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I’d argue, as I have elsewhere, that much of the engine was coming together by the end of Wolfman’s run — Marv introduced Bullseye, not Miller, and the book was gradually shading into a crime noir. By the time Roger McKenzie’s started writing it, it’s gotten noticeably darker than a standard superhero book, what with Jim Shooter having Maxwell Glenn framed and driven to suicide by the Purple Man. McKenzie’d already started the Turk bit before Miller came on board; Bullseye’s psychosis had been well-established in Shooter’s #146 and the initial McKenzie/Miller use of the character.

Miller makes a nice convenient break point, and he finished the developing engine overhaul by bringing in Elektra, the Hand, and the Kingpin, but he was not the sole architect of the book’s renewal despite what memory and nostalgia conspire to convince us.

I’d also note that Elektra was not meant to be a permanent part of the book: Miller used her wonderfully, but left her with an open ending and had a sort of handshake deal with Marvel to keep her offscreen. And Miller also ended the ninja material when he left the book the first time, with the Hand slain by the Kingpin’s men and the only surviving member of Stick’s group left weary but hopeful. Bullseye was a paralyzed wreck over whom an intended “last word” was said in the Russian roulette story.

When Miller did come back on board with “Born Again,” he seemed to be setting up a brand new story engine by tossing the secret identity and leaving Matt as a satisfied fellow underemployed in Hell’s Kitchen, living with Karen Page. The supporting cast, including Foggy, had been all but written out. And Daredevil had disgraced but not deposed the Kingpin and ensured that the villain could never legitimate his criminal enterprise. Miller took apart the engine he helped build; later writers spent lots of time putting it back together with minor variations, of course, but Miller himself doesn’t seem to have seen it as “The” motor for the book.

Frankly, I think Daredevil is actually one of the weakest concepts and grim n’ gritty stuff was like an overcompensation for this. He’s both offbrand Batman and Spider-Man at the same time. But add some ninja booty and tons of grit and suddenly he’s this major character. I think he’d almost be better off and more fun as Matt Murdock, lawyer to the stars of the Marvel Universe.

I agree with Omar, a lot of the elements Miller is credited with bringing to Daredevil actually started with Wolfman, Shooter and McKenzie.

I’ll plead “mea maxima culpa” here; the Essentials covered up through Daredevil #101, I’ve got the ‘Marvel Visionaries: Frank Miller’ trades that cover his run, leaving about a sixty-issue gap that I was decidedly vague on. I really should have known better than to make assumptions on what happened during that sixty-issue gap, especially where Marv Wolfman was concerned. (The man has a talent for designing storytelling engines that’s really overlooked way too often, because nobody really thinks of it as a “skill”.)

So, yes, entirely my fault and born out of ignorance. I apologize.

I’m amazed you left out the storyline where Daredevil and Dr. Doom mindswitch into each other’s bodies! That to me says it all…

I have nearly all of the first 250 issues of DD. I think all I’m missing are a couple of the first 10, but I’ve read them in the Essentials. The book really didn’t get going until Wolfman took over (around #124, I don’t have the books at hand right now), and even then he was inconsistent (the Uri Geller issue, anyone?). Stan never got the character to be interesting for more than a couple issues at a time (I think the Masked Marauder stories around issue 25 were pretty good and he had a stretch in the 30s and 40s that worked well, but that might have been due to the quality of the Colan art), and Thomas wasn’t much better at capturing an interesting DD. Gerry Conway had a few interesting concepts that soon collapsed under poor storytelling or science. Steve Gerber’s early issues were an absolute disaster, but his later ones were very good (around issues 110-115), but he left the book before he REALLY got something going. There were fill-in writers for a few issues that produced bad stories (the Hydra/Blackwing multipart story is, in my opinion, the nadir of the pre-Miller years).

Then Marv came on with a two-part Copperhead story (#s 124 & 125?) that I think of as the best story in the first 125 issues. As I’ve already said, there are some bad ones during Marv’s run, but there are some really fun things as well like the Jester saga in the 130s. Marv started an incredibly long plot thread featuring the Purple Man that ran for probably over a dozen issues in a bi-Monthly book! That was unheard of at the time. Marv left, and Jim Shooter progressed the plot with some real interesting sidebars and excellent Gil Kane/Klaus Janson and Carmine Infantino/Janson (and I REALLY don’t care for Infantino, but what Janson DID with those pencils!) art. Shooter passed the book onto MacKenzie, who did a fine job, although the conclusion (#154) of the Purple Man story was rather disappointing. Then, of course, Miller joins as the artist with issue #158 and things got real exciting for the book.

My first Daredevil comics were the Shooter period (late 140′s/early 150′s) and even as a kid I found it very dark and violent (and cool). It was only later reading some Stan Lee reprints I knew DD as anything other than a tormented character. And between Purple Man and Death Stalker, there was a definite noir feel emphasizing gangs and crime bosses.

Having said that, I don’t think you should feel bad, John, because I think Miller definitely is a turning point in the book where the engine crystallized. Possibly I’m getting the engine confused with the comic’s “voice” or “feel”, but it certainly feels like after Miller came Daredevil became a very unique property with a renewed sense of direction. And we shouldn’t understate the importance of Kingpin as a driving force for the series ever since Miller brought him to the book.

One question about Elektra’s resurrection: did Stone (the last of Stick’s clan) ever appear again? I heard he showed up in the story that brought Elektra back, which to me which I think would miss the point of Miller’s original story.

My understanding was that Stone sacrificed himself to resurrect Elektra (we see his white ninja outfit left behind, implying he was dissolved). I thought Miller wrote it so that Daredevil failed to revive her, but somehow purified her so that Stone felt she was worth saving to take up the struggle (’cause he was “weary”).

Thanks for the write-up. DD’s a favorite and I love looking back at this stuff.

Hmm. Sadly, I’m gonna disagree with you, John, or at least modify your original thesis radically: the hook of Daredevil–his blindness–is part of what screws up the book for so long, because it’s too strong. Nearly every story in those first 167 issues of Daredevil hinge on Murdock’s blindness as the only thing that makes him different from any other superhero.

Miller takes what you dismiss as “pretty standard ‘avenging hero’ stuff”–the crime, the conflict between Matt’s profession and his secret identity, the weirdly complex relationship with his father–and moves *that* to the forefront, not the blindness. The blindness and the devil suit become metaphors for Murdock’s ability to blind himself to what he’s doing, from his willingness to embrace what he considers evil, and those conflicts become the dramas that power the book through Miller’s take on the characters, as well as through the terrific work by Bendis and Brubaker.

Daredevil is an odd character. Paradoxically, he is odd because he is not eccentric enough.

To me part of his appeal was always how ordinary he actually was, how out of his league he always seemed to be and how gallantly he just ignored that and fought on.

After all, he is just a normal human with enhanced senses and a serious physical disability – to say nothing of his emotional scars. No wonder he always seemed to end up fighting Spider-Man villains – for him to surpass those who gave Spidey a run for his money is high acomplishment indeed; it makes the character look competent and driven. Batman has no powers but is independently wealthy and has a loyal butler; Spider-Man struggles with bills but has nifty superpowers; DD has the worst of both and the best of neither. He even managed to avoid Avengers membership, a feat that even Wolverine failed to reproduce.

And yet he fights on, apparently unable to realize that he should feel sorry for himself or something.

There’s a certain subtle appeal in it.

You should examine the storytelling engine of the other famous Marvel hero that couldn’t get it together in the star and had to wait many years until someone got him a good one: Iron Man.

(And I say that as a BIG fan of the character!)

Best,
Hunter (Pedro Bouça)

I dunno, Pedro — I’d say that Archie Goodwin’s take on Iron Man had nearly all of the elements we normally associate with the Michelinie/Layton run.

“You should examine the storytelling engine of the other famous Marvel hero that couldn’t get it together in the star and had to wait many years until someone got him a good one: Iron Man.”

I was going to say the same thing. Like Daredevil, Iron Man floundered for many years and, also like Daredevil, was a bi-monthly for a few years.

“He even managed to avoid Avengers membership, a feat that even Wolverine failed to reproduce.”

This is arguably untrue; one of the annuals during the Busiek run showed a flashback to the Black Widow trying to keep the team together after the Onslaught/Heroes Reborn incident, and Daredevil agreed to join her. I don’t know if that qualifies him as a member under a strict reading of the team bylaws, and he never really *served* as an Avenger (the Widow’s team never really came together, and I think Bendis used him in a crowd of past and present members once, but that’s about it), but technically he hasn’t avoided it completely.

That’s sure the first I ever heard of DD being an Avenger.

Funny that you mention Iron Man. I don’t think he’s a similar character to DD at all, but word reached me that the two characters were considered for a joint book at one point. They _did_ have a odd tendency to crossover in the early 1970s…

Iron Man and DD were nearly merged in the mid-1970s due to absolutely horrible sales. These poor sales were not helped by a mess of a crossover between the two books penned by Gerry Conway. DD actually went bimonthly for awhile as a result.

“And his Rogue’s Gallery…it says a lot that in the first Daredevil Annual, when his arch-enemies gather to combine their forces against him, the assemblage winds up being Stilt-Man, Leapfrog, Gladiator, the Matador, and Electro. That’s right, he had to borrow one of Spider-Man’s B-list villains just to fill out the team.”

This seems like an odd statement to make, not just because Electro was the first costumed villain DD ever fought, but also because Frank Miller turned the Kingpin from a B-list Spider-Man villain into his main nemesis, and this causes no problems. If they’d used the Owl in the place of Electro, would you have had any problem with his rogue’s gallery?

This seems like an odd statement to make, not just because Electro was the first costumed villain DD ever fought, but also because Frank Miller turned the Kingpin from a B-list Spider-Man villain into his main nemesis, and this causes no problems.

I’d disagree on a couple of coutns here:

1) The Kingpin was an A-list Spider-Man villain, not a B-lister. Stan Lee used him very frequently, gave him his own mini-supporting cast with his wife and son. In fact, he appears more frequently than any other villain during John Romita, Sr.’s term as penciller, getting no fewer than four extended stoyrlines. And Lee protected him a lot; he didn’t let Spider-Man outright beat Kingpin in a fight for six issues’ worth of appearances, and basically made sure the Kingpin escaped the law every time out in an era when even gangster villains tended to be thrown in jail to satisfy the CCA. The only other villain who got that kind of treatment was the Green Goblin; even Doc Ock tended to take his lumps and go to jail

Later Spider-writers liked him as a mastermind as well: Len Wein had him running scams behind the scenes for virtually his entire run, for instance. Part of why Miller was able to make him Daredevil’s numero uno baddie was that DD lacked a decent Big Bad; but part of it was also that the Kingpin was well-established as a Big Bad, not just some dude who got beaten up by a random hero on a slow month.

2) Electro, on the other, hand, was a rather minor Silver Age villain…maybe not even B-list, really. He certainly didn’t turn up very often in the original 1960s stories. He had two Ditko-era scuffles with Spider-Man, two encounters with Daredevil, and was dredged up as a villain-of-the-month towards the end of the Lee/Romita, Sr. run just after the last of the four extended Kingpin arcs by that creative team. He’s another of the early Spidey baddies basically forgotten about by Stan Lee after Ditko left, and Ditko didn’t use him very often either. (Of the early Spider-villain, Electro was used about as infrequently as the Chameleon, another distinctly low-end cipher who was shuffled into various non-Spider-titles because no one could come up with a decent niche for him. Compare, say, the Sandman, who wound up co-opted as a frequently-recurring Fantastic Four villain, or Kraven, who Lee inexplicably seemed to love setting against Spider-Man despite his basic…well, crappiness.)

And then Electro just sort of stops showing up in any sort of important capacity at all. He pops up for a two-parter in Daredevil around two years after his last ASM appearance, turns up as a throwaway baddie to cement Omega the Unknown’s (wrongful) public identification as a superhero in 1976, then vanishes entirely for a couple of years before Bill Mantlo finally takes an interest in him and gradually reintroduces him to Spidey’s rogues gallery. It takes until around 1980 for Electro to become the constantly recurring minor badguy that most readers now imagine he always was.

Prior to Mantlo’s rehabilitation efforts, Electro was a floating villain-of-the-month that writers used to fill out issues with fights scenes, a comfortably generic zapper-type who could be pounded on while more important plot developments went on in the background. He actually turned up about as infrequently as such indisputably minor characters as the Beetle or

Balls, cut off by mistake.

…as the Beetle or, say, the Scorpion, another Ditko-era bad guy who got little more than thankless appearances for quite some time until his even later “rehabilitation” in the 1980s.

Wow. Omar Karindu’s post was exactly the rebuttal I would have written, only more eloquent and using tons of supporting evidence.

And for the record, replacing Electro with the Owl would have meant that it was an all-Daredevil rogue’s gallery…it would also, however, have meant that it was an even lamer rogue’s gallery than it already is. The only decent villain in the Fearsome Five (I think that’s what they called themselves) is the Gladiator, and even he didn’t have a whole lot of personality at the time. (But he had giant buzzsaws strapped to his wrists, which makes up for a lot.)

They called themselves the Emissaries of Evil, for the record. And Gladiator had some personality, at least — he was 9introduced in DD v.1 #18 as a loony costume shop owner who literally believed that the clothes made the man, sort of a LARPer gone very, very wrong.

The Gladiator is a surprisingly vicious character to come out of the Silver Age…his only shtick being that he has ROTATING SAWBLADES MOUNTED ON HIS ARMS.

(In a way it’s a shame that he got rehabilitated during Miller’s run, if not for the fact that rehabilitated Potter also is a very good character. Both Bendis and Brubaker has, of course, since shown that you can have your cake and still eat it in this case…)

That’s true, though it was rather funny how, in the Gladiator’s first few appearances, Denny O’Neil and Stan Lee tried to duck the comics code by having the villain and everyone else refer to the blades as “whirling wrist shields” that just sorta happened to be able to cut through stuff. The first writer I can recall really letting the Gladiator slash up people was Steve Gerber.

Really? I have never read his oldest appearances.

#140 is a funny issue, where you have Gladiator in full Chainsaw Massacre mode teaming up with the Beetle in his old costume, which is as silly as it gets. Kind of the whole history of superhero comics rolled into one.

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