Daredevil Villains #19: Biggie Benson
DAREDEVIL #47 (December 1968)
“Brother, Take My Hand”
Writer, editor: Stan Lee
Penciller: Gene Colan
Inker: George Klein
Letterer: Artie Simek
Colourist: Not credited
Biggie Benson is another random crime boss who shows up in Daredevil as a one-off villain. I could stop there. But there are a few reasons to spend more time on this issue. The least interesting of those reasons is that Biggie isn’t strictly a one-off villain; he comes back looking for revenge in a couple of issues time. But that’s just to get the plot rolling.
A better reason to pay attention to this story is that it introduces Willie Lincoln, who shows up periodically as a supporting character for the next year or so. Since the supporting cast still consists entirely of Foggy Nelson, Karen Page and Debbie Harris, any new recurring character is at least somewhat noteworthy.
But more than that, this is A Very Special Issue, and we haven’t had one of those yet.
We open with a flashback to a few months ago, as Daredevil visits Vietnam to entertain the troops with a display of acrobatics. In the audience is Willie, who is losing his sight after being injured in battle. Willie is a huge Daredevil fan, and apparently he’s insisted on hanging around in order to see his idol in person. This being the Silver Age, the melodrama is cranked up to 11, and so Willie’s sight gives out on him in the middle of Daredevil’s performance.
Daredevil visits him in the hospital and learns that Willie was a cop. But even before he got drafted, something had happened to get him kicked off the force. Willie won’t explain further, so Daredevil just assures him that lots of blind people lead productive lives, and suggests that he should get in touch with Matt Murdock when he gets home.
Stan Lee is keen to make sure that his position on the Vietnam War is not misconstrued. As Daredevil’s plane is taking off, our hero thinks to himself: “War! The most brutal – most idiotic – most loathsome manifestation of all that’s wrong with mankind! And it’s always the youngest – the finest – the best of our people that pay the highest price! The world will never be able to repay the debt it owes – to the countless Willie Lincolns who gave their last full measure of loyalty and devotion!”
Cut to the present day, and Willie is back in New York. He visits his old precinct and asks for a job. The captain would love to have him back, even without his sight. But before he was drafted, Willie was framed for taking a bribe, and he can’t be re-hired until he clears his name. Willie can’t afford a lawyer, so he goes to visit the welfare department. As it happens, Karen is working there (don’t ask, it doesn’t last long), and she too points him to Matt Murdock. This time Willie takes the hint, and of course Matt takes the case.
The mobster behind it all is Biggie Benson. Biggie is just your standard balding guy in a suit. Now, true, it’s a purple suit. But that’s as flamboyant as the guy gets.
You might have thought that Matt would put a case together and take it to the police, or perhaps just pop round to Biggie’s house and heroically whack him over the head with a stick. But for some reason, Matt’s solution is to sue Biggie in a civil court. Biggie is unfazed. He sends thugs round to Willie’s home, to make sure that the case never gets to court. Of course, Daredevil fends them off. And in court, Matt tricks Biggie’s main witness into admitting that he lied. Willie is cleared, and thanks to Matt’s fame, the story makes front page news.
After the case, Matt visits Willie to give him a pep talk about all the things a blind man can still do. Remarkably, Willie has somehow made it all the way to the end of the litigation without anyone mentioning that Matt is blind too. Matt is supposed to be a high profile celebrity lawyer whose antics make front page news in Marvel New York, but somehow all of this has entirely escaped Willie’s notice.
Needless to say, Willie is blown away by this demonstration of what a blind man can achieve. Then some more of Biggie’s thugs come round, so Matt switches off the lights and beats them up while pretending to be Willie. The hoods are handed over to the cops, and Willie’s life is back on track.
This seems a good place to mention that Willie is black. Now, in one sense, this is irrelevant. Nothing in the plot turns on it, and nobody mentions it. But it’s obviously intended to register. Black people were, shall we say, thin on the ground in late sixties Marvel. I’m not sure there had even been a non-white character with a speaking part before this issue, aside from the sequence in issue #28 where aliens temporarily blind the human race and we get a montage of national stereotypes reacting.
Marvel did have some regular black characters at this point. Gabe Jones debuted in Howling Commandos in 1963, and the Black Panther’s first appearance was in 1966. Robbie Robertson was introduced as the deputy editor of the Daily Bugle in 1967. The Falcon debuts next year, and as we go into the 1970s, the bystanders in Daredevil‘s New York will become noticeably more diverse than they had been in the past. Luke Cage gets a solo series in 1972.
Still, Willie is the book’s first black character to do anything remotely significant, let alone to have a whole issue built around him. It’s plainly not a coincidence that he appears in a Message Issue. Still, the closest the story comes to mentioning it is Willie’s final line: “Murdock never made a big deal about it, but when you get down to where it’s at, maybe that’s what brotherhood is all about!” By Silver Age Stan Lee standards, this is almost subtle.
As well as that, the issue is another example of Lee toying with a street-level, crime-based story, closer to the formula that will eventually work for Daredevil, only to back off from it straight away. Stan comes back to this idea from time to time, and it provides some of the Silver Age material that has aged best, yet every time he seems to leave convinced that it didn’t work. Or maybe just that it didn’t sell.
Biggie himself doesn’t stand out at all, even though Gene Colan puts in the now-familiar effort to give him some extra personality. He’s a stock crime boss who barely does anything beyond sending the lads round – but that’s fine, because he’s here to represent a standard sort of injustice that Willie can overcome. His role in his next story is equally mechanical – somebody has to hire the new villain to get the plot moving, and it might as well be him. That scheme duly backfires and he gets himself killed, having contributed everything he really had to offer.
Willie Lincoln was retconned as one of the soldiers in the Bengal’s origin, as well as Red Wolf and Father Janes from New Warriors. (And James Rhodes flew the chopper that got them to safety.)
I feel the need to react to that non-logo. The original wasn’t a classic, but it was both mildly distinctive and inspired better logos later. The best I can say for this is that it’s legible.
Marvel was better than DC when it came to black representation. Supposedly, Ferro Lad in the Legion of Super Heroes was supposed to be black but Mort Weisinger vetoed it because “we’ll lose our distribution in the South”.
@Michael
Let’s be fair here – if Weisinger hadn’t vetoed that, whatever his actual reasons, making the LSH’s first black member the guy who *is literally too ugly to show his face* would probably have been seen as a historical misstep.
Two less notable due to longevity, but still important Marvel characters from this time period:
Silver Surfer #5, in 1969, co-starred Al B. Harper for one issue.
Also later in 1969, Archie Goodwin introduced Eddie March in the pages of Iron Man. He was the second person Tony Stark chose as a replacement for him in the armour.
It is a terrible logo, but that’s a very nice cover by Colan.
I like the logo – it really declutters the cover and lets the action take center stage. Having Daredevil kick out in front of it was a stroke of genius on Colan’s part.
Now we just have to work on the corner box a bit, and we’ll be in good shape.
@Chris V- There’s also Bill Foster, who appeared in Avengers 32-35. 41 and 54, although he didn’t do much in those issues.
@SanityorMadness- it couldn’t be worse than Tyroc, whose first appearance established that the reason why we didn’t see black people in the 30th century previously was because they were all on one island.
More to the point, Mike Grell has made it clear that the reluctance to include black people in the Legion lasted into the 1970s. Grell has said he kept trying to introduce black Legion members before Tyroc and kept getting rejected until the Tyroc story.
And it wasn’t just the Legion. By the end of 1975, Marvel had Black Panther, Falcon, Luke Cage, Brother Voodoo, Storm, Black Goliath, Blade and Misty Knight. Who did DC have as black superheroes at that point? There was John Stewart, but he’d only appeared in a couple of issues at that point. I suppose you could count Nubia but again, she only appeared in a few issues. Then there was the Bronze Tiger. HIstorically. DC was much more reluctant than Marvel to allow black superheroes, even after it was shown that books with black superheroes didn’t necessarily sell poorly.
And there’s the almost origin of DC’s Brown Bomber, which is so bizarre you’d think it was a parody.
>>Matt is supposed to be a high profile celebrity lawyer whose antics make front page news in Marvel New York, but somehow all of this has entirely escaped Willie’s notice.
To be fair, Willie probably wasn’t reading the newspapers.
Steve Ditko was also drawing Black characters as extras in Amazing Spider-Man around this time. In particular a few of his issues include unnamed Black police officers who are Comic Code, portrayed in positive heroic terms.
It’s also worth noting that Bill Foster, mentioned previously by Michael, was introduced in an Avengers story that attempted to criticize hate groups like the Klan. It’s undermined by a Cold War plot that blames it all on an Asian Communists. But then, the Sons of the Serpent kept being written as a white supremacist group that was never actually led by white people.
Regarding DC, a number of writers have stated that the problem there was editorial. For instance, 1969’s Teen Titans #20 was supposed to have a Black character named Joshua, co-created by Marv Wolfman, Len Wein, and Nick Cardy.
But they claim that then-publisher Carmine Infantino had the story completely rewritten, and Jericho became a white character named Joshua. Elements of this plot idea were recycled for both the first actual Black Titans character, Mal, and later for the Jericho character Wolfman introduced in the 1980s.
To be fair to that first Sons of the Serpent story and its Scooby-Doo ending, it’s not inappropriate to do the twist “the leader of the white supremacist group is himself non-white!” for the sake of a good story. The problems really only arise when the same thing happens in the next Sons story, and then AGAIN in the one after that. By that point it’s got a bit silly, to say the least…
@Zoomy: The problem is that the first Sons of the Serpent story tries to avoid controversy by having the villains go on and on about “rid[ing] the nation of those of different heritages — different creeds” and shouting “Foreigners must be banished!” instead of addressing either a specific kind of racism or even using the word “racism.”
But then the guys shouting about banishing foreigners turn out to be the dupes of…a foreigner! It was all a plot by what the story describes as a general from “a hostile Oriental nation.” And it ends on the Avengers issuing a call for national unity to resist division, lest AMerica be weakened enough to fall to these outside enemies.
NB that they only used that logo for the one issue, so it was recognised as an instant dud. With issue 48 they went back to the old one and kept using it for another year or more.