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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DAREDEVIL #180 (March 1982)
“The Damned”
Writer, penciller: Frank Miller
Finisher, colourist: Klaus Janson
Letterer: Sam Rosen
Editor: Denny O’Neil

Frank Miller’s first run as writer covers issues #168 to #191, but it’s built heavily around the trinity that we’ve already covered: Elektra, the Kingpin and the Hand. There are some edge cases in the rest of Miller’s run who might have qualified for this feature, to be sure. The Kingpin’s mayoral candidate Randolph Winston Cherryh gets a major speaking part, but he’s still basically a Kingpin pawn. There’s a subplot about the board of Glenn Industries trying to seize control of the company from Heather, but they’re mostly anonymous white collar criminals. And there are generic drug dealers and the like who drive the plot of individual stories. But these are gimmick-free criminals with a single story, and they all share the spotlight with more recognisable characters.

Once we score all of those guys off the list, this turns out to be our final entry from the Miller run. For those of you who might be wondering, issue #177 doesn’t have a villain – it’s an issue of Stick helping Daredevil to get his radar back. Issues #178-179 are the Kingpin. Issue #181 is Bullseye. Issues #182-184 have the Punisher as guest villain on loan from Spider-Man. Issue #185 is the Kingpin again. Issue #186 is Stilt-Man. Issues #187-190 are the Hand and the Kingpin. And issue #191 is Bullseye.

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DAREDEVIL #174-176 (September to November 1981)
“The Assassination of Matt Murdock” / “Gantlet” (sic) / “Hunters”
Writer, penciller: Frank Miller
Finisher: Klaus Janson
Colourists: Glynis Wein & Klaus Janson (#174), Christie Scheele & Bob Sharen (#175), Glynis Wein (#176)
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Editor: Denny O’Neil

We’ve already had Elektra and the Kingpin, and now we complete the trinity of enduring creations from Frank Miller’s Daredevil.

Ah, the ninja! Historically, an expert in stealth, spycraft and infiltration. Over time, a part of Japanese folklore, with quasi-magical abilities. And in the Marvel Universe, a bunch of anonymous guys in bright red who attack in large groups and die. Or at least, that’s how they come across if you first encounter them in later stories. They’re the ultimate redshirts.

But what about their first incarnation? After all, recurring villains tend to rack up a string of defeats over the years – that’s the nature of the beast. Surely it was different when they started? Right?

The Hand make their debut in issue #174, when they assassinate one of Elektra’s targets before she reaches him. The narrator tells us that they’re “the same order of master assassins that taught her the many ways of murder before she broke training to operate on her own.” We’re told that the Hand want to kill Elektra because she left. But that’s not why they’re here – instead, the Hand have been hired to kill Matt Murdock.

Four anonymous ninjas do indeed attack Matt in his apartment. You might think that this was overkill when dealing with a blind lawyer – the random target in the prologue was taken out by a single ninja with a crossbow – but it sets the tone for the Hand right from the off. Why bother with stealth when you can just chuck expendable swordsmen at the problem? Now, these particular ninjas don’t know that Matt is Daredevil, and so they have an excuse for being taken by surprise when he fights back. And Matt duly beats them, almost singlehandedly – Elektra helps him out with the last one. In the aftermath, we learn that the ninjas always commit suicide and into gas when they’re defeated.

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DAREDEVIL #173 (August 1981)
“Ladykiller”
Writer, breakdown art: Frank Miller
Finished art: Klaus Janson
Colourist: Glynis Wein
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Editor: Denny O’Neil

Our last two entries kicked off Frank Miller’s writer/artist run in style, with Elektra and the Kingpin. Up next will be the Hand. And in the middle… there’s this guy. When people talk about the highs of the Frank Miller run, they’re not thinking of this issue. It hasn’t aged so well.

Miller actually intended “Ladykiller” to be the name of the story. The character himself is only referred to as Michael Reese, when he’s named at all. The name “Ladykiller” only gets used in-universe in Amazing Spider-Man #219, where Daredevil mentions this story in passing for no particular reason. It’s an odd story to reference purely for a bit of Marvel Universe world-building, because Michael Reese is a sex offender, and this is a story about rape. Now, this is still a Code-approved comic from 1981, and so it can’t say in terms that it’s a story about rape, but it’s less than subtle in getting that point across.

As subject matter, this can go badly in superhero comics. It can easily come across as exploitative. It can also simply feel like a clumsy attempt to be adult, clashing horribly with the traditional superhero tropes in a way that ends up drawing attention to all the residual elements still unchanged from children’s comics past. And that’s pretty much what happens here.

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DAREDEVIL #170-172 (May to July 1981)
“The Kingpin Must Die!” / “In the Kingpin’s Clutches”
Writer, penciller: Frank Miller
Finisher: Klaus Janson
Colourist: Glynis Wein
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Editor: Denny O’Neill

We’ve skipped issue #169 (which is a Bullseye story), and so we go straight from Elektra to Frank Miller’s other major addition to the series.

The Kingpin had been around since 1967 as a Spider-Man villain. I don’t normally cover guest villains in this feature. But the Kingpin is an outright import into Daredevil’s rogue’s gallery, even if he’ll continue to be shared with Spider-Man.

On one level, there’s nothing new in Miller’s Kingpin. He’s built entirely out of elements taken from earlier Kingpin stories. But the Kingpin had never really worked before in the way that he does under Miller. So we should take a look at the Kingpin stories that came before this.

The Kingpin debuted in Amazing Spider-Man #50-52 (1965), by Stan Lee and John Romita Sr. It’s the “Spider-Man no more!” story, the one where Spider-Man dumps his costume in a trash can. The Kingpin installs himself as head of the New York mobs, and of course Spider-Man comes out of retirement to defeat him. At this stage, the Kingpin has some Silver Age gimmickry such as an “obliterator beam” in his cane – which will keep showing up for years to come. But the main premise is that the Kingpin plans to run the underworld like business. He seems to think he’s respectable, and takes offence at the idea that killing his opponents counts as  murder.

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DAREDEVIL #168 (January 1981)
“Elektra”
Writer, penciller: Frank Miller
Inker, embellisher: Klaus Janson
Colourist: “Dr Martin”.
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Editor: Denny O’Neil

This feature began with me wondering why there were so few major Daredevil villains, despite the book having been around since the early sixties. Back in the first post, I wrote: “There’s the Kingpin, the Hand, Bullseye, um, Typhoid… um… does Elektra count…?”

Over fifty posts in, we’ve only met one character from that list: Bullseye. Typhoid won’t show up until 1988. But the other three are about to join the book in rapid succession,  because we’ve now reached Frank Miller’s run – initially as writer / artist, with Klaus Janson as his finisher and inker, though Janson takes over on art entirely towards the end.

It’s a statement of the obvious, but Miller’s run genuinely is a quantum leap in quality. It’s not that the plots are that much deeper than before, so much as that the storytelling really kicks up a gear. Miller turned Daredevil into a book that people were talking about, and the sales increase got it back onto a monthly schedule again. And this run is the template for Daredevil going forward.

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DAREDEVIL #167 (November 1980)
“…The Mauler!”
Writer: David Michelinie
Penciller: Frank Miller
Inker: Klaus Janson
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Colourist: Glynis Wein
Editor: Denny O’Neil

So here’s what happened since our last instalment. Issues #163 and #164 don’t have villains: the first one guest stars the Hulk, and the other is the story where Daredevil admits his secret identity to Ben Urich, who decides not to publish. Issue #165 has Dr Octopus, on loan from Amazing Spider-Man. Issue #166 brings back the Gladiator. And that’s the end of Roger McKenzie’s run as writer.

By this point, Denny O’Neil has taken over as editor, and as of issue #168, Frank Miller will be writing as well as pencilling. But first, we have another fill-in.

This one is a rather better fit than the Steve Ditko story we looked at last time. For a start, it still has the regular art team of Frank Miller and Klaus Janson. But this time, our guest writer is David Michelinie. At this point, he’s about 30 issues into his run on Iron Man, and he’s already completed “Demon in a Bottle”. So this feels like a contemporary Marvel comic from 1980.

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