Discuss: Marvel's Second Decade of Villains

Martinex1: Not only did Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and the rest of the Marvel Bullpen develop an amazing pantheon of heroes in the 1960s, but the list of villains created in those first ten years reads like a Who's Who in the Comic Book Hall of Fame.  The roll call includes but is definitely not limited to: Dr. Doom, Magneto, Loki, Green Goblin, Dr. Octopus, Kang, the Leader, Abomination, Kingpin, Immortus, Electro, Galactus, the Skrulls, and Ultron.  Less impactful (but still fairly recognizable) villains of the time include: Klaw, Mole Man, Count Nefaria, Living Laser, Kraven, Vulture, Attuma, Fixer, Scorpio, Mentallo, Gladiator, Prowler, Mr. Hyde, Cobra, Shocker, Purple Man, Sandman, Super-Adaptoid, and the Frost Giants. Teams of baddies consist of the Frightful Four, Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, the Zodiac, the Sinister Six, and the Masters of Evil.  Phew!  I'm sure you can think of dozens more as Marvel rode a creative wave that could hardly be matched.

What about the second decade of Marvel's output?   Looking at 1972 through 1981, the second wave of the Marvel creative force tended to take a fan's approach and used those same antagonists again and again.   And I have to say that era, as we recently discussed, really captured the Bronze Age Babies' fascination.   But there was much less output targeting a new villain class.   That is not to say there were not some fantastic new ideas, anti-heroes, and megalomaniacs.   Take a look below and let's discuss the second decade of Marvel's bad guys and gals.  

 

  

 

Carnival of Madness - Daredevil 161

Daredevil #161 (November 1979)
"To Dare the Devil!"
Roger McKenzie-Frank Miller/Klaus Janson

Doug: It's been a fun series so far, hasn't it? Today we'll wrap up our month spent with Frank Miller and the team as they changed comicdom's perspective on Daredevil, perhaps forever. Maybe at the end we can have discourse on the impact of Miller's tenure on the character -- specifically, did said tenure really do anything for Daredevil? Or was any critical acclaim short-lived in the larger 50-year history of the character? Maybe Miller's art and stories are the book's golden age -- but why is that window of greatness so narrow? Would the general public, in spite of the Hollywood film, recognize the name or visage of Daredevil?

Doug: When we ended our visit to Daredevil #160, we'd just seen one of the great comic bar fights of all time, rivaling anything Conan was ever involved in. DD had gone looking for information about Bullseye's whereabouts. The assassin had kidnapped the Black Widow and was using her as bait. Ol' Hornhead wanted nothing more than to take that bait. As we begin, we're at Coney Island and watch from above as one of the informants DD had so wanted to squeeze comes sprinting into the area Eric Slaughter is using as his base. You'll recall that in issue #159 an unmasked Bullseye had hired Slaughter and his men to either capture or kill Daredevil; Bullseye used that ruse as a means to videotape Daredevils movements for study. "Turk", he of the lisp and fast feet, runs right up to Slaughter and tells him how Daredevil wants him. Trouble is, DD tailed Turk and is right above the gangsters as Turk begins to relate his tale. Remember -- this is a very impatient vigilante. As we've now grown accustomed to, Miller is just dynamite in these fight scenes. Although static images, the reader can feel the pop in each blow and hear the jangles of chains and the crushing of jawbones. And for my money, you can't beat Miller's efforts in providing motion through the use of multiple images, sequentially presented and overlapping. Great feature of the art.

Doug: Daredevil emerges from the scrum to face Slaughter, and he basically tells him to give up Bullseye or else. But just then DD hears the Astrotower kick into gear -- in a deserted theme park? Scaling the tower, he knows that Bullseye can see him -- but what's he to do? Of course there are gunmen on a perch, but DD evades their fire in another great series of panels. Miller seemed to have his finger on the pulse of the radar sense and when would be a good time to depict it; he also gives us another "motion" panel that nails it. Bullseye gloats over a loudspeaker that he indeed has Daredevil's "woman", and it's a shame that she has to die; after all, she's quite beautiful. And then the rollercoaster cars begin moving. DD knows he has a very limited amount of time to a) locate Natasha, b) avoid additional gunfire and/or Bullseye himself, and c) free her from however she's bound on the tracks. Swooping low over the 'coaster tracks, he begins his search. And of course, the gunfire commences. DD's able to take out several gunmen, actually swinging right at them -- pretty unnerving I'd guess, trying to get off an accurate shot while knowing you're going to get buried in about 10 seconds...

Doug: As Daredevil scrambles back toward the tracks, he suddenly wheels and veers in a different direction. The flunkies can't believe it, and as the train hits the Widow's body there is a large impact, knocking "her" off the tracks! But hey -- no heartbeat = no Natasha, right? Bullseye, ever watching, cannot believe it. Of course he has the real Widow, a goon on each arm and a very large gun to the back of her head. While he taunts her, Bullseye has her moved and strapped to a large board; the assassin throws a knife at her, pinning it just below her shoulder. Sceneshift to a musty and dirty old gym, where an old man is talking to Daily Bugle reporter Ben Urich. Urich's come for some information on "Battlin'" Jack Murdock. The old man relates a story of the old pugilist, and of course Murdock's son comes up in the conversation. He's a lawyer now, you know. Urich says he knows. "K.O." tells how hard Murdock pushed his son to study, and how the neighborhood kids always made fun of him for it. Called him a name... "Daredevil?" says Urich. "How'd you know?" "Just a hunch." The plot thickens...

Doug: Back at Coney Island, DD has caught up with Turk again and drags him to a very high point in the park -- in the fork of a devil, no less. Turk decides that giving up Bullseye's location gives him a chance to get away; not giving it up, and the pavement's going to be coming up real fast. Inside the arcade, Bullseye has a marksman throwing knives at the Widow. Bullseye orders him to stop missing and kill her before DD arrives. But the Widow begins to wriggle, and her catlike reflexes allow her to avoid several knives... until she gets the right one. She maneuvers her wrists into just the right position, where a blade cuts her bounds. Now it's butt-kicking time, Soviet spy-style! I was really glad they did this and didn't keep Natasha as some helpless female, which would greatly have disrespected the character. Tasha easily takes out the biggest of the thugs assembled, and shows no fear as she turns to face Bullseye -- he armed with a knife. But as he is about to throw it, the cord from Daredevil's billy club encircles his wrist. DD whips him backwards, totally killing his enemy's balance. And then Daredevil proceeds to kick his butt -- hard.

Doug: But it couldn't, and shouldn't, end that easily. DD tosses Bullseye across the arcade, but the villain lands in the baseball toss game. Coming up firing, DD takes several baseballs off his face and chest. Trying to recover, he fires his billy club toward Bullseye, who snatches it out of the air. Bullseye fires it back, catching DD square on the jaw. While Daredevil struggles to catch is wits, Bullseye uses the club to crack our hero on the back of the head. However, through sheer will, DD takes advantage of the close quarters and punches Bullseye in the face, following that up with a hand to the face. Bullseye's head is driven back into a wall. Daredevil then delivers a roundhouse, which sends his foe reeling -- right toward a gun. But Bullseye's nerves are shot, and his hand shakes as he grips the weapon. At close range, DD knows he's done for, so he takes the only chance he has left: he goads Bullseye. And the assassin cannot pull the trigger. Calling out to Eric Slaughter and his men, Bullseye orders them to shoot Daredevil. Slaughter calls back that DD has earned his respect, and if Bullseye wants him dead he should shoot him himself. Bullseye collapses to the ground. The Widow steps over by Daredevil and remarks that Bullseye seems to have lost his mind. DD says that it's over now. He binds Bullseye's arms behind his back, lifts him to his shoulder, and DD and the Widow walk off hand-in-hand.

Doug: Sentimentally, I'd have liked to have seen Daredevil and the Widow get back together. But as I said when we began this tour back near the end of June, this was the last issue that I read for a very long time. And even saying that, I've never read Miller's complete run. Really, I've only picked at it here and there, even though I have access to almost all of it. So the Elektra stories? I wouldn't see those until around four years after they were released. In fact, when I was first going about filling in the massive holes in my collection, it was Miller's collaboration with Bill Sienkiewicz on Elektra: Assassin that was on the newsstands. I thought it was weird (I never warmed to Sienkiewicz's style). Bullseye is a great villain, and I think Miller was onto something (by now co-plotting with Roger McKenzie, I'd guess) in reaching into the head of the villain and going after the pathological elements of his psyche. While the "anything in my hands is a weapon" schtick is cool, depth was needed. I think in this 3-parter we started to get a little of that. All in all, these four issues would equate to around 80 minutes very well spent!

Doug's Favorites - Daredevil 160

Daredevil #160 (September 1979)
"In the Hands of Bullseye"
Roger McKenzie-Frank Miller/Klaus Janson

Doug: This is the second-to-last issue of Daredevil that I purchased before my five year hiatus from new comics buying. I was fortunate enough to also purchase next week's conclusion to this Bullseye 3-parter off the spinner rack, but then I quit cold turkey. I don't know that I overall stopped with the November 1979 cover dates (next week's issue), but it was close. I've always loved the cover to this book, despite it's depiction of violence against women. White covers always tend to grab the eye, and I'm a well known sucker for floating heads. But the expression on Bullseye's face -- his "Ta-da!" exuberance, and the hopeless state of the unconscious Black Widow make it one of the best covers in Frank Miller's run on this book.

Doug: If you'll recall, back in DD #158 the law offices of Nelson & Murdock had been trashed by the so-called Unholy Three (I always find that a dumb moniker. They're the freakin' Ani-Men!) when they came to kidnap Matt Murdock for delivery to the Death-Stalker. Heather Glenn, Matt's girlfriend, had asked the Black Widow to go search for the blind attorney -- even though she knew that Matt could take care of himself. So today's story actually begins with an epilogue. Natasha Romanoff arrives back to her penthouse apartment after a night on patrol. She thinks to herself that every time she gets close to someone, death ensues. She's brooding, and perhaps that's why her guard is down. As she begins to ready for bed, a voice comes from the other side of the room -- the voice of Bullseye! He has not come for pleasantries. Had Natasha not been trained to be hard, fought alongside the Avengers, the Champions, SHIELD, and Daredevil, she surely would have died instantly. As everything is a weapon in the hands of Bullseye, it's spellbinding that he attacks the Widow with a hairbrush, a picture frame, a flower vase, a blowdryer, one of his own explosive throwing projectiles, and a chandelier. While the battle lasts 15 panels, we get the impression that it does not last 15 seconds. Pulling a clipping from the newspaper he'd read at the end of the previous issue, Bullseye pierces the photo of the Widow with a stiletto and hurls it into the wall. She is his captive; his hostage.

  

 

Doug: Sceneshift to a cemetery, where the DD cast is gathered at the grave of Maxwell Glenn, Heather's father. Matt has brought her here to come to grips with his death -- the others provide moral support from a distance. It's pouring rain. Heather is perturbed that Matt made her come, and especially on a day as it is. She chafes at him, saying that when she needed him the most he was away playing Daredevil. She asks for a promise that it won't happen again... and gets no answer. Matt begins a "with great power..." speech, and gets a slap to the face for it. Heather storms off and Matt is left alone. Foggy encourages the girls to let him be. We next find Matt in his brownstone, brooding. He's poured himself a drink, and thinks about why he became DD in the first place. He figures there's one person who will "get" what he's going through -- Natasha. So it's into the red suit with the hornheaded mask, and away he goes to seek his former lover.

Doug: Matt billy clubs it across town and arrives to Natasha's to an open window. There's no sign of her, and his radar sense tells him that there's been a scuffle. His keen sense of smell tells him that there's been blood in the room. And then the breeze raises the paper pinned to the wall. Using his heightened sense of touch, he recognizes the scrap as the picture of the Widow that had run in the paper a few days past. DD hightails it to the Daily Bugle offices, where he pumps Ben Urich for information on Bullseye. Urich tells him that they have nothing that hasn't already seen print. DD wants to know how Bullseye made it back onto the streets. Urich relates how he broke out of Bellevue Psychiatric by strangling his therapist, knocking out a security guard, taking a nurse hostage, and finally commandeering a police car, which he later abandoned. Before Urich has finished this recounting, ol' Hornhead is nowhere to be seen. Urich shuffles over to his file cabinet and pulls a folder out. There's a picture of Daredevil clipped to the outside, but the filing had been in the "M" section... for "Murdock".

Doug: You know, if you were or are a reader of Conan, whether under the pencils of Barry Smith or Big John Buscema, then you've seen your share of bar fights. I'd say there's nothing either of those two masters ever put to bristol board that would surpass what Frank Miller and Klaus Janson give us over the next five pages. In fact, it's so strong an action scene that I just decided to include the entire thing rather than attempt to pick-and-choose which panels were the best. The premise of the scene is that DD has come looking for Bullseye's location -- he wants information and he wants it now! It's kind of funny -- DD had a chance to get what he wanted, but I guess there was a sense that all hell was about to break loose so he figured he'd rather be the orchestrator rather than a reactionary. His strategy seems to work just fine.

Doug: This second act in the Bullseye trilogy is mostly set-up, isn't it? So why the heck would I have scrapped my original title (which wasn't very satisfying; it was a work in progress) and changed it to one of my "favorites"? Seriously -- why do most of us read comics? That's right -- same reason people go to hockey games. For the fights! Obviously, there was more to this issue than that, and I recall at the time finding the "Urich knows Matt is DD" subplot intriguing. It's nothing we hadn't seen before from J. Jonah Jameson over in the Spidey books, but this was fairly new territory in DD (hey, that Mike Murdock thing really threw everyone off back in the day!). I personally never warmed to Heather Glenn, so that she and Matt may have been heading toward "over" was OK with me -- I thought it would have been much cooler if he'd gone back with the Black Widow. And I guess that's one of the elements of the story that really gripped me then, and now on the re-read: Bullseye tries to hit Daredevil where it hurts, by kidnapping his partner (and presumed love interest?). He accomplishes this relatively easily when he shouldn't have. And then we see DD go after her like a man possessed. There was some serious passion involved in every scene and from every character -- from Bullseye to Heather Glenn to Ben Urich to Daredevil. Although we only had half a dozen scene shifts, the pace was frenetic. I loved this book 35 years ago, and it's still one to check in on every now and then! Enjoy the more-than-usual full-page art samples today!

Every Breath You Take - Daredevil 159

Daredevil #159 (July 1979)
"Marked for Murder!"
Roger McKenzie-Frank Miller/Klaus Janson

Doug: Last week we entered the realm of Frank Miller's Daredevil, and I don't think anyone was overtly disappointed. While some may not care for Miller's present style of drawing or the level of violence in his works (such as the Sin City stories), it would be difficult to argue his impact on the DD book as one of the highlights of the twilight years of the Bronze Age. Certainly he would be a major architect in the segue to the Dark Age. But here, very early on (when Daredevil was still a bi-monthly), it's pretty straightforward superhero fare. And this particular issue, and the subsequent two installments, would establish Bullseye as one of the baddest dudes in the Marvel pantheon of villains. Onward...

Doug: We open in some sort of film room, as the narrator tells an assemblage to look carefully at the film. It's a recording of Daredevil's circus battle with Bullseye (DD #132) in which the Man Without Fear thoroughly kicked the tail of the assassin. At this meeting the narrator is offering some serious cash ($200K -- how times change. That's about three years pay for some middle class folks in the States these days) for the capture of Daredevil and his deliverance, whereafter he will be marked for murder! If, however, DD's body is returned dead, an additional $300K will pay out. The proposal is addressed to a Mr. Eric Slaughter and his goons. We don't know it at the time, but the man with the Benjamins and making this offer is Bullseye. Oh boy... Around three years ago, frequent commenter Fred W. Hill said this in my review of Daredevil #131: "Funny that it took about 10 years for anyone to come up with Daredevil's own great villain, although it would take Miller's handling to really make Bullseye a significant foe." That begins here!

Doug: Cut to the steps of a courthouse, where Matt Murdock is being questioned about his kidnapping the previous night. The Ani-Men had taken him to the Death-Stalker, where all three men ended up dead by the end of the night. Murdock wasn't at the scene when it was over, having been replaced by his alter ego; but the press nonetheless has questions. Off to the side is Daily Bugle reporter Ben Urich, listening intently. He thinks to himself that all is not what it seems about Matt Murdock. Once inside the court room, Murdock approaches the bench and asks for a continuance in the case he's working. He gets it, so he and Foggy head back out and cab over to their offices. But in the court room, on the street, and back at the offices there lurk some shadowy figures, each one whispering to a comrade. It's apparent that Murdock's every move is being tracked, and there is a plan afoot.

Doug: Matt is able to hear the whispers around him; Foggy asks him why he's so jittery. Just then two muscle-types emerge and mug our lawyer friends. With a knife held under his nose, Murdock is told that it's known that Daredevil sometimes does investigative work for Nelson & Murdock. So it would behoove Murdock to tell his hornheaded friend that Mr. Slaughter would like to see him, alone, at Pier 42 at midnight. No Daredevil, and it won't turn out well for Matt and Foggy. Then the hoods run off. As Foggy collects himself, he calls to Matt... but Matt is gone.

Doug: DD arrives at the waterfront silently and scopes it out. As he settles in, his keen senses detect gunmen throughout the area -- the sounds of their guns being readied, the scent of cigarette smoke, and of gunpowder give everyone away. Daredevil works behind some of the men -- everyone is skittish, as it's past 12:00. Surely Daredevil would not have put Murdock's life in danger -- why hasn't he shown? DD dives into the water and swims to a ship tied nearby. The men aboard tell us that it's a really dense fog that's settled this evening. Perfect for a sightless swashbuckler.  DD climbs high enough to launch his billy club to the deck, creating a loud clanging diversion and taking out a goon.

Doug: You know, in last issue's review I led you in a discussion of Miller's art, especially as compared to Gene Colan's. I made no mention of the scripting of Roger McKenzie, and that was an oversight on my part. He really has the pulse of this character and the mood of this corner of the Marvel Universe. We might expect Daredevil to be handled as we are seeing last issue and this as Miller is aboard. I cannot tell you anything in regard to who was doing the plotting, but the tone of these stories, as well as the dialogue, is top shelf. So kudos to McKenzie, who had been on the title since #151. Miller's choreography is again well-played, and of course Klaus Janson is along to take us into Miller's noir world.

Doug: What follows Daredevil's ascension to the ship deck is seven pages of all-out butt-kicking. One of the elements of watching DD in combat is his use of the billy club. It's not unlike the manner in which Captain America uses his shield -- for offense and defense. Miller really varies the camera angles throughout the scene, which even goes underwater for a spell. And it's worth noting that the wise-cracking Spider-Man knock-off that could be Daredevil is nowhere to be found in either of these first two issues we've looked at. Instead, we are finding a hero who is just a bit perturbed at the way he's being treated -- kidnapped, mugged, and with a contract on his head. There's no time for banter when you're 24/7 PO'd. Miller gives the readers a phenomenal climactic panel for this scene when DD uses his billy club to whack a bullet right out of the air. Pretty dang awesome.

Doug: As the last tough is corralled for questioning, another thug hops into a motorboat and begins to speed away. As DD shakes his would-be informant, and is about to get the name of the contractor, a life preserver strikes the man square in the back of the neck, shattering his spine. No more talk. Daredevil turns his head toward the craft, and "sees" that the driver is pointing something at him -- but not a gun. He is confused, a countenance not lost on the man getting away. Sometime later, we see the arms and legs of the man who had apparently led off our story. It's a familiar look, and as the camera continues to pull back in each panel, there's no mistaking who had ordered the contract. Bullseye. And what was he pointing at Daredevil? Why, a movie camera. You see, he had been in hiding during the entire fracas on the pier, up to the very end when he had to kill the informant who was about to spill his identity. And what use will the film be? For studying Daredevil's every move and tendency. It's a bloody revenge that Bullseye seeks. And oh yeah... he knows that the Black Widow is back in New York. See you next Monday.