Daredevil Villains #15: The Queega
Again, we’re skipping a couple of issues with returning villains – issues #26-27 feature the return of Stilt-Man and the final defeat of the Masked Marauder.
DAREDEVIL #28 (May 1967)
“Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor’s Planet!”
Writer, editor: Stan Lee
Penciller: Gene Colan
Inker: Dick Ayers
Letterer: Sam Rosen
Colourist: not credited
Yes, it’s a flying saucer issue. The aliens are really just little green men – well, they’re quite big green reptiles, I suppose, but you get the point. They aren’t even named in this issue. The name “Queega” comes from the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe.
Matt accepts an invitation to give a talk at Carter College on the legal aspects of flying saucers. About a third of the book is taken up with the romantic triangle before we even get to the College, where Matt plans to wing his way through a talk on a subject he knows nothing about. As it turns out, he just gives a fairly sensible talk about how the law would treat aliens if they ever showed up. In fact, you could make a case for this being one of the more legally sound issues of Daredevil. (Readers interested in the sum total of UK case law on this topic are directed to paragraph 23(2) of this decision.)
The talk is interrupted by the sound of a gunshot. Exciting!
It turns out that the shot was fired by Professor Tom Brewster, a UFO obsessive who claims to have stumbled upon some aliens in the woods. Rather surprisingly, Brewster is promptly arrested for firing a gun in a public place.
Naturally, Daredevil suspects that Brewster is telling the truth. So he investigates, and stumbles upon a flying saucer. The aliens seem surprised that “another human has discovered our presence on this primitive planet”, despite having set up base two minutes’ walk from a university campus. The aliens are reptilian semi-humanoids with weird energy halos. Wouldn’t you just know it, their main weapon turns out to be a ray that blinds people. Of course, it has no effect on Daredevil whatsoever. Unfortunately, they also have a secondary weapon: a delayed-effect freeze ray, which does work on him.
The aliens abduct Daredevil and explain their dastardly plan. They intend to blind the entire human race, and then steal all of Earth’s minerals. Literally, all of them. How are they going to do that? “We have means of transferring them to our own galaxy,” handwaves the alien captain. Daredevil protests that half the population would perish without “our precious minerals”. The aliens explain that this is “unfortunate” but “cannot be helped”. Why can’t it be helped? Hush with your questions.
The aliens are very impressed by Daredevil’s courage. They offer to restore his sight and let him join them on campaigns of planetary invasion. Naturally, Daredevil is not keen.
So the aliens get back to their plan. And they do get as far as blinding the entire human race. This gives us in a half page montage in which people around the world react to their sudden blindness in the sort of style you’d expect from a late 60s comic, complete with special national fonts for everyone’s lettering. “What have the Kapitalists done to us?!” says a Russian. “Muhammud has turned his face away!” says a man in a turban on an elephant.
Anyway, Daredevil fights the aliens and manoeuvres them into smashing their own machine, so everyone gets their sight back after a few minutes. The only impact we see of the global blindness is Foggy and Karen’s taxi crashing harmlessly into a tree, but you’d have thought the global death toll from car crashes and industrial equipment would be alarmingly high. Apparently not, though, because nobody seems terribly bothered. Inconveniently, the aliens can’t proceed with their invasion until they fix the machine, which will take “a thousand thousand nomameters”, whatever those are. So they just dump Daredevil and go home. And that’s the end.
The occasional Queega has shown up in the background of crowd scenes in cosmic stories, but otherwise they’ve been politely forgotten about. And why wouldn’t they be? They’re painfully generic, and bring nothing to the table other than whatever novelty factor alien invasions and flying saucers might still have had by 1967. Which can’t have been much.
The Queega don’t even have a memorable design – aside from their little energy halos, they’re just reptile men. Colan often elevates second-rate stories by cranking up the energy and the emotion in the characters, but either he can’t figure out how to do that with alien characters, or he can’t summon up much enthusiasm for the material. Whatever the reason, it’s obvious he wants to get back to the humans.
Who could blame him? Lee really is running out of ideas at this point, and you can feel the barrel being scraped.
Lee really is running out of ideas at this point, and you can feel the barrel being scraped.
Yeah,. Lee just seems to give up on this book until he decides to dump Mike Murdock and finally start moving past the love triangle.
I think something similar happens with The Avengers and Uncanny X-Men. Lee falls into a rut for a while, but then something (or someone?) gets him to shake up the tiresome status quo, and there’s a last burst of creativity before he just gives the book to Roy Thomas.
“…how the law would treat aliens if they ever showed up.”
You might want to chat to Reed Richards about that “if”, Matt. Or Thor. Or the Hulk. Or…
Anyway, I was going to say that, while all these villains are obscure, this is the first one that has me going “Wait, who?” but of course, it’s not. That honour goes to Klaus Kruger, a villain so forgettable I geniuinely had to look him up twice while writing this.
The aliens explain that this is “unfortunate” but “cannot be helped”. Why can’t it be helped? Hush with your questions.”
Sounds like ‘our needs are greater than yours’ kind of thing. They may not actually want to do harm, but if they have to they will. Further, resource wars are a real thing.
“Lee really is running out of ideas at this point, and you can feel the barrel being scraped.”
And yet, he stayed on the book for another 25 issues. Wonder what he saw in Daredevil that didn’t make him decide to pawn off the character early on like he did with the X-Men, Ant-Man and those Human Torch/Thing stories.
He was already doing Spider-Man, you’d think he’d have a hard enough time coming up with stories for one souped up urban acrobat swinging across the rooftops.
The scene where Matt gives the talk about aliens is referenced in Mark Waid’s Daredevil 30, by an alien who’s trying to con Matt.
@Norvo- Stan continued to write Ant-Man/Giant-Man stories until the very end, although other writers helped out with some issues- by most accounts, Stan liked Hank and kept him in Tales to Astonish longer than sales warranted.
In an alternate universe Frank Miller did a well regarded revival of the Queega, and for the next 40 years, Daredevil has mainly been endless “Versus Aliens” stories.
While Stan Lee certainly wanted to boost sales whenever he could, I would assume that he genuinely felt pride in writing plots and creating characters. He certainly implied that he was far better at it than Wally Wood when commenting issues #9-11 in the letters page of this very book. And he _was_ a writer-editor, meaning that it would be difficult for anyone without a financial participation in the company to tell him off.
As for why he wanted to write Daredevil up to #50 despite an obvious lack of inspiration, my best guess is a combination of genuine interest with the opportunity to use the book as a test plataform for ideas that he could use in more valuable books. While Daredevil is perhaps a bit too similar to Spider-Man to make sense as a separate book at this time, there are also some interesting, unique qualities to the concept.
Daredevil is older, more mature and better employed than Peter from the very start; his emotional landscape has significantly different features, being defined by the absence of a mother figure and the presence of a demanding yet flawed, even hypocritical parent; and there are simply less antics with love triangles, abusive employers and limited privacy than in Spider-Man. Matt Murdock is, for better or worse, a self-made man with a stable career.
The decisive reason for keeping Daredevil on the stands in the later 1960s may well be the obvious one: it had the surprising differential of a disabled lead, and both genuine human interest in the cause of visibility of the disadvantaged as well as the creative challenge of dealing with a blind protagonist attracted Stan. He was fairly progressive for his time – for instance, he created the Sons of the Serpent back in 1966’s Avengers #32, when he was 43.
“Daredevil protests that half the population would perish without “our precious minerals”.”
Yeah, we would all die on a planet with no minerals. That’s pretty basic biology, Stan.
And that cover is (again) terrible. At least it’s a fully realized scene this time, but the perspective is so strange.
Here to help out my good buddy the Queega beat out that jerk Leapfrog.
Lee would say in later years that Daredevil would get a lot of positive letters from blind kids who had it read to them, how great it was that there was a hero with the same disability as them etc. No idea how true that is, but it might explain why he’d want to stay on the book himself, if he thought that kind of positive reception was important and didn’t want to risk it by giving it to Larry or Roy.
I could also see it being a “business prestige” optics issue, if Stan stops writing the book, does it become a second tier book in eyes of fans and it hurts sales?
I think most commenters here have a much higher opinion of Stan Lee, or at least the amount of work he did as a writer, than I do. Seeing “Lee plotted…” always makes me pause. Why was the writing on Spider-Man so much better? Because Steve Ditko was doing the vast majority of the plotting. Then, you had John Romita’s attractive art and storytelling chops.
Gene Colan is one of my all-time favorite artists, but plotting was not his strength. According to Marv Wolfman, he preferred working from a script, or at least a tight plot.
I’m not saying Lee didn’t do *any* plotting, but the vast majority of the plotting and storytelling went to the artists. He didn’t plot the Spider-Man strip, either. Jim Shooter even claimed Stan hired him to plot Silver Surfer. I take everything Lee says with an entire shaker of salt.
Stan Lee embellished stuff for the benefit of his brand and that of his corporate overlords on the rare occasions when he actually fully recalled what happened.
Neither he nor Jack Kirby were gifted with great recall especially regarding anything that happened more than a decade previous.
Stan Lee shouldn’t be treated as an absolute liar on anything but never use him as the only source for your histories.
How will the Quueg be written up in the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe?
And how do the other major powers see them? “Those jerks blinded us before robbing our jewelry?” Are they elaborate space burglars? Galactic nuisances? A secret empire?
This one reads like an Atlas-era story that Stan pulled out of a drawer and added Daredevil into. I do enjoy it, though.
I love the Mike Murdoch stuff, think it’s the most successful angle the book has come up with at this point. At the same time as being goofy it manages to be vaguely creepy as well, partly because of the idea of Matt trying to direct his relationship with Karen and Foggy via his various alter-egos, and partly because at times it actually does seem like Mike is cracking up. You could imagine something like this in a David Lynch movie, the protagonist’s flamboyant, overbearing somewhat sinister alter-ego.
The alien invasion plotline here is so different than most of what we’ve seen in Daredevil up until this point that you could play it as something Matt imagines as he becomes increasingly disconnected from reality. I don’t think this was Stan’s intention, but I think a viable angle for a book would be ‘straight laced guy becomes costumed hero, starts out fighting ordinary hoods and mobsters, then bad guys with costumes and gimmicks who are still essentially semi-normal crooks and then keeps encountering increasingly far out and cosmic antagonists as he starts to lose his mind’
@squeak You’re going to love the Gerber run.
@squeak
‘straight laced guy becomes costumed hero, starts out fighting ordinary hoods and mobsters, then bad guys with costumes and gimmicks who are still essentially semi-normal crooks and then keeps encountering increasingly far out and cosmic antagonists as he starts to lose his mind’
This is basically Jim Starlin’s jumping off point for his 70s Adam Warlock run, who had previously been written as a fairly straightforward (if quite messianic) superhero figure, and Starlin repositioned as “what if his greatest enemy is… his own mind???”
I don’t know that you can call an artificial being chosen to be the messiah figure for the carbon copy version of Earth by its biogeneticist creator, finds himself crucified, rises from the dead, and then devolves the wolf/human hybrid Satan archetype disguised as Richard Nixon to be a “fairly straightforward superhero”.
@Joe Sounds like ‘our needs are greater than yours’ kind of thing. They may not actually want to do harm, but if they have to they will. Further, resource wars are a real thing.
Sure, on our crowded little planet. If you’re a space faring civilisation searching for minerals, you have plenty of options without disturbing complex organic life at all, never mind civilisation. Heck, there’s one right next door; the mutants aren’t going to claim it for decades yet!