Daredevil Villains #17: The Exterminator
We’ve jumped forward quite a few issues again, thanks to a string of issues featuring guest villains from the wider Marvel Universe. Issues #30-32 feature the Cobra and Mr Hyde, explicitly on loan from Thor. Issues #33-34 are a Beetle story – he does come back for two more stories in the #100s, but I don’t think anyone regards him as a Daredevil villain. Issue #35-36 are the Trapster. Issues #37-38 are Dr Doom, and lead into a crossover with Fantastic Four.
DAREDEVIL #39-41 (April to June 1968)
“The Exterminator and the Super-Powered Unholy Three” / “The Fallen Hero” / “The Death of Mike Murdock!”
Writer, editor: Stan Lee
Penciller: Gene Colan
Inkers: George Tuska (#39), John Tartaglione (#40-41)
Letterers: Artie Simek (#39), Sam Rosen (#40-41)
Colourist: not credited
It’s been the best part of a year since Daredevil last debuted a new villain. But while the Exterminator is notionally the main villain of this arc, a lot of the emphasis is on his henchmen. Ape-Man, Bird-Man and Cat-Man debuted as the Organizer’s thugs back in issue #10, as part of the Wally Wood arc that Stan Lee hated so much. Now, they’re featured prominently as the returning villains. They’re billed as the Unholy Three, with their fourth member Frog-Man having fallen by the wayside for some reason – perhaps because of his similarity to Leap-Frog. Daredevil notes Frog-Man’s absence, assumes that he must still be in jail, and never mentions him again.
During the issues we skipped, Stan also brought back the other member of the Organization, Foggy’s ex-girlfriend Debbie Harris. Why? Because even Stan was bored with the book’s romantic triangle, and the simplest solution was to partner Foggy up with someone else. Not only does that get Matt and Karen out of their holding pattern, it frees up Foggy from being a blocking character and a comedy figure, and lets him start shifting back into his original role as Matt’s best friend. By the time we reach this issue Debbie is a full fledged member of the supporting cast, and Foggy is worried that their relationship will damage his chances of being elected as District Attorney. She’s a convicted criminal, after all. Nonsense, says Matt – New Yorkers are very understanding about such things. They love reformed criminals and the open-minded politicians who date them!
Once Debbie Harris was back in circulation, it made sense to bring back her former stablemates. In Wally Wood’s story, the Unholy Three were press ganged into working for the Organizer. They were halfway between actual super villains, and hired thugs who were pretending to be supervillains as part of the Organizer’s plan. All that has fallen by the wayside – they’re now just an animal-themed henchman squad. But Stan does keep the idea that a mastermind keeps track of them via their clunky headsets and chest-mounted video cameras. This time round, that villain is the Exterminator.
Like the Organizer, the Exterminator has nothing to do with the Unholy Three’s animal theme. He has a version of the Unholy Three’s headset, but otherwise he wears a generic full body supervillain costume, in a garish clash of white and purple. He certainly stands out in a crowd, but you can see why he was redesigned as a moody shadow figure when he returned as the Death-Stalker in issue #113. The fact that he doesn’t make the cover of any of these issues might be another hint that nobody was thrilled with his appearance.
The Exterminator is a scientific genius who has just created “the awesome T-ray”, which will make him “the next master of all mankind”. But what is the awesome T-ray? Well, it’s not a time travel ray, he clarifies. It’s a time displacement ray. Clear yet?
Ape-Man points out that this is pseudo-scientific gibberish, and so the Exterminator demonstrates the ray on him. Unfortunately, this doesn’t take matters much further. When zapped, Ape-Man vanishes for half an hour and then re-appears. It sure looks like he’s been sent half an hour into the future, which would be… well, time travel. But judging from what happens later, apparently he’s been shunted into a limbo dimension where he had to patiently wait for half an hour until the effect wore off. The dialogue completely fails to get this across. “The time continuum in which you – and you alone – exist has suddenly been displaced!” says the Exterminator uninformatively.
Having explained his gimmick to the satisfaction of the Unholy Three, if not of the reader, the Exterminator equips the thugs with portable T-rays – ray guns, in other words. Then the villains head off to a nightclub, where Matt and Karen are on a double date with Foggy and Debbie. The villains drive there in full costume in a completely normal car. It’s adorable.
The Exterminator’s plan is to zap Debbie and keep her in “displaced time” as a hostage. But people won’t know she’s in displaced time! They’ll think that she’s been disintegrated! So… how does the hostage thing work if people don’t know she’s a hostage? “Think,” he says, “how it will make men fear the awesome power of the Exterminator!” And so the Unholy Three zap a whole bunch of random people in the club, while the Exterminator waits politely in the car. And yes, they do zap Debbie and escape.
The Exterminator doesn’t appear in part two, where Daredevil chases after the Unholy Three and gets zapped himself. That leads to a lengthy sequence where he escapes back to Earth, only for him and Debbie to find themselves as ghosts because they are “slightly out of synchronization”. The Exterminator notices the problem, but doesn’t care. “It merely means I possess a weapon even deadlier than I dreamed it was! It means any victim of the Exterminator is destined to be lost forever!” At least this segment gives Gene Colan the chance to draw some odd pages of Daredevil in a world full of hazy pencil sketches, which is something different.
Meanwhile, Foggy discovers that a scientist working for the Organizer skipped town just before his trial. There wasn’t a scientist in the original Organizer story, but I suppose he’s meant to be whoever created the Unholy Three’s costumes. Foggy reveals this information to the press in an attempt to draw out the villains, with no real plan for what he’s going to do if they show up, but heck, he’s trying to help the woman he loves. That goes about as well as you’d expect.
Daredevil rescues Foggy, the villains are defeated, and Daredevil contrives a nice big explosion in which he fakes his own death. And since Karen and Foggy think that Daredevil is actually Matt’s brother Mike, the notorious twin storyline is duly resolved. Well, more or less. There’s still the question of what happens when Daredevil shows up again alive and well. But that loose end is tied up in the next story, where Matt explains that this new Daredevil must be Mike’s previously unmentioned protégé, and everyone just runs with that. And then the twin brother plot really is over.
What about the Exterminator, though? He has no meaningful back story, agenda or personality. He stands and falls with his gimmick, the T-ray. But while it does let Colan cut loose a bit, it’s never remotely clear what “time displacement” actually means, or why it’s meant to be useful. He can take people hostage… well, do you need a ray gun to do that? There’s something rather quaint in the fact that the Exterminator apparently never considered deliberately designing a lethal weapon, and sees it as an unexpected boon that his victims might be lost forever. But the bottom line is that he seems to have applied vast scientific learning simply to come up with a pointlessly elaborate revolver.
He is a weird villian for daredevil, presumably the gimmick would be to put him up against the hulk or some other character that is invincible to “normal’weapons
It’s not clear that Death Stalker was originally intended to be the Exterminator.
As we’ve discussed earlier, Matt deliberately destroys the Exterminator’s gizmo to fake his own death. Later on, we learn that this left the Exterminator trapped in another dimension where he turned into the Death-Stalker. This means that the Death-Stalker DID have a legitimate grievance against Matt, since Matt probably would have found a safer way to destroy the device if he hadn’t been intent on faking his own death. Matt never takes responsibility for this.
However. as Omar pointed out, that’s not what Stan intended. Foggy seems to be in the same room as the Exterminator when Matt destroyed the device and Foggy is unharmed. Moreover, Foggy says “They’re all unconscious…except…Daredevil1” Stan’s idea was apparently that the Exterminator hit his head falling when Matt kicked him earlier and was knocked out. And Len Wein later has the Ani-Men reappear.
There was an attempt to make the Death Stalker Matt’s primary nemesis in the 70s but he got killed off after Miller joined the book.
The Death-Stalker gets a backstory after his death as the son of a creepy rich lady.
I thought T-Ray was the dude who claimed to be the real Wade Wilson and possibly popularized the nose Band-Aid lewk.
And here Matt Murdock learns how fun it is to fake his own death. One of his absolute favourite pastimes.
Hyde and the Cobra are absolutely DD villains in my mind. Maybe reading Thor from the beginning will disabuse me of that notion when I get around to it, we’ll see.
Beetle, okay, not so much, although I would argue he wasn’t really a Spider-Man rogue either until he formed the Syndicate; he just kind of bounced around the Marvel Universe.
I miss Debbie Harris, she was done dirty by O’Neil.
The Exterminator and his T-Ray? Duds. Death-Stalker, on the other hand, is one of the greats.
Interesting you skipped Hyde. At this point he feels more like a DD villain to me, even though that’s not where he started
@Skippy- Cobra appeared in Journey into Mystery 98, 105-106 &110-111. had a cameo in Fantastic Four Annual 3, then appeared in Daredevil 30-32 & 61, Captain America 163 & 180-182, and Daredevil 142-143 & 153-154 before appearing in Spectacular Spider-Man 46. Mr. Hyde appeared in Journey into Mystery 99-100, 105-106 & 110-111, had a cameo in Fantastic Four Annual 3, then appeared in Daredevil 30-32 & 61, CaptaiN America 150-152. Daredevil 142-143 & 153-154 before appearing in Spectacular Spider-Man 46. So basically they started out as Thor villains, had cameos in Fantastic Four Annual 3, then appeared in Daredevil 30-32 & 61, then had separate storylines in Captain America, then returned in Daredevil 142-143 & 153-154. After Spectacular Spider-Man 46, where they had a falling out, Cobra appeared in Spider-Man for a few issues then joined the Serpent Society in Captain America which established him as a Captain America villain. Hyde, on the other hand, became a general Marvel Universe villain, although he occasionally returned to fight Daredevil, most notably in Kesel’s run, where Matt had to prove Hyde innocent of murder.
@Zachary Quinton Adams: Following up on Michael’s post, I think Hyde never fully settles into nay hero’s rogues’ gallery. He’s an Avengers villain when they need someone to beat up, pops up occasionally in Captain America, and gets used against Marvel’s pseudo-monster heroes, such as the Ghost Riders and — more rarely — the Hulk. He’s kind of a free-floating psychopath.
Karl Kesel wanted to make him a more frequently recurring Daredevil baddie and set up some thematic elements to do that. But, ironically, Kesel’s run was one of the last times Hyde was used as an antagonist for DD, aside from a throwaway appearance in Bendis’s run.
@Michael: Given all of the ways the Exterminator is just a generic plot device villain here, and one with a frankly inane gimmick, I always thought it was odd that later writers remembered him well enough to bring him back as an explanation of the Death-Stalker.
As to your point, it seems almost impossible that “it’s the Exterminator in a new guise” was what Steve Gerber intended, and the Death-Stalker’s initial appearance, methods, and apparent power set don’t really fit well with what’s revealed later on.
For one thing, the eventual explanation that he has special gloves doesn’t fit with his bare-armed look in his first appearances, nor does his vengeance quest fit with Death-Stalker’s role as a kind of spymaster and weapons dealer. But there’ll be plenty of time to discuss all that when we get to Daredevil v.1 #113.
“Maybe reading Thor from the beginning will disabuse me of that notion when I get around to it, we’ll see.”
The Thor series takes a little while to settle into the sense that characters with a godly or cosmic connection are the typical Thor villain.
Hyde and Cobra are early villains who don’t fit that, which is probably why they end up moving to other rogue’s galleries.
I didn’t start reading a lot of Marvel Comics until the mid-80s, so my first exposure to Death-Stalker was after he was already dead and indexed in the OHOTMU Book of the Dead…
But I did read the Harlan Ellison issue of DD where our hero was lured into the house of deathtraps by the exploding little girl robots on behalf of Death-Stalker’s vengeance-seeking dead mom and WOW that was something to experience as a kid…
I don’t think either Cobra or Hyde are particularly attached to anyone at least since their first Daredevil appearance. It strains credibility that they would be a challenge for Thor, and they were explicitly hand-me-downs when they first appeared elsewhere (in Daredevil). If they _are_ attached to anyone in particular, at this point it would be Daredevil.
Then there is the Mr. Hyde robot created by Mr. Kline, that appears in #82-83.
@Paul: I’m really enjoying this series and I appreciate the thought, effort, and wit, and that go into it. The comments conversations have been great fun, too.
I hope that I am not engaging in irritating nitpicking, but there appears to be a minor typo in the issue numbers provided at the start of the post. The Hyde/Cobra story runs from #30 to #32, the Beetle is in #33 to 34, and the Trapster story from #35 to #36 (though Dcotor Doom appears in the final pages of #36, and the cover is from Doom’s POV).
My apologies if this comment is ungracious or unhelpful.
No, you’re absolutely right. I’ll fix that.
Re Mr Hyde and Cobra: their story specifically positions them as guest villains from THOR; Thor even shows up to give Daredevil his blessing to fight them.
Thor pops up to give Daredevil permission to fight his villains? That is kind of great.
It’s odd that Mr. Hyde feels like a Daredevil villain to me, seeing how clearly he’s freelanced across the DCU. He just feels like a good fit for Murdock.
I do have a fondness for Death-Stalker, which is 100% due to the character design.
@Luis Dantas- I think it’s fair to say that Cobra’s been a Captain America villain since the mid-1980s.
Yeah once he became a member of the Serpent Society (and then became the leader) Cobra/King Cobra became a Cap mainstay, I’d say.
Also,I’m not super familiar with this era of Daredevil but I did have some inklings about Death stalker being pushed as something of Matt’s main villain pre-Miller. So it was interesting to see how lackluster his supposed first appearance came across here. It being a retcon makes more sense.
Yeah, there’s no way Gerber intended Death-Stalker to be the Exterminator.
Roger McKenzie is the one who wrote the reveal that Exterminator and D-S were the same guy (in Frank Miller’s first issue, which is kinda wild), but I wonder if it was McKenzie’s idea? Jim Shooter seemed to plant the seeds for the reveal when he wrote a Death-Stalker appearance a year or two earlier. In my head, I’ve always assumed Shooter was the one who planned to reveal the two characters as the same person but then left the series before getting around to it, so it was up to McKenzie to do that, just in time to kill the character off.
It was Marv Wolfman’s idea. He brought Death-Stalker back and started planting the seeds. Roger McKenzie was using Marv Wolfman’s notes for the origin of Death-Stalker while writing DD #158.
It was in DD #138 when Wolfman brought back Death-Stalker disguised as Death’s Head. Karen Page wanted to know why this Death’s Head was pretending to be her father. He said he wanted to find out about Paxton Page’s research into time displacement and the fourth dimension, which was a major hint that this Death’s Head was the Exterminator. In Ghost Rider #20, this Death’s Head used Death-Stalker’s death touch, revealing that the Death’s Head imposter was really Death-Stalker. Wolfman left DD before returning to the Death-Stalker plot, but McKenzie was using Wolfman’s notes to finish the Wolfman story.
@Jason- The first clue we got that Death-Stalker was the Exterminator was in Daredevil 138, during Marv Wolfman’s run. The Death Stalker is trying to find out about any research Karen Page’s father did into time displacement, which, of course, was the Exterminator’s gimmick.
Later 1970s Daredevil is the rare example of a book in which a lot of plotting survived multiple writer handoffs, maybe because soon-to-be Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter was involved.
Wolfman’s Death-Stalker reveal idea seems to have been preserved reasonably well, for instance. And Wolfman himself started by finishing off a two-parter begun by Len Wein.
It’s not as clear, IIRC, that Wolfman intended for Maxwell Glenn to be the Purple Man’s victim, or just genuinely corrupt, but that plotline gets planted early and seen to conclusion as well.
A couple of plots do get lost in the shuffle, though. A hard-bitten cop character, Lieutenant Bert Rose, gets accused of corruption partway through, but that’s his last appearance in the book despite looking like a plot setup. (Shooter may have intended this as part of the Purple Man plot.)
And Wolfman drops in a weird, incongruous science-fiction character, the Star-Walker, in issue #129 who seems to be considering an attack on Daredevil for…reasons. That was mercifully ignored by everyone afterwards, and Wolfman has stated he didn’t have a particular direction in mind for following it up.
Finally, Daredevil’s reporter pal at the Daily Bugle in a couple of the Wolfman issues is Jake Conover. He gets dropped, in large part, and later Roger McKenzie introduces the much more famous — and well-defined — Ben Urich.
Conover goes on to arbitrarily become a minor supervillain, one of the many people using the Rose identity, in some mediocre 1990s Spider-Man stories.
ChrisV and Michael — Ah yes, thank you, I forgot that Wolfman planted those seeds early.
Omar — I think it was the Sky-Walker, not Star-Walker. Marv invented Star Wars!
Lots of cop characters in Daredevil got dropped when the next writer showed up, as I recall. Burt Rose was part of the same grand tradition as “Ironguts” O’Hara and “Bucko” Leary.
Death-Stalker’s first appearance under that identity was in a story by Steve Gerber involving Man-Thing, his nexus of realities swamp environment and his supporting cast member Richard Rory. It sure felt like a hint of supernatural origins for him. So did his lethal touch; the retcon of it being a version of Satan’s Claw always felt a bit odd.
Marvel used the Murdock twin brother scam in the comics a few years ago…still, thanks for reviewing vintage comics……