Comics Rainbow - Daredevil Villains

This Friday will see the premiere of Marvel and Netflix’s second collaborative streaming show Jessica Jones, based on the comic series Alias.  The show is the next installment in the lead up the streaming crossover series Defenders after Daredevil earlier this year and will feature the second Daredevil villain brought to life in the form of David Tennant’s Purple Man.  It’s been no secret that the Marvel cinematic universe has been lacking for interesting bad guys since day one and a big part of that has been that all the cool bad guys are part of franchises Marvel doesn’t own the rights to like Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, or the X-Men.  However, it’s not at all surprising that Marvel is on the cusp of scoring two big villain wins this year with Kingpin and Purple Man, two Daredevil bad guys.  Daredevil has always had one of the more interesting rogues galleries among heroes, usually counted alongside Flash, Batman, and Spider-man as one of the best in the genre so it’s about time Marvel dove into that toy box of madness for inspiration.  So, that’s what we’re going to look at today, the full spectrum look at the many foes of Daredevil; shades, shames, successes and all.

Calling Stiltman the “most hated” Daredevil villain is a bit of misleading issue of semantics.  Stiltman is actually pretty appreciated when he’s used in the right context, which is comedy let’s not act surprised over that.  The character owes his origin to Daredevil’s bizarre ‘60s adventures when the character was much lighter and weirder.  Nowadays Daredevil is considered one of the landmark “dark and gritty” characters but everyone tends to forget he spent a big chunk of his career fighting guys like Stiltman and Leap Frog and tooling around with the caveman hero Kazar.  

Seriously, the classic Daredevil comics are some of the weirdest things Marvel ever put out in the silver age, a bizarre blend of high concept groovy weirdness and the melodrama antics that seeped into a ton of Lee’s writing from his time doing romance comics.  That strange miasma is exactly where Stiltman lives, with his doofy power suit that grants him super extendo-stilt legs.  In a world of gamma beasts and Norse Gods the ability to extend your legs to amazing lengths is honestly a pretty lame power so it makes sense Stilt Man eventually made the transition to comedic C-list villain rather than legitimate foe. 

This probably seems like an odd choice to anyone who knows the basics of Daredevil.  As far as most fans are concerned Daredevil has 2-3 great villains and your top pick MUST be one of them but, as this section exists to illustrate, I’m not most fans.  Firstly I absolutely love the visual design of Gladiator.  His spinning blade gauntlets are unfathomably cool and it’s blended with this unique look that’s part wrestler and part gladiator.  I also really love the dopey central idea that he’s a costume designer who spent so much time building suits for other supervillains he just eventually decided “eh, I can do this too” and thus the Gladiator was born.  

However, what I really love about Gladiator is the very understated but still decidedly unnerving symbolism of Daredevil’s foe being modeled on an entertainment warrior.  Daredevil’s dad was a boxer, fightin’ Jack Murdock, so the idea that Daredevil would have to go out and fight a bad guy who was modeled specifically on the same thing his father was always struck me as a great way of getting under Daredevil’s skin.  Basically all of Daredevil’s villains come from wildly different aspects of what makes a rogues gallery great and Gladiator is one of the more psychological foes that way, embodying an unsettling gimmick that we’ll see again on this list. 

Here’s a pick probably everyone will disagree with.  Like I said, most hardcore Daredevil fans have 2-3 foes they absolutely love and Bullseye is definitely on that short list.  Bullseye might be charitably described as yet another Marvel attempt to copy the success of DC’s Joker, the first iteration of this being the Green Goblin.  In Bullseye’s case he’s a psychotic assassin whose able to turn basically anything he grabs into a weapon and uses his free time to monologue to anyone who’ll listen about how much he loves violence and killing.  I know a lot of people like Bullseye due to how emblematic he is of Daredevil’s descent from off-beat superhero oddity to grim and gritty not-Batman of the Marvel universe (a point we’ll be coming back to later trust me,) but I’ve just never seen the appeal in his very uninspired brand of sociopathy.  A lot of interest in the character comes from the fact that he actually managed to kill Daredevil’s girlfriend Elektra at one point, which was admittedly a pretty dark moment but didn’t do that much for the whole “Green Goblin but more” thing.  Still though, credit where it’s due that this character can be interesting, like during Mark Waid’s recent run on Daredevil where Bullseye had been left paralyzed but was still able to strike at Daredevil through precision planning and targeting. 

Probably not the crime lord most folks were expecting to take the top spot in this rainbow huh?  Yeah, I am an absolutely huge fan of The Owl because he’s the perfect blend of pretty much every era of Daredevil’s history.  On the one hand he’s an incomparably weird character.  I’d be tempted to say that he was modeled on the Penguin as they’re both bird based crime bosses but at the time Owl was created Penguin was just another Batman super villain rather than a crime boss.  Additionally, the Owl actually has super powers, specifically the ability to glide and see in the dark, which, as far as super powers go, is shockingly lame.  On its own all that weirdness would probably just end up written off as another quirky Daredevil foe like so many others but in the case of The Owl it’s all wrapped around a shockingly brutal and ruthless core.  

Even back in the ‘60s he was a brutal character, one of the most devastating villains Daredevil ever fought at the time.  That’s what I think really works about the Owl, that his weirdness works as an exterior to a more dangerous and unhinged character underneath and specifically that he was always crazy and dangerous from the start.  He’s not like Bullseye where he’s just a crazy violent murderer or Kingpin who morphed into this insanely powerful crime lord.  It’s as if he was always a violent psychotic murderer and both the bird affects and mob ephemera where his way of hiding till the world caught up with him. 

I’ll probably end up talking more extensively about Purple Man when Jessica Jones comes out but a curious thing about him is that he’s actually a very underused and kind of unpopular character.  A big part of this is how limited his functionality and personality have been over the course of his comic appearances.  Initially, in the ‘60s, the character’s whole thing was that the sight of a purple man was so shocking it rendered people susceptible to his suggestions but he never used this power in any interesting way.  The thinking at the time seemed to be that the sight of a purple man would be enough to render the audience star struck as well, which is part of why he passed so quietly into obscurity the way he did.  

Even after the character returned with an adult makeover in Alias as a super powered rapist he never found much development beyond simply being a rapist, it was the end all be all of his character.  However, furrowed between those two extremes are a lot of great stories and great story potential, especially from writers who are willing to accept that the character needs more definition than just the surface level.  Most recently Mark Waid penned a pretty great story about his various bastard children who’ve all inherited his purple man mind control powers banding together as a creepy Children of the Damned type collective.

 

Here’s a character that nobody knows what to do with no matter how cool his conception was.  Like a lot of Marvel baddies with names that are references Mr. Hyde’s origin is that he was an amoral biochemist who was so obsessed with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that he decided to do it for real and developed a serum that made him even more violent and monstrous as well as hulking and super strong.  Though Mr. Hyde’s gone head-to-head with the likes of Thor and the Hulk he tends to get lumped in as a Daredevil foe, mainly because he fills up the large ranks of B and C list street villains that fight most of Marvel’s ground level defenders like Daredevil, Luke Cage, and Spider-Man.  

The idea of a literal Mr. Hyde stomping around New York causing havoc is a pretty great concept but Marvel has pretty much never known what to do with it, mainly because they tend to ignore the most interesting aspect of the idea.  Authors tend to focus on the idea of Mr. Hyde’s super strength and size as the source of his villainy but the much more interesting aspect of his origin is the fact he developed a straight up evil serum and never bothered to do anything with it.  He actually made a chemical that’s both a super steroid and a moral inhibitor but all he ever did with it was get roided up and beat on Daredevil?  Great idea but a huge waste of a character. 

Alright, you knew this was coming, one cannot talk about Daredevil villains and not touch on the oversized elephant in the room that is the Kingpin.  Even though Kingpin started life as a Spider-Man villain he will forever be associated with Daredevil, thanks mainly to Frank Miller’s groundbreaking work with the characters in the ‘80s as part of the major entry of dark and gritty storytelling into the Marvel universe.  It’s honestly pretty easy to see why so many people love Kingpin as much as they do based on those stories alone, he’s essentially the Bane of the Daredevil universe only with a more interesting and complex personality that Bane never got.  His entire claim to the fame is being the man who broke Daredevil by discovering his secret identity and then destroying Matt Murdock’s life as completely as possible.  

That’s a pretty good reason to view a bad guy as being on the top of your favorites list, especially given how legitimately well written those stories are and how well they hold up.  At the same time Kingpin is a lot like an evil version of Batman (there’s a lot of Batman in the Daredevil mythos overall if you haven’t figure that out,) in that he’s a non-powered guy in a world of Gods and monsters but is still a threat to the heroes because of his fabulous intelligence and wealth.  In a world where people are already lining up in droves to see Batman put the beating on Superman Kingpin getting one over on the superheroes of the Marvel universe with nothing but his wits and enough money to buy out Tony Stark is a big favorite element for a lot of fans.

Nuke is another character from the Frank Miller era and is probably the best original villain of Miller’s entire career.  He’s essentially evil Captain America, in that he’s a jingoistic American super soldier so obsessed with patriotism that he paints a flag on his face.  Though it was eventually revealed that Nuke had been created by the Weapons Plus program that birthed Wolverine, at the time of his introduction in Daredevil #232 he was just this creepy psychotic ugly American that the Kingpin hired to take down Daredevil.  That Captain America comparison doesn’t come lightly either given that aside from Nuke’s raving jingoism the visual of him scarfing down red, white, and blue power pills has become on of the most iconic elements of the character and bares a clear parallel to Captain America’s super steroid power source.  

Nuke bares special mention here because of how well he fits into Daredevil’s overall place in the Marvel universe as the guy who has to deal with the weird, creepy, dark stuff that gets pushed to the margins of other people’s continuity.  Nuke’s origin is connected to both Captain America and Wolverine and Cap does eventually show up to try and get Nuke under control but it makes sense that he would have to come to Daredevil’s world, he’s just too psychotic and creepy to fit into any other strata of the Marvel universe. 

Ikari is one of the coolest Daredevil villains of all time if not necessarily the most developed.  He first appeared as part of Bullseye’s revenge against Daredevil after getting paralyzed with one hell of a gimmick: he has all of Daredevil’s powers but he can see.  It was revealed that Bullseye somehow found out Daredevil’s origin and got his hands on a ton of the same chemicals that gave Matt Murdock his enhanced senses and used them in a string of experiments to create his own super enhanced fighter.  Ikari is probably the deadliest fighter Daredevil ever fought, one of the few foes who could match him blow for blow and power for power with the added wrinkle of being able to see where Daredevil couldn’t.  

Daredevil eventually managed to defeat Ikari and took down Bullseye but it wasn’t too long before Ikari resurfaced working for the Kingpin, the final resting place of nearly all Daredevil bad guys.  The only reason Ikari didn’t place higher on this list is that we really don’t know anything about him aside from that wonderfully iconic design and super cool power set.  We never found out who it was under the samurai/daredevil/boxing costume or why Bullseye selected that person, which leaves Ikari himself a little directionless when not actively working for another villain. 

All throughout this rainbow I’ve talked about how similar Daredevil’s mythos is to that of Batman, so it’s only right we end on a character that’s almost a direct rip-off of a Batman villain.  The hilariously named Mr. Fear is a skull clad Daredevil foe who developed a special gas that makes people hallucinate their worst fear and is ripped off completely from the Batman villain Scarecrow.  For the sake of context Scarecrow was invented in a Superman/Batman crossover in 1941 and Mr. Fear was invented in 1965, so he wasn’t even a close call in creation like Red Tornado and Vision or Swampthing and Manthing, this is a pretty cut and dry case of the rip-off.  

It’s also kind of hilarious how much Marvel had nothing to do with the character, initially having him for a group called the Fellowship of Fear alongside Ox, a human body builder and local moron, and the Eel, the least threatening electric powered villain ever.  Marvel has tried to find an interesting wrinkle for Mr. Fear over the years but in a world where Scarecrow already has a 20 year head start on your character there’s really no room for two chemical fear inducing bad guys in the superhero pantheon. 

Next week: we’ll get that Jimmy Olsen rainbow I promised last week before the Supergirl schedule got shifted around. 


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