DAREDEVIL #4 (October 1964)
“Killgrave, the Unbelievable Purple Man!”
Writer, editor: Stan Lee
Penciller: Joe Orlando
Inker: Vince Colletta
Letterer: Sam Rosen
Colourist: not credited

“You’re about to meet possibly the most off-beat, far-out, ding-dong, rootin’-tootin’ crackerjack super-villain you just ever did see!”

Such was Stan Lee’s vision of the Purple Man, as set out on the splash page of his debut. Things have changed. Today, as the nemesis of Jessica Jones, the Purple Man is the most high profile character from Daredevil‘s early issues. But he’s also now a character who needs a trigger warning. Look, there it was. This is the debut of a character who goes on to be a horrific abuser – in the TV version, an unambiguous rapist. What the hell happened?

On his own account, Zebediah Killgrave was a “spy for a foreign power” who got caught sneaking into an army ordnance depot. He got drenched in an experimental nerve gas which turned him purple and gave him the power to make people obey him. Being a villain already, he decides to use this power for world domination. It’s never entirely clear how he thinks that’s going to work, given that his power only works at close range. But that’s the goal.

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DAREDEVIL #3 (August 1964)
“Daredevil Battles the Owl, Ominous Overlord of Crime!”
Writer, editor: Stan Lee
Penciller: Joe Orlando
Inker: Vince Colletta
Letterer: Sam Rosen
Colourist: uncredited

It’s Daredevil’s first supervillain of his very own… for a fairly undemanding definition of “super”. And he gets a huge build-up, which suggests Stan Lee had hopes for him as a recurring villain.

The Owl is a Wall Street financier. The narrator tells us that he’s “merciless” and has “no friends … no loved ones… nothing to connect him with the human race save the fact of his birth!” What this means in practice is that he’s massively rich and powerful, everyone is afraid of him, and everyone already suspects him of corruption. For some reason, he’s actually changed his name to “the Owl”. Orlando draws him as a smug, sinister fat guy in an old fashioned suit (even for the time).

This could have been a workable set-up for the Owl – albeit a bit anti-capitalist for Stan Lee. He’s a rich criminal operating in plain sight and mocking the fact that nobody can prove anything against him. In fact, we know that’s a workable set-up, because it’s the Kingpin. But the Kingpin won’t debut until 1967. The Owl isn’t fighting for space with him just yet.

Unfortunately for the Owl, the first time around, Stan Lee doesn’t stick with the set-up. He blows it up almost immediately. The Owl is arrested for fraud. As a show of contempt, he picks a lawyer at random from the phone book, which turns out to be Nelson & Murdock, because of course it does. Matt takes the case – partly because he wants to learn more about the Owl, but partly because he actually believes that everyone is entitled to representation – and gets the Owl released overnight. According to Matt, the Owl “is charged with sheer animal power” and “almost limitless energy, all of it directed into evil channels”, which is an odd mix with the bloated fat cat that Orlando draws. But you can kind of see it, in a force of personality way.

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DAREDEVIL #2 (June 1964)
“The Evil Menace of Electro”
Writer, editor: Stan Lee
Artist: Joe Orlando
Inker: Vince Colletta
Letterer: Sam Rosen
Colourist: uncredited

If you’re going to play Daredevil as a swashbuckling solo superhero who swings through the streets of Marvel’s New York, there’s an elephant in the room: Spider-Man already exists. So what makes this new guy stand out? One solution would be to give Daredevil his very own arch enemy. Instead, here’s Electro.

Now, this is only the second Electro story. He debuted in Amazing Spider-Man #9 four months earlier. He hasn’t been slotted as a C-lister yet. But even allowing for all of that, Daredevil’s not even met a supervillain of his own yet, and already he’s dealing with Spider-Man’s hand-me-downs. How was that supposed to help him?

It’s not like Electro is an especially strong concept. His back story and powers have no particular synergy with Daredevil. Max Dillon is a lineman who gets electric powers when he’s struck by lightning, and decides to become a criminal. That’s it. That’s the character. Electro stands and falls on the strength of his electricity gimmick, and there are certainly worse gimmicks. It’s a strong enough visual to have kept him around to the present day. But he’s still a gimmick villain. Going to him as early as issue #2 is not a good sign.

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So, I thought we’d do something different.

Quick: Name ten Daredevil villains. Come on, the book’s been a mainstay of Marvel’s line since 1964, it can’t be that hard. There’s the Kingpin, the Hand, Bullseye, um, Typhoid… um… does Elektra count…? Admittedly, this is not really my area. But I googled a few lists of top Daredevil villains and almost all of them resorted to counting the Punisher. One of them was desperate enough to include Mysterio.

So I thought I’d read some Daredevil and find out what the hell he’s been doing all these years when he wasn’t fighting the Hand or the Kingpin. I’ve barely read any pre-Nocenti Daredevil before and I have pretty much no idea what happens in the book prior to Frank Miller, other than that there’s a wacky bit where he pretends to be his own twin brother. The general consensus seems to be that early Daredevil is completely skippable. Even at the time, Marvel don’t seem to have thought much of his commercial appeal – between issue #10 in 1965, and issue #100 in 1973, he made less than ten guest appearances in other books, even counting cameos.

And yet he must have been doing something right, because he hung in there when the likes of Dr Strange couldn’t. So I’m going to read through Daredevil and cover the issues that add new villains to his list. Some of these will be pretty short, and it’s going to be an irregular series (in other words, you’ll be getting these in quiet weeks).

DAREDEVIL #1 (April 1964)
“The Origin of Daredevil”
Writer, editor: Stan Lee
Artist: Bill Everett
Letterer: Sam Rosen
Colourist: not credited

This is the one early Daredevil issue that everyone knows, because it’s mostly an extended flashback setting out his origin story. The villain of that story is the Fixer, who is emphatically not going to be Daredevil’s arch enemy.

The original version goes like this. Little Matt Murdock wants to follow in the footsteps of his boxer father Battlin’ Jack. But Jack insists that Matt ignore sports and manly pursuits in favour of study, so that he can break out of poverty and “amount to something” – a promise that Jack made to Matt’s late mother. All the other kids think Matt’s a loser and nickname him Daredevil, which is thoughtful of them. But Matt trains in secret, while also getting straight As. Desperate to pay for Matt to go to college, Jack agrees to be managed by the disreputable Fixer. Meanwhile, Matt randomly loses his sight and gains super powers when he shoves a blind man out of the way of a runaway radioactive waste truck. Matt still goes to college, while Jack goes on an implausible middle-aged winning streak under the Fixer’s management. The Fixer tells Jack to take a dive in the first round of a key fight, but Jack refuses to disappoint his watching son, and wins by knockout. The Fixer has Jack shot dead in retaliation.

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