DAREDEVIL #272-273 (November 1989)
“Liberation” / “The Billion Dollar Ashtray”
Writer: Ann Nocenti
Penciller: John Romita Jr
Inker: Al Williamson
Colourist: Max Scheele
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Editor: Ralph Macchio

There’s still a way to go in the Ann Nocenti run after these issues, but this is where we leave it. While she created a string of new characters in the early part of her run, the later issues feature longer storylines and returning or guest villains, with a couple of one-off stories about everyday bad people along the way.

So, to be specific, issue #274 has Skip Ash as the villain. Issues #275-276 are an Acts of Vengeance tie-in, with guest villain Ultron. Issue #277 is a one-off story about a manipulative psychiatrist. Issues #278-282 feature Mephisto and Blackheart. Issue #283 guest stars Captain America, and the villains are assorted corporations. Issues #284-290 are a Bullseye storyline. And her final issue, issue #291, has Bullet.

Which means that for us, Ann Nocenti’s run draws to a close with the entirely unrepresentative figure of Shotgun. These two issues are part of the Number Nine storyline, which we’ve already looked at in the context of Skip Ash. As you’ll remember, Skip is a factory farmer who’s doing illegal operations for the CIA on the side. But he’s also got a laboratory which is altering women to make them “perfect”, and one of them, Number Nine, has been freed by his semi-estranged daughter Brandy. Since this is still a superhero comic, Skip calls in some favours from his government contacts to try and get Number Nine back. And so they send Shotgun to help out.

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DAREDEVIL #270 (September 1989)
“Blackheart!”
Writer: Ann Nocenti
Penciller: John Romita Jr
Inkers: Mike Manley & Al Williamson
Colourists: Max Scheele
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Editor: Ralph Macchio

We skipped over quite a few issues last time, so for anyone wondering what was in them: issues #259-263 are the end of the Typhoid Mary storyline, with the last two of those issues doubling as Inferno tie-ins. Issue #264 is a fill-in story with the Owl. (Yes, I know there are some gimmicky street gangs in it too, but it’s an Owl story.) Issue #265 is another Inferno tie-in. Issue #266 was a Christmas story with guest villain Mephisto. And issue #267, which we covered last time, has Bullet and the debut of Skip Ash, with Daredevil leaving New York City to spend some time upstate.

Issue #268 is a small town crime story, and issue #269 has Freedom Force as the guest villains. So that brings us to issue #270. I skipped over Mephisto earlier, but he does show up quite extensive in the next year or so. Nonetheless, he’s still an outside villain, as the storyline acknowledged – it ends with the Silver Surfer showing up to deal with him, and Daredevil leaving the two of them to get on with it. Besides, we get to talk about those issues anyway, thanks to Blackheart, who is a Daredevil original.

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DAREDEVIL #267 (June 1989)
“Cremains”
Writer: Ann Nocenti
Penciller: John Romita Jr
Inker: Al Williamson
Colourist: Gregory Wright
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Editor: Ralph Macchio

Skip Ash isn’t really the main villain in issue #267. In fact, he’s not even an antagonist in the story at all. But it is his debut, and he continues to appear into the #270s, and he has a really weird side project that makes him count as a villain. So he makes the cut.

As issue #267 begins, Daredevil has lost Karen Page thanks to Typhoid, and his Storefront law clinic has been closed. He’s tormented by his urges to seek revenge, but changes his mind after an altercation with Bullet, which leads him to conclude that Bullet himself is just a guy, and not the real problem. Disillusioned with everything, including himself, Matt gets a random train ticket upstate. When the train passes a government plane crashed in a nearby field – don’t ask how anyone identifies it as a “government plane” at that distance – Matt jumps off the moving train to help.

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DAREDEVIL #258 (September 1988)
“I Heard The Jungle Breathe”
Writer: Fabian Nicieza
Penciller: Ron Lim
Inker: Jim Sanders III
Letterer: Diana Alberts
Colourist: Bob Sharen
Editor: Ralph Macchio

We’ve skipped issue #257, which is a crossover with Punisher. Technically the villain in that story is a guy called Alfred Coppersmith, but his story plays out mostly in Punisher, so we’ll pass him over. That brings us to issue #258, which is a fill-in story by Fabian Nicieza and Ron Lim. Inevitably, it bears little resemblance to the Nocenti/Romita issues that surround it. But it does introduce a new supervillain, and one who actually comes back.

This issue brings back Willie Lincoln, a short-lived supporting character who hadn’t appeared since issue #59. In the original stories, he was a Vietnam veteran who had been blinded in action. Daredevil helped him to clear his name after he was framed by a mobster, and finally he got his old job back with the NYPD. It’s an overcoming-adversity story. After that, he occasionally popped up to help out, before being quietly forgotten about.

That was the 1960s. This is 1988, and American attitudes to the Vietnam War have moved on. Willie remains anchored to late 60s Vietnam despite the floating timeline, with other aspects of the original story being retconned accordingly. We open with a flashback to Willie serving in Vietnam in 1968, as the panicky soldiers in his patrol start killing innocent villagers. This turns out to be the mission on which he got blinded. Nicieza doesn’t quite throw Willie under the bus here – he’s at least dithering about what he can do to stop it, before the question is taken out of his hands when the enemy shows up. Daredevil assures us later on that Willie isn’t to blame. But his blinding is still recast as an ironic punishment for Lincoln wishing that he didn’t have to watch this happen.

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DAREDEVIL #254-256 (May to July 1988)
“Typhoid” / “Temptation” / “Blindspots”
Writer: Ann Nocenti
Penciller: John Romita Jr
Inker: Al Williamson
Colourist: Max Scheele
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Editor: Ralph Macchio

Up to this point, Ann Nocenti has given us a lot of one-off villains, and a few who showed more staying power. But Typhoid really is a major addition to the rogues gallery, and someone who goes on to be used across the Marvel Universe.

She’s also the first Nocenti creation to get an extended storyline. Previous new characters appeared in one or two issues, but Typhoid is around for nearly a year. While I’ve given the credits for issues #254-256 above, she appears in some form in every issue from #254 to #263, except for a fill-in story in issue #258.

Issue #254 opens with a splash page of Typhoid, complete with her swords, her one-armed jacket, her weird metal shoulder plates, her fishnets, her braids, and the white make-up on the right half of her face. She has a serious expression. Meanwhile, the narrator tells us that poisonous people live among without knowing what they are, doing what they have to do to survive. “Touch her, she’s the best,” the narrator adds. The opening scene has her breaking up a mugging, only to enlist the mugger as her sidekick – she “brands” the guy by clawing his face with her fingernails, offers him excitement, kisses him, and declares that “Typhoid’s on top, she calls the shots”. It’s mostly played as if the mugger, Rip, is receiving some sort of infection.

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DAREDEVIL #253 (April 1988)
“Merry Christmas, Kingpin”
Writer: Ann Nocenti
Penciller: John Romita Jr
Inker: Al Williamson
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Colourist: Max Scheele
Editor: Ralph Macchio

You might have picked up from the cover and the title that this story isn’t really about the Wildboys. It’s a Christmas story, and the main plot is basically that the Kingpin is Scrooge without the epiphany. He doesn’t see any ghosts, but he does refuse to give his staff the day off for Christmas (“a useless waste of a business day”), and he fails to intimidate a property owner because he doesn’t understand the power of the festive season. It’s that sort of issue.

The Wildboys – Jet and Spit – are a B-plot, and they only actually appear on six pages of this issue. But they do come back. They’ve made nine appearances in total, eight of which were in Daredevil. In particular, they’ll be included among the returning villains in issues #259-260. So they merit an entry, even if they don’t really have a spotlight story to debut in. (The Official Handbook claims that they were also among Ammo’s gang in the previous issue, but so far as I can see, there’s nothing on the page to support that.)

The issue opens on Christmas Eve, with the Wildboys driving through Hell’s Kitchen and making a general nuisance of themselves. They’re harassing women, driving onto the pavement so that pedestrians have to dive out of their way, and robbing charity collectors. Basically, they’re just a couple of assholes. Everyone hates them – one person even says that he hopes they get shot.

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DAREDEVIL #252 (March 1988)
“Ground Zero”
Writer: Ann Nocenti
Penciller: John Romita Jr.
Inker: Al Williamson
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Colourist: Max Scheele
Editor: Ralph Macchio

For some reason, Daredevil #252 is a double sized issue. It’s not an anniversary issue. It’s not a fresh start. It’s not the climax of a long running storyline. It’s not even a turning point. Instead, it’s a tie-in to “Fall of the Mutants”, which was taking place over in Uncanny X-Men, New Mutants and X-Factor.

“Fall of the Mutants” wasn’t even a crossover. It consisted of three separate turning-point storylines that barely interacted with one another. But despite that, there were four tie-in issues. All four of them linked to X-Factor‘s storyline, in which Apocalypse and his Horsemen attack New York. The only connection with Daredevil is that it happens to take place in his city.

This turns out not to be a problem. Ann Nocenti has a story that she wants to tell here, and it’s about how everyone in Hell’s Kitchen reacts when a disaster hits and they fear the world might be ending. To do that story, you need a disaster, but the disaster itself isn’t the point, and so Nocenti doesn’t want to waste time in this book on actually setting it up or resolving it. A crossover provides a wonderful solution to this problem: it means that she doesn’t have to explain the disaster at all, and anyone who really cares can be referred to another book where the details actually matter. She doesn’t even need to recap the plot of the crossover, because it doesn’t matter. If you don’t know what’s happening or why… well, nor do any of the regular characters, and that’s the whole point.

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DAREDEVIL #250-251 (January/February 1988)
“Boom!” / “Save the Planet”
Writer: Ann Nocenti
Penciller: John Romita Jr
Inker: Al Williamson
Colourist: Max Scheele
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Editor: Ralph Macchio

It’s taken over a year, but at long last Ann Nocenti is joined on the book by a regular penciller. John Romita Jr will be with us until issue #282, and this is where Nocenti’s run really kicks up a gear.

Romita was an established name by this point – he’d already had runs on Iron Man, Amazing Spider-Man and Uncanny X-Men. However, 1987 had seen him take a career detour to draw the first six issues of Star Brand. In a 2017 interview, Romita essentially says that this was an unhappy experience, that he was thinking of quitting comics, and that he was talked into taking the Daredevil assignment by an offer of more creative input. Some of what Romita says in that interview doesn’t seem quite right – he talks as if Ann Nocenti was also new to the book, and says that Al Williamson was hired at his request, when he’d been inking the book on and off for a while already. But Romita’s central point, that his run on Daredevil was where he really had the opportunity to come into his own as a creator, is hard to argue with.

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DAREDEVIL #248-249 (November/December 1987)
“A Cage in Search of a Bird” / “Kiss and Kill”
Writer: Ann Nocenti
Penciller: Rick Leonardi
Inker: Al Williamson
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Colourists: Petra Scotese (#248) and Max Scheele (#249)
Editor: Ralph Macchio.

For the first time in a while, we’ve skipped a couple of issues. Issue #246 is a fill-in issue by Jim Owlsey and Tom Morgan, and the guest villain is Chance, on loan from Spider-Man. Issue #247 is the second Project Reptile story, and we’ve already covered them. That takes us to issues #248-249, which lead into the second phase of Ann Nocenti’s run. Up to this point, we’ve had a lot of one-off villains, but from here on we start hitting names that stick around.

Somehow, a year into her run, the book still doesn’t have a regular penciller. That will finally change in the next story when John Romita Jr comes aboard. In the meantime, the last of the guest artists is Rick Leonardi. He was fairly well established by this point. Although Marvel hadn’t yet given him a regular assignment on an ongoing title, he had drawn Vision & The Scarlet Witch and two Cloak & Dagger minis, and fill-ins on high profile books like Amazing Spider-Man and Uncanny X-Men. Naturally, he brings a lot of grace to Daredevil, and his Hell’s Kitchen is brightly kinetic. Under Leonardi, Daredevil looks like an optimistic comic.

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DAREDEVIL #243-244 (June & July 1987)
“Don’t Touch Me” / “Touch Me”
Writer: Ann Nocenti
Penciller: Louis Williams
Inkers: Al Williamson, Danny Bulanadi & Tony DeZuinga
Colourists: Christie Scheele & Paul Becton
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Editor: Ralph Macchio

(Note: I skipped this post by mistake last time, so it’s appearing out of sequence. For #78, see here.)

After a string of one-off villains, most of whom are mentally ill serial killers, Ann Nocenti goes in a different direction: magic. Specifically, voodoo.

The last time Daredevil did voodoo was in issue #130, cover date February 1976. That’s a story by Marv Wolfman, Bob Brown and Klaus Janson, in which a voodoo priest called Brother Zed uses his illusion powers to convince his followers that he has real magical power, and then exploits their belief for his own gain. The basic concept isn’t too bad when taken in isolation, but the story came out at a time when black characters were largely absent from Daredevil, and if your sole representation of black America is to have them decapitating chickens in Central Park, then that’s a problem.

Eleven years have passed, since then, but in terms of the diversity of its cast, less has changed in Daredevil than you might think. The generic bystanders certainly have a lot more variation than they used to. But the book’s most prominent black character is still Turk, a comic relief character, and even he hasn’t appeared in Nocenti’s run. The Hell’s Kitchen supporting cast is small, and consists of Karen Page and a group of street kids called the Fatboys – they aren’t all white, but the ones with developed personalities are. Rotgut and his mother were black, to be fair, although Rotgut himself was an albino. So while things have changed in 11 years, this still stands out as a Story With A Lot Of Black People In It.

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