Daredevil Villains #11: The Ox
DAREDEVIL #15 (April 1966)
“–And Men Shall Call Him… Ox!”
Writer, editor: Stan Lee
Penciller: John Romita
Inker: “Frankie Ray” (Frank Giacoia)
Letterer: Art Simek
We’ve seen the Ox before. He was one of Mr Fear’s henchmen back in issue #6. But this time it’s different. It’s his spotlight story, and now there are two… um, two Oxen?
With Ka-Zar’s origin story out of the way, Stan Lee reverts to the established Daredevil formula. Matt’s back in New York, he’s back in the office, and he’s back in the romantic triangle with Karen and Foggy. Poor Foggy is still feeling the after-effects of being hospitalised by the Fellowship of Fear back in issue #6. Not that he’s mentioned it in issues #7-14, of course, but apparently it’s still giving him dizzy spells. And so Matt is given the opportunity to reflect on how the Ox was, in fact, the most dangerous member of the Fellowship of Fear.
The Ox’s gimmick is very simple: he’s big, strong and not very smart. This issue strongly implies that he’s not just mentally below average, but has some sort of disability. He debuted as one of the Enforcers in Amazing Spider-Man #10 (1964), and has superhuman strength for no apparent reason. Presumably he’s a mutant. Since we last saw him, he’s been in jail, sharing a cell with mad scientist Karl Stragg. We quickly establish the dynamic: Stragg has a plan to use Ox’s strength to escape by slowly working on the bars, and Ox is half-heartedly playing along. But Ox isn’t entirely sure he even wants to break out, and Stragg is already getting frustrated with him. Crucially, the Ox is sensitive about his low intelligence, but Stragg is promising to raise his intelligence to normal levels if he helps them break out. That’s the Ox’s motivation.
For a moment it seems like we’re getting Of Mice and Men with supervillains. But it quickly becomes clear that Stragg is just out for himself. After they escape, the Ox dutifully leads Stragg to Mr Fear’s laboratory – where, you may recall, Mr Fear was mainly working on fear gas and waxwork animation. Even so, Stragg whips up his mind-altering machine in the course of an evening using whatever equipment Fear had left lying around. Even more remarkably, it works. But instead of making the Ox smarter, the machine swaps his mind with Stragg’s. The idea is that Stragg wasn’t technically lying: he’s the Ox now, and in that sense, the Ox is smarter.
It turns out that just as the Ox wanted to be smarter, Stragg wanted to be stronger. He’s obsessed with the idea that his great mind is trapped in a feeble (i.e., ordinary) body. Now, with the power of the Ox, he will be unstoppable.
But things immediately start going wrong for Stragg as the new Ox. He heads off on a rampage of random destruction without being terribly sure why he’s doing it. Through the iron law of coincidence, he stumbles upon Karen Page on her way home from work, giving her a chance to scream, and show how intimidating the Ox is. Daredevil intervenes, but Stragg knocks him out and decides to frame him for the rampage by dressing him as the Ox. Then he hauls Karen off with him.
Stan Lee overused the device of having Daredevil framed by a villain, or having Matt explain things away by claiming that people were impersonating Daredevil. But this issue brings us the device at its most gloriously insane. Let’s break it down. For a start, the Ox doesn’t even have a costume – he has a yellow jumper, a pair of green trousers, a waistcoat, and a pair of shoes. And, apparently, when Stragg took over his body, the Ox had spares of all of that in his inside pocket. In Daredevil’s size.
Then, Stragg doesn’t just strip Daredevil of his clothes and dress him as the Ox – he puts the Ox clothes over the top of the Daredevil costume. What are the police supposed to make of a man lying unconscious in the middle of a scene of destruction, with two different costumes on? Apparently they’re supposed to think that Daredevil has gone on a destructive rampage for no reason at all, disguised himself as the Ox in order to avoid the blame (while still wearing his full Daredevil costume at the same time), and then decided to have a nap on the sidewalk.
The Marvel NYPD are on board with this theory. “He must’a figured he could go on a crime spree thruout the city, and in the dark of night everyone would think he was the escaped Ox!” Even Stan feels compelled to have another cop question whether this makes any sense. But the lead cop is unmoved. So Daredevil is carted off to jail, but they don’t remove his mask because “a whole team of DAs are still arguin’ about whether they got the right to do it or not!”
For some reason, Stragg takes Karen back to Mr Fear’s lab. The original Ox is still sitting around looking confused, and makes a break for it with Karen. Eventually Daredevil catches up with the new Ox on a rooftop. The big guy continues to lose his mind, and eventually charges off the roof to his death because he’d forgotten that that’s how edges work. The story doesn’t really explain any of this, but the idea seems to be that the Ox’s low intelligence was tied to his powers, so Stragg gets more and more like the original Ox the longer he stays in his body. Meanwhile, the original Ox gets his wish and finds he’s smarter than he’s ever been – so he goes back to prison as the first step to starting a fresh life with a clean slate. It’s quite a sweet ending.
It’s obvious why Stragg doesn’t come back – the whole story is a one-off. It’s more surprising to learn that the Ox does come back, in issue #86, with the bizarre explanation that Stragg’s machine eventually leads the Ox’s new body to mutate into his original form. He still shows up from time to time in connection with the Enforcers, but he never took off as a solo character. Power creep is a factor here: in the mid-60s, you could get away with calling the Beast a superhero. The Ox is a big guy who can lift a car, but Stragg insists that he has “the power of a titan” and “the entire city will tremble before me”. Even at the time, this was a bit of a stretch. There’s something unavoidably comical about Stragg’s delight in being the new Ox.
The Ox’s problem is that his role has been filled by a higher profile character. If you want a big strong guy who isn’t very bright and who fights Spider-Man a lot, well, that’s the Rhino – and he’ll debut in Amazing Spider-Man in three months’ time. In a world where the Rhino exists, there’s really no place for the Ox.
Flowers for Oxernon.
There should always be room in superhero comics for the hired goon. Someone has to do the job for even the lowliest powered hero.
This is backdated to November for some reason. I assume that wasn’t intentional?
At least the covers are getting better.
I’ve fixed the date. Thanks.
Daredevil 86 is weird- At the end, just before “Ox” dies, Stragg’s personality seems to return. Matt says “The Stragg personality- it’s taking over!” and addresses Ox as Stragg just before he seemingly dies. The Ox is seemingly killed in the explosion.
The Ox stays dead for 26 years. And when he returns it’s explained that the Kingpin’s men found him barely alive in an alley. There’s no trace of Stragg’s personality.
And then there was the Ox’s identical twin brother, who was with the Enforcers in the seventies. That’s not as bad as Machete from Batroc’s Brigade, who I think was triplets…
Daredevil #15 is probably the weirdest, most nonsensical Daredevil story we’ll get until Gerry Conway’s run, so of course it’s a story Conway revisits and makes even weirder and less sensical. (Th “Mike Murdock” stuff is nonsensical, but not bizarre so much as pure Silver Age cheese.)
Daredevil #15 reads to me as if Stan had a plot for one of the pre-FF #1 books (such as Amazing Adult Fantasy) lying around and adapted it.
You could tell a lot of this story without Daredevil; even the Stragg!Ox’s death at the end could be done without a superhero fight.
And the Ox walking off at the end of the issue with a new lease on life is more like the ending to one of those “twist” stories than it is the end of a Marvel superhero book of the Silver Age.
The contrived way Daredevil is not only brought into battle with the Ox, but also put out of the way in an even less plausible fashion suggests that this is more of a bad O. Henry/Twilight Zone concept than a plot for a Marvel superhero book.
Zoomy said: And then there was the Ox’s identical twin brother, who was with the Enforcers in the seventies. That’s not as bad as Machete from Batroc’s Brigade, who I think was triplets…
Maybe that’s where Roger Stern’s idea for the “previously unmentioned twin” solution to the Hobgoblin mystery may have come from.
Regarding Machete, we might also recall the three Razor-Fists, the second and third of whom were apparently brothers with only one hand each replaced by a blade. And they each managed to lose a hand — and only a hand — in a car accident.
And then writers brought back Razor-Fist #3 but gave him two blade-hands, just like the original.
On the topic of Batroc’s Brigade members, there’s also Zaran’s apprentice, though there was more of an effort at distinguishing him fully from the original.
Wasn’t there also an ill-advised 1990s redesign of the Lizard that was eventually written off as some kind of clone or mutated actual Lizard, right around the same time the original Ox was brought back for…reasons?
Looping back around to Daredevil, I thought it was rather odd that Charles Soule decided to have the fake Mike Murdock identity be be manifested as a real, separate person. And then Chip Zdarsky used the character for the third time Daredevil has used a fake version of himself to make everyone think he’s dead.
The whole reason Ox works as a character is because he’s part of a team, where the Enforcers each have a minor gimmick and together they’re just barely threatening to normal civilians. As a trio, they can give any street level hero a good fight for an issue. That’s it. Trying to make the Ox a solo big time threat is just laughable.
It’s even pointed out in the Enforcers’ third fight with Spider-Man that not one of them is as powerful as he is.
Omar said “Regarding Machete, we might also recall the three Razor-Fists, the second and third of whom were apparently brothers with only one hand each replaced by a blade. And they each managed to lose a hand — and only a hand — in a car accident.”
Just imagine how many twin brothers there are out there in the Marvel universe, eagerly watching news reports of their minor-supervillain siblings, sharpening their prosthetic pointy limbs and waiting in obscurity for their opportunity to reveal themselves to the world!
“We need legal permission to unmask this vigilante we arrested” will of course become a recurring Daredevil trope.
I like the Ox. A big strong dumb guy is useful for a wide variety of stories. Maybe if Daredevil didn’t have Man-Bull, Ox would have taken that role more frequently. Like the Kingpin, he’s a much more believable threat to someone of DD’s power level than Spider-Man’s.
Out of curiosity, has anyone gone back to the idea of Ox trying to reform but being coerced back into villainy?
Because ‘Big Strong, Dumb Guy Who Wants to Reform’ isn’t a bad gimmick.
@Taibak- that’s been done with the Rhino before.
Besides, the niche of Big Strong Guy Who Wants to Quit Being A Super-Villain is occupied in the Marvel Universe by Armadillo.
To be honest i never got the impression Ox had super human strength he was just a big strong dude and none if the other Enforcers had powers anyways so it seems weird Ox would be on a team with a bunch of non powered losers.
The Official Handbook (in 1985) claimed that neither the original Ox nor his brother had superhuman strength. However, the original Ox did display superhuman strength in Daredevil 86 as a result of the mess with the radiation and body-swapping. and he’s been depicted as superhuman ever since his return. So presumably the Ox’s powers are a result of the body-swapping/ radiation.
Also, Marvel stories tend to be kind of hazy on the line between “incredibly strong normal human” and “superhuman.”
The Kingpin, in particular, has sometimes been shown doing thins that ought to be impossible for a baseline human, and was portrayed as effectively super-strong in most of his pre-Daredevil appearances. (and, for that matter, in his first Frank Miller arc.) But he was never suggested to be a mutant or superhuman.
The Silver Age Ox seems like a similar case, at least prior to his solo appearances in Daredevil
The Kingpin is an odd example. In Amazing Spider-Man 83, Peter says, “With his cunning…his wealth… and his super-strength. he’s the most dangerous crime lord alive.” That seems like Stan was basically saying “Yes, readers, the Kingpin IS super-strong- I just haven’t thought of an explanation yet.”
It really wasn’t until the first Official Handbook came out that it was suggested the Kingpin doesn’t have super-strength. The Kingpin’s entry claimed he doesn’t have super-strength and that one of the reasons he was able to fight Peter was because Peter was holding back for fear of killing the Kingpin.Which makes no sense since some of the feats he’d performed should be impossible for a normal man. It seems like the writers at Marvel didn’t like that explanation. In Spectacular Spider-Man 100., Peter pays lip service to the idea that the Kingpin has no superpowers and then the story demonstrates why that makes no sense. Kingpin then tears a staircase off a wall. Was the staircase holding back? Peter repeatedly says stuff like “Are you sure you’re not a mutant?” and “He must be related to the Juggernaut.” It’s odd that the idea the Kingpin was a normal human made it into the Official Handbook when the writers continued to write him as unstoppable by anyone less strong than Spider-Man.
Ox III, the one that worked for Lightmaster in Spectacular Spider-Man #19 (1978) and was eventually revealed in a Handbook to be the twin brother of Ox I, apparently was a regular strongman, but Bill Mantlo made a valiant effort to suggest super-strength anyway.
He torns a Spider-Man mannequin apart with his bare hands with little effort, impressing Montana. Later he lifts a whole bar stand IIRC, but it strains him quite a lot. Spider-Man seems to be impressed at first, but it is just setup for downing him with a simple punch.
Yeah I never thought Ox was super strong until this review, but then I was introduced to him via the Handbook, and have only read 2 or 3 of their actual stories.
As for Spider-Man holding back, the whole idea of pulling punches is weird. How does someone like Spider-Man, or more starkly, Thing, know how to punch a person just hard enough to knock them out? Mid-fight? You might be able to figure it out eventually, but surely there’d be a few early attempts that break a head like a Styrofoam cup full of salsa.
The first I saw of any of the Oxen was the story from Spectacular Spider-Man #20, where he punches his way through a pane of Stark-designed maxi-glass, which “could restrain the charge of a rampaging bull elephant”. So I always tend to think of him as super-strong in a very minor way, despite what tends to be said in the majority of other comics.
The Ox clearly has superhuman strength in Daredevil #15. Aside from the fact that the plot doesn’t work otherwise, he’s smashing fire hydrants and lampposts with his bare hands, flipping a moving police car with two cops inside with no apparent effort, and tearing a rotor blade off a helicopter “as easy as tearing a newspaper”.
Oh there’s no question that he does have super strength at least some of the time. Most likely it’s just different artists or writers with different interpretations of “big strong guy”.
Here’s my No-Prize attempt: Ox has superstrength, but it only manifests when he’s not thinking too hard about it. His lack of intelligence works in tandem with his power in order to limit his curiosity, making it less likely that he’ll question how he can perform superhuman feats. He’s like Gladiator, but almost in reverse.
The original Ox definitely has superhuman strength currently. In Amazing Spider-Man 1 (2015), Dr. Shannon Stillwell says “The Walrus has enhanced durability. The Ox, some increased strength… a couple tons at most.”
Both the Kingpin and the Ox(en) are definitely depicted with superhuman strength in the Silver Age and Bronze Age.
It occurs to me that both of them display the most visibly superhuman strength when drawn by John Romita, Sr.
Romita, Sr., also co-created another character — the risibly named Man-Mountain Marko — who later was formally established to be a superhumanly strong mutate.
And the youthified Silvermane from that same Silver Age Spider-Man arc seems to be ridiculously physically strong.
Romita, Sr. also has Batroc bounding down a street doing what seemed to be multi-story high jumps in one of Batroc’s earliest appearances, too.
Romita, Sr. tends to depict mobster and thug types who were just that strong, without explanation, and the scripting eiother ignores or responds to the art.
That said, the “normal human does superstrong stuff” thing happens from time to time even in more recent comics.
There’s an issue of Brian Michael Bendis’s Daredevil — issue #42 or #43, I think — in which he somehow managed to flip over a parked limousine containing two of the Owl’s men.
There’re also the “normal skilled humans” who seem to do things that would require superhuman force: every time Bullseye manages to throw a very lightweight object with enough force to conk or wound someone, it would probably require superhuman force to make up for the limited mass of what he’s throwing. For instance, in his first appearance, he manages to throw a ball-point pen through someone’s throat.
To clarify, Bendis had Daredevil somehow flip over a parked limousine. We don’t quite see how he did it, though.
To some extent the “rule of cool” (and the rule of expectations) apply here. It definitely happens in other books too, but it seems to be a mark of Daredevil specifically.
Take for instance Frank Miller’s first run in Daredevil. When DD first meets Kingpin (#171, 1981), there can be no doubt that Fisk is much stronger than DD. The plot involves a door that uses its own weight as a substitute for a lock and key, underscoring that we should think of Fisk as a superstrong being. Matt fights dirty when they first trade punches and still loses. He is also highly skilled in martial arts (to the point he ought to be giving Shang Chi and Iron Fist significant challenges), as made clear by Miller’s very first scene depicting him. But that is inconsistent with #182, less than a year later, where an admittedly unwell Matt actually attempts to threaten Kingpin with a mugging.
Kingpin also fought Captain America (#147, 1972) and a clone of him hosting Red Skull’s mind (#378, 1990). He defeated Red Skull in 1990 and it took Cap and the Falcon to contain him in 1972.
There isn’t any real rational way of explaining all that IMO. But I sometimes feel that Kingpin is supposed to be a dangerous fanatic whose physical abilities are directly influenced by his feelings of entitlement, much as Mike Loughlin portrays Ox above.
Luis Dantas said: The plot involves a door that uses its own weight as a substitute for a lock and key, underscoring that we should think of Fisk as a superstrong being.
And the door bit is actually taken wholesale from a Silver Age Spider-Man story, in which only Fisk and Spidey can open it.
It’s worth noting that, under Miller’s pen, the Kingpin never actually loses a fight with Daredevil. That doesn’t happen until Chichester’s Last Rites/”Fall of the Kingpin” story, where Fisk is pretty well codified as “just” a really strong, shrewd human being.
Ox and Kingpin are normal unenhanced humans who just happen to be super-strong in a similar way to how Moondragon is a normal unenhanced human who just happens to be an incredibly powerful telepath. Humans in the Marvel universe are like that sometimes.
@Omar Karindu: I just read the Chichester run, and wow, I’ve never seen a more guileless take on the Kingpin. Matt could have done nothing at all and he still would have lost to Hydra. What a weird follow-up to Nocenti.
@Skippy- But Moondragon was trained by alien priests. That works as a Hand Wave. There’s no such excuse for Kingpin and Ox.
When following up on Ann Nocenti, being weird is not automatic. But it helps.
That was one part of the problem…the Chichester run wasn’t weird, just sort of poor. It was the start of Miller lite, which plagued DD off and on for years from that point. Only one part of the problem though.
Michael said: @Skippy- But Moondragon was trained by alien priests. That works as a Hand Wave. There’s no such excuse for Kingpin and Ox.
And as to the Kingpin, Marvel seem to have pretty resolutely settled on him being merely very strong for a human as of the mid-90s or a little earlier. He routinely loses fights to Daredevil these days, and it’s a plot point from the later JMS issues of Amazing Spider-<Man that Spider-Man could always have clobbered him if he weren’t holding back.
And the Ox, as you and others have noted, has been explicitly made superhuman, albeit without any direct explanation in the comics. Perhaps he got an early version of the process used to create Man-Mountain Marko before the Maggia got hold of it?
Skippy said: @Omar Karindu: I just read the Chichester run, and wow, I’ve never seen a more guileless take on the Kingpin. Matt could have done nothing at all and he still would have lost to Hydra. What a weird follow-up to Nocenti.
Chichester really wanted HYDRA to be a big villain across his titles; he was also writing the SHIELD book of the era. So I think he cleared the Kingpin out to make room for them. And they duly turn up for multiple arcs in his Daredevil run, up until the ill-advised “Jack Batlin” retool.
Chris V said:That was one part of the problem…the Chichester run wasn’t weird, just sort of poor. It was the start of Miller lite, which plagued DD off and on for years from that point. Only one part of the problem though.
I think we have to note that Nocenti established the idea that pretty much every writer blows uop Matt’s life, since she had him lose what little he had left after “Born Again,” which actually has a kind of happy ending with Matt choosing what really matters and the Kingpin having seemingly screwed himself over int he long term.
It’s Nocenti who has the Kingpin stay powerful, and then has his schemes — really, Typhoid’s actions — further wreck Matt’s life.
But Nocenti’s run is surreal and innovative enough that this didn’t matter. I’d agree that it was when writers like Chichester, a more conventional storyteller despite his horror leanings, just kept repeating less and less interesting variations of “Matt has a mental breakdown as his life collapses around him.”
Even fairly good iterations of this — parts of the Bendis era, Brubaker’s run, Zdarsky’s run — are still just iterations.
Honestly, Matt is about as unstable a personality as Hank Pym or the Scarlet Witch at this point. It’s just that he never causes enough damage (outside of himself) for anyone to really care.
@Omar Karindu- But writers still occasionally have the Kingpin perform feats that make no sense for a normal human. For example, in the current Gang War storyline, when Shotgun needs to injure Tombstone, he needs special ammunition provided by Madame Masque, since Tombstone’s skin is extremely resistant to damage. But later on, Tombstone and Kingpin fight hand to hand, and we see Tombstone is bleeding by the end of the fight.
Re: Chichester and Kingpin- a lot of this has to do with Chichester’s love for Baron Strucker. Baron Strucker got killed off early in the Silver Age and stayed dead for over a quarter century. (Minus a weird Captain America story that got written off as one of Machinesmith’s robots.) As a result, he never became a major villain like Doom, Loki, Kingpin, Magneto, Red Skull or Dr. Octopus. This was also the case with the Green Goblin. But Norman went out after killing Spider-Man’s lover. Strucker got killed because he ran the wrong way. Plus, we saw that Norman had damaged Harry’s psyche and Peter worried that little Normie would one day follow in Norman’s footsteps. There were two Green Goblins and two Hobgoblins meant to replace Norman. So it was no surprise that once Norman returned from the dead he joined the top ranks of Marvel’s baddies. Strucker’s major legacy, on the other hand, was the incestous Strucker twins. When Chichester took over Nick Fury’s series, he brought Strucker back and had him take over Hydra and used him extensively in all of his books. He was trying to turn Strucker into one of Marvel’s major villains. So having him easily defeat the Kingpin, one of Marvel’s top villains, was part of that.
@Omar Karindu- the reason why the Kingpin stayed powerful after Born Again was that he was also appearing in the Spider-Books. Kingpin’s first major appearance in Nocenti’s run was Daredevil 248. Between Born Again and Daredevil 248, the Kingpin appeared in Spectacular Spider-Man 118, Amazing Spider-Man 280 & 287-289, Web of Spider-Man 30 and Spectacular Spider-Man 130. He stayed powerful because the Spider-Man writers understandably didn’t want to make it too easy for Peter to deal with a weakened Kingpin. Having Kingpin wreck Matt’s life again WAS all Nocenti, though.
@Thom H- the reason why Matt doesn’t cause damage often is plot armor, though. In Born Again, he beats up an innocent man pretty badly but luckily the guy doesn’t die. In Chichester’s run, he deliberately sparks a war between Hydra and the Kingpin that he intends to cripple the Kingpin’s LEGITIMATE businesses but luckily Strucker orders his goons not to kill any innocent civilians. (Because Baron Strucker is known for his respect for civilian lives.)
The Chichester run may not have a whole lot going for it, but I cannot wait for Paul to get to System Crash.
@Michael: Chichester definitely pushed Strucker as a major villain, and at the same time made his motives and methods quite a bit more generic.
However, as a lasting villain, Strucker also had three other things going for him:
First, the World War II-era Sgt. Fury stories made him Nick’s original nemesis. This is a big part of why Steranko had Strucker turn up as the Supreme HYDRA.
Second, the Steranko reveal of Strucker as HYDRA’s leader made him part of the defining run of Nicky Fury SHIELD stories, and gave him his iconic “Satan’s Claw” gauntlet weapon.
Third, no one managed to come up with a good, lasting replacement for Strucker as head of HYDRA, to the point that we got no fewer than two separate Strucker robots turning up in the years that followed, one of them running a HYDRA cell.
There was Madame Hydra, but she was also a one-arc Steranko villain and got reworked as the Viper — now without her HYDRA ties — in her second appearance
So reviving Strucker probably did look like a good way to make HYDRA seem like a big threat to Nick Fury again. I’m not sure about the whole “living death spore virus” thing, and that’s gradually been forgotten about.
Minus the Typhoid Mary issue, I thought “Last Rites” was a good story. Matt finally beats the Kingpin in a way that I found plausible, Lee Weeks’s art was great, and it was Chichester’s tightest plotting. No, it wasn’t as good as Nocenti’s run, but there’s no shame in not matching an all-timer.
“Fall from Grace” was a mess, but it had chutzpah. I don’t agree with bringing Elektra back, and the multiple enhanced covers and guest appearances were gratuitous. Still, I like the black armor, the constant motion, and Scott McDaniel’s weird art. I also like the scene in which the reporters figure out how they can out Matt Murdock as Daredevil.
“System Bytes” is also a mess, and a hilariously dated one at that. Is it good? Noooooo, but I recommend everyone experience it once. Kind of like Chuck Austin’s X-Men stories, dumb craziness abounds.
@Mike Loughlin- There were several plausibility problems with “Last Rites”. Aside from the aforementioned “How did Matt know Strucker wouldn’t kill Kingpin’s noncriminal employees?”, simply destroying all of his legitimate businesses in New York City and having hackers drain his accounts shouldn’t have been able to make the Kingpin broke to the extent required by Chichester’s story. Much of his fortune would be in stocks and bonds. Many of the businesses he owned would be outside New York City. He was once depicted as part owner of the CHUNNEL. And the Kingpin would almost certainly have large amounts of cash lying around. The idea that he couldn’t get a few hundred dollars together to pay a storage locker’s fees is ludicrous.
One thing about Nocenti having Fisk destroy Daredevil’s life after Miller already did that is she has Fisk do it differently. In Born Again, Fisk takes tangible, physical things from Murdock: his money, his home, his license to practice law. It’s a “How the Grinch stole Christmas” approach, and like for the Grinch, it doesn’t work. Murdock and Karen Page find and help each other. (Unlike the Grinch, Fisk’s heart does not grow 3 sizes.)
When he shows up in Nocenti’s run, he goes after intangible things: Matt’s faith in the legal system as a path to justice, and his love with Karen. The first fails; Fisk isn’t able to win the case about the kid being blinded by illegally dumped chemicals, but Typhoid succeeds in torching Matt’s personal life.
(And there’s the catch where Fisk then falls for Typhoid, who seems to enjoy the whole situation, which gives Daredevil another avenue to strike at Fisk in Fall from Grace. Take away whatever love Fisk had found in the absence of his wife.)
Re: super-strength and how characters avoid hitting people too hard, didn’t Lee and Ditko do something with that in Amazing Spider-Man? Flash Thompson goads Peter into boxing with him. Peter gets ready to unload on his bully, remembers he could potentially kill Flash, and pulls back enough he “only” knocks Flash clean out of the ring.
I’d say that probably gave Flash brain damage, but he was a big football star, so he’d probably had a half-dozen concussions already.
@Michael: Wilson Fisk – master criminal, lousy with money! It was the ’90s, hackers were thought to have godlike powers. If a comic said they wiped out a fortune, then I believed it.
@Calvin Pitt: I’ve always assumed super-heroes practiced hitting various things off-panel to find out how hard they could hit criminals. “That punch took out a granite boulder. Too hard! That one bruised a watermelon… good enough!”
Can watermelons actually bruise? Uh… in the MU they can! 616 Gallagher never became a comedian, he was the Avengers’ official watermelon tester.
The problem is that in real life, if you hit someone hard enough to knock them unconscious. there’s a significant chance that you’ll kill them or cause permanent brain damage. But this problem never seems to happen with heroes.
DeMatteis established that Matt had in fact accidentally killed a few people by hitting them too hard over the years (immediately after the Chichester run), but it was never mentioned again. And of course, there was the exploration of this issue in the recent Zdarsky run.
Logically Spider-Man should have a similar accidental body count, but the only one that springs to mind is Charlie from Spider-Man vs Wolverine, which was a slightly different situation from his usual punch to knock out a goon.
On the flip side, there are the numerous instances in the Silver Age when Matt knocks Foggy and others unconscious purely so they don’t see him change costumes.
Peter David did something like that in Spectacular Spider-Man, where the cop that was Sin-Eater shows up, and he has all these permanent disabilities from the beating he took? Not quite the same, because Spider-Man definitely wasn’t worried about holding back, but at least sort of nodded towards the damage he could inflict.
And when Doc Ock’s body was breaking down (prior to the bodyswap that kicked off Superior Spider-Man), part of the decline in his health was all the super-strength punches he’d taken to the head, I think.
To some extent, these are genre conventions that won’t hold up to scrutiny.
The harmless knockout blow is of a piece with all those knockout gases and tranquilizer darts that are instantly acting, perfectly effective, and otherwise harmless.
With Spider-Man, I suppose we can fudge that his spider-sense somehow helps him hold back in combat.
With Daredevil, it’s canonical that Matt’s super-senses usually let him know exactly how much damage he’s doing. The combat death in Zdarsky’s recent run was explicitly tied to Matt being worn down and going out when he wasn’t in physical or mental shape to fight.
Granted, that’s the general condition of a hero at the dramatic high point of a lot of story arcs.
But if superhero comics are going to continue having fistfights, recurring villains, and heroes who don’t just beat their enemies to death, then we have to ignore some of what we know about cranial trauma and a few other things.
Calling attention to the absurdity of these genre conventions is sometimes good for a single storyline or arc, but it’s usually not great for a long-term character’s status quo or visual design.
Otherwise we get stuff like people pointing out that Doc Ock, not only shouldn’t be able to take punches from Spider-Man without pernamnet physical damage, but also the point that he shouldn’t be able to stand upright with those massive metal arms.
We all remember John Byrne trying to fix that second issue by giving him metal pants, right? Or Slott trying to address the “Ock is a normal human taking shots from people who lift cars” thing by giving him a clone body with Spider-Man genes in it? We don’t want to go back to metal pants and spider-powers for Doctor Octopus, do we?
Indeed, Doctor Octopus has gone straight back to being a middle-aged man with robot arms who gets socked on the jaw by super-people. I suppsoe his restored original body means he can have another 40 years or so of appearances before he needs a new one.