DAREDEVIL #220-221 (July-August 1985)
“Fog” / “Behold My Vengeance”
Writer: Denny O’Neil
Artist: David Mazzuchelli
Colourist: Christie Scheele
Letterer: Joe Rosas
Editor: Ralph Macchio

We’ve skipped another a couple of issues. Issue #218 is a Jester story. Issue #219 is a small-town crime story by Frank Miller and John Buscema where Matt only appears as a silent, unnamed stranger. As a straight crime story with one-off villains, it doesn’t get an entry in this feature, but it’s an intriguing oddity that has more in common with Sin City than it does with Miller’s previous Daredevil stories.

That brings us to issues #220-221, which will be our final entry for the Denny O’Neil run. He stays on the book for a few issues more, but issue #222 involves some people fighting over a sample of Mr Fear’s fear gas, and issue #223 is a Secret Wars II tie-in, with the Beyonder as the antagonist. Issue #224 is another fill-in (which we’ll be covering), issue #225 is the Vulture, and issue #226 is the Gladiator.

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DAREDEVIL #217 (April 1985)
“The Sight Stealer”
Writer: Denny O’Neil
Artist: David Mazzuchelli
Colourist: George Roussos
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Editor: Ralph Macchio

We’ve jumped forward a year since the last entry, so let’s get up to speed.

Issues #206 and #210-214 are the remainder of the Micah Synn storyline. Issue #207 is HYDRA. Issues #208-209 are a fill-in story by guest writers Harlan Ellison and Arthur Byron Cover, and they involve robot assassins sent by the Death-Stalker’s mother. I’m not giving her an entry, because she’s barely in the story. Issue #215 sees Daredevil team up (kind of) with the Two-Gun Kid, Marvel’s western hero who was also a lawyer; Two-Gun’s segments are told in flashback, with Daredevil tying up the loose ends in the present day. The villains are just your standard issue corrupt businessmen, though. And issue #216 was the second Gael story.

William Johnson left as penciller after issue #207. His replacement is David Mazzuchelli, who’ll be with us through to issue #233. This is Mazzuchelli’s first major assignment for Marvel after a few fill-ins, and it’s the only lengthy run he’ll do on a superhero title in his career. Oh, and the book has changed editors once again: as of issue #212, it falls under Ralph Macchio’s office.

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DAREDEVIL #205 (April 1984)
“The Gael”
Writer: Denny O’Neil
Penciller: William Johnson
Inker: Danny Bulanadi
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Colourist: George Roussos
Editor: Bob Budiansky

Gather round, children! An American is going to tell us about the IRA! This always goes well!

Daredevil #205 brings in Matt’s new love interest, Glorianna O’Breen. She’ll stick around as a regular until issue #233. But we first meet her as Debbie Nelson’s photographer niece from Ireland, on the run from “terrible danger” back home. Her father Fergus is a member of the IRA – “the anti-government rebels”, as she describes them – but he’s been falsely accused of betraying the organisation, and so he’s sent her to America to keep her safe from retribution.

Soon afterwards, Daredevil stops two IRA men from trying to bundle Glorianna into a van. But of course, the IRA couldn’t possibly be doing anything bad – it turns out that they’re actually trying to keep her safe from the Gael, an IRA hit man who “went bad”. We’ve already seen the Gael in the opening scene: he’s a man in a trenchcoat who kills one of his informants for the hell of it, has a shamrock motif on his gloves, and leaves a paper shamrock on his victim’s forehead as a calling card. You’d think it would blow away. Maybe he makes them with Post-it notes.

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DAREDEVIL #204 (March 1984)
“Vengeance of the Victim!”
Writer: Denny O’Neil
Penciller: Luke McDonnell
Inker: Danny Bulanadi
Colourist: Bob Sharen
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Editor: Bob Budiansky

Denny O’Neil doesn’t like the English, part two.

William Johnson was still notionally the regular artist at this point, but by all accounts he struggled badly with deadlines. Issue #203 was an inventory story. This issue returns to the regular storyline, but with a fill-in artist. Luke McDonnell was the regular artist on Iron Man at this point, but over the course of the 1984 cover dates he somehow found time to pencil not only  this issue, but also the back-up strip in issue #202 and the whole of Further Adventures of Indiana Jones #20. He did skip one issue of Iron Man, to be fair, but then again he also drew that year’s annual. He was seriously fast.

Daredevil #204 doesn’t even look like a rush job; the opening splash page on the streets of New York is full of properly designed individual bystanders and journalists. Regular inker Danny Bulanadi must have helped, but it’s still remarkable.

This is the second part of the Micah Synn storyline that began in issue #202. Crossbow is a hitman, who’s been hired by Lord Barrington Synn to kill Micah. Barrington is a stereotypical simpering aristocrat, who wants Micah dead “before anyone learns that he and I are of the same ancestry”. Apparently, Micah is a brutal, savage heathen and “a blot on the Synn honour”. Later on, there will be mention of Matt and Foggy pursuing some sort of claim that Micah might have on the Synn estate, but at this point Barrington seems simply to regard Micah as a family embarrassment. Of course, Micah really is awful, but Barrington doesn’t know about any of that. His objection appears to be simply that the man has gone a bit African.

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DAREDEVIL #203 (February 1984)
“Trumps!”
Writer: Steven Grant
Penciler: Geof Isherwood
Inker: Danny Bulanadi
Letterer: Jim Noavk
Colourist: George Roussos
Editor: Dennis O’Neil

Daredevil went into 1984 with regular penciller William Johnson struggling to keep up a monthly schedule. Having started his run on issue #197, he managed to do six consecutive issues. But this is where we hit our first fill-in, evidently commissioned back when Denny O’Neil was still the editor. Johnson only manages two further issues – #205 and #207 – before leaving the book.

Steven Grant had been writing for Marvel on and off since 1979, but hadn’t yet had a regular run on a series, unless you count seven issues of Marvel Team-Up. We’re still a couple of years away from him writing the first Punisher miniseries. Penciller Geof Isherwood was relatively new to Marvel: prior to this, he’d done an anthology story for Bizarre Adventures #33, and a fill-in issue of Power Man & Iron Fist (also written by Grant). In the same month as this, another Grant/Isherwood fill-in story appeared in G.I. Joe. You get the idea.

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DAREDEVIL #202 (January 1984)
“Savages”
Writer: Denny O’Neil
Penciller: William Johnson
Inker: Danny Bulanadi
Colourist: Glynis Wein
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Editor: Mike Higgins

We’ve skipped issue #200, which is a Bullseye story, and issue #201, where the villains are one-off ordinary criminals. That brings us to issue #202, which was part of Assistant Editors’ Month – a stunt event where the assistant editors were supposedly running Marvel’s line for a month while all the regular editors were away at a convention. In practice this meant a lot of wacky gimmicks. Daredevil‘s contribution was a comedy back-up strip which doesn’t concern us – its only effect on the main story was to make it a few pages shorter.

Even so, Micah Synn is by far the most bizarre concept that we’re encountered since Steve Gerber’s Black Spectre arc back in the 1970s. He’s a major fixture of Denny O’Neil’s run – he appears nine times between issues #202 and #214 (and most of the issues where he doesn’t appear are fill-ins). And after that storyline, he vanishes entirely. He’s never been seen again.

Micah Synn is the chief of the Kinjorge tribe, “from Mount Suruba in eastern Africa”. Ah, eastern Africa. That really narrows it down. In 1775, a party of British explorers went to Africa hoping to start a trading post, but got stranded there and “reverted to savagery”. They’re the King George Tribe, if you hadn’t figured it out. They’ve been living in isolation ever since, apparently hiding from hostile neighbouring tribesmen, until being “discovered by a party of Belgian geologists” six months ago. The Kinjorge are entirely white, so it would appear that the eighteenth century traders had enough numbers (and enough women) to make a viable breeding population. Seems unlikely, but that’s the story.

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DAREDEVIL #196-199 (July to October 1983)
“Enemies” / “Journey” / “Touch of a Stranger” / “Daughter of a Dark Wind”
Writer: Denny O’Neil
Pencillers: Klaus Janson (#196-197), Larry Hama (breakdowns on #196 and “art assist” on #197) & William Johnson (#197-199)
Inkers: Klaus Janson (#196-197), Mike Mignola (#197) & Danny Bulanadi (#198-199)
Colourists: Christie Scheele (#196-197), Glynis Wein (#198) & Bob Sharen (#199)
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Editor: Linda Grant

We’ve been through a string of fill-ins, but with issue #200 around the corner, it’s time for an actual storyline, and for Denny O’Neil’s run to get into full swing.

The change of creative team is completed here, with Klaus Janson leaving the book after the opening scene of issue #196. His replacement is William Johnson, who’ll be with us for less than a year. Compared to the artists who came before and after him, Johnson isn’t particularly well known. His only previous work for Marvel had been the final four issues of Master of Kung Fu, and he moved over to Daredevil when that book was cancelled.

His opening splash page in issue #197 is frankly not great, but once he settles in, his art is perfectly good – if rather conservative compared to what’s come before. Reportedly, he was taken off the book because he couldn’t handle a monthly schedule. This seems highly plausible, since he drew only eight out of eleven issues during his run, and as far as I can tell, he never worked as a regular penciller on an ongoing title again. He did some scattered fill-in work on Marvel’s licensed books over the next few years before apparently dropping out of the industry.

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DAREDEVIL #195 (June 1983)
“Betrayal”
Writer: Denny O’Neil
Artist: Klaus Janson
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Colourist: Glynis Wein
Editor: Linda Grant

Technically, Denny O’Neil’s run as writer began with issue #194, which we covered last time. But that story reads as if it was intended to be a fill-in. This story is really where we begin his  run, which will take us through to issue #226 in 1985 – albeit with more than a scattering of fill-ins along the way.

At first, O’Neil sticks with the crime milieu that had become the book’s established format. He’ll start deviating from that fairly quickly, and the villains will get rather more eccentric. But we’ve just had some format-breaking fill-in issues, so it’s probably a good idea to go back to basics.

“Tarkington Brown” is a strange name for a villain. It sounds like a firm of estate agents from Cornwall, or a whimsical otter voiced by Stephen Fry. In fact, Tarkington Brown is the mastermind behind an NYPD vigilante death squad, who hunt down and kill mobsters that escaped conviction. The story opens with Daredevil stopping the death squad from killing Bruno Ponchatrane, who is not just a mobster, but a child murderer to boot. Ponchatrane got off on a technicality, thanks to the efforts of Foggy Nelson. Foggy wasn’t desperately keen on representing him either but couldn’t see a reason to turn down the instructions.

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DAREDEVIL #194 (May 1983)
“Judgment”
Writer: Denny O’Neil
Artist: Klaus Janson
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Colourist: Glynis Wein
Editor: Linda Grant

Following Frank Miller on Daredevil is not an enviable task. After two quite decent fill-in stories, the man who takes on the assignment is the book’s editor Denny O’Neil – not so much because he wanted the job as because somebody had to do it, it would seem. He’ll be with us until issue #226, give or take a few fill-ins scattered along the way.

This issue doesn’t read like the start of a planned run, though. The next issue starts some actual storylines, with issue #200 looming on the horizon, but issue #194 this feels like it was intended as the book’s third consecutive fill-in. The editor credit tends to confirm that the book was playing for time at this point. Officially, Marvel didn’t have writer-editors in 1983, but they may have been paying lip service to that policy here. Linda Grant, credited as “guest editor” on this issue and “special editor” on the next, was not a full-fledged editor, but O’Neil’s own assistant. She remains the credited editor up to issue #200, after which the book is finally reassigned to a different office.

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DAREDEVIL #193 (April 1983)
“Bitsy’s Revenge”
Writer: Larry Hama
Artist: Klaus Janson
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Editor: Denny O’Neil

Frank Miller’s run ended with issue #191, and by most standards he left the book in a much healthier state than he’d found it. Sales had turned around, it was back on a monthly schedule, and it was a book everyone was talking about. But all of that rested heavily on Miller himself, and left Marvel with the question: what now?

Klaus Janson stuck around for a few more issues on art. That gave the book some degree of visual continuity during this transition, although to be honest, less than you might expect. His layouts are more traditional and his issues feel a little more restrained, though there are still visual flourishes to be found. But it’s still Klaus Janson, and there’s still some consistency.

Who would even want to put themselves forward as the next regular writer of Daredevil, though? As it turns out, the answer seems to have been “nobody”. After two issues by fill-in writers, editor Denny O’Neill wound up writing the book himself – in his own words, “mostly because there didn’t seem to be (m)any other viable candidates for it”. But we’ll get to that next time.

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