetics and having him profess a disgust for nature. (He also seems to get presented as a low-rent Kingpin, right down to the white suits and the skyscraper headquarters.)
There, the Plunderer comes across there as a Saturday morning cartoon baddie, popping up in virtually every issue with yet another scheme to get at Ka-Zar that comically backfires on him. Oh, and he turns out to be working for a particularly off-brand version of Thanos, too.
After that, he just vanishes for a long time. Mark Millar brings him in as cannon fodder in Civil War, and then he’s wheeled out again by Al Ewing as a comedy villain (as Michael mentions above).
There’s probably something to the idea of a villain who opposes Ka-Zar because he wants to exploit the resources of the Savage Land. It’s possibly the one consistent thing about the Plunderer’s appearances in later Ka-Zar stories.
Unfortunately, the Plunderer not only has little additional consistency in motif or motivation, as Michale notes, but also gets stuck with not just one, but two pretty stupid names: “the Plunderer” isn’t great as a nom du crime, but “Parnival Plunder” might actually be even worse. Is “Parnival” even an actual given name, or just something Jack Kirby and/or Stan Lee invented for the alliteration?
In any case, “ruthless exploiter of the Savage Land” is probably a niche better filled by Roxxon Oil at this point. And none of it would make for a recurring Daredevil villain.
I continue to be surprised at the pure chaos of early Daredevil. It’s pretty clear Lee was using it as a dumping ground for half-baked ideas, leaving the actual/supposed status quo in the dust. I can see how it might have been popular with kids of the time, though, given how child-like the plot mechanics tend to be.
I love that Matt quits the law firm because they have no money and immediately books a cruise(?).
Also, Ka-Zar has some amazing hair on that cover. He may be a retrograde white savage, but he knows that proper grooming makes a good first impression.
@Omar: Ox II is certainly a Daredevil villain.
@Omar Karindu: “Is ‘Parnival’ even an actual given name […]?”
I just did a quick search and the first page of hits for “Parnival” were all references to this character. Further onward I did see a reference to a “Parnival Gründvald”, who seems to have something to do with Warhammer 40,000.
Parnival Plunder isn’t any weirder a name than Baron Andrew Adonis, and he’s a real guy somehow.
Those are real names though. Baron is a rank. Andrew is a common name. Adonis is a rare, but still real, surname in the Philippines and Haiti.
Potipherah Plunder would have been a better name, if Lee wanted an alliterative name that was unique.
Lee probably meant to use Parsifal/Parzival and it got mixed up somewhere.