Daredevil Villains #65: Micah Synn
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.
Professor Horatio Piper is an anthropologist who’s brought Micah and his two wives to Manhattan, because that’s excellent anthropological practice when you’ve just discovered a hidden tribe. The Kinjorge are a media sensation, and so Piper introduces them to Matt and Foggy, who can represent their legal interests. Piper is black, by the way, which seems unlikely to be a random creative choice.
In his first appearance, Micah cuts a more or less dignified figure, speaking in (understandably) broken English, and politely accepting the lawyers’ help. Meanwhile, his wives hang around in the background mocking the disabled. Later, Micah tries to walk off with some food from a grocery without paying for it, on the grounds that he’s allowed to because he’s bigger than the shopkeeper. When the man takes issue with this reasoning, Micah chucks him through a window and gets himself arrested.
Professor Piper explains that this is merely a matter of cultural relativism. “These people come from a hard, savage land. For centuries, their very survival has depended on a certain ruthlessness… on taking what they need and exploiting the weakness of others. To the chief, what he did was not wrong. On the contrary.” Moments later, one of the wives gets run over by a car, to the apparent indifference (or even amusement) of Micah and his remaining wife.
At the hospital, the cop who arrested Micah offers his condolences, and sensitively acknowledges the challenges of cultural acclimatisation. Micah does not accept the apology, and decides to avenge himself for his arrest by chucking the cop through another window – this time on the tenth floor. Daredevil comes to the rescue, and fights Micah, but only manages to beat him by luring him into electrocuting himself. Micah is duly arrested again, with Daredevil musing that “He may be the most dangerous man I’ve ever met.”
To figure out what the hell O’Neil was trying to do with this bizarre character, we have to look at the rest of the storyline. There are a number of themes going on. For a start, Micah is apparently the descendent of an aristocrat and the potential claimant to a peerage or something. Coming to the story today, a natural first reaction is that the high concept is to add a race swap angle to a dodgy racial stereotype about savage tribesmen. But in fact, the core idea seems to be to satirise Tarzan.
As originally conceived, Tarzan was a British aristocrat whose parents were stranded in West Africa and killed, leaving him to be raised by apes. His creator Edgar Rice Burroughs later wrote that “I was mainly interested in playing with the idea of a contest between heredity and environment”, and that Tarzan was “an infant child of a race strongly marked by hereditary characteristics of the finer and nobler sort”. So Tarzan is a hero because, even without exposure to his parents’ culture, he’s just innately better. Because of his race.
Now, to be fair, this was in 1912, and the original Tarzan stories also have a romantic primitivist streak which suggests that his heroism was fully brought out precisely because he didn’t grow up in English culture. When he has the chance to go back, he refuses. But Tarzan is still a literal noble savage who combines the best of both worlds; he does Africa better than the Africans.
As we’ll see in coming instalments, O’Neil is not a big fan of the English. The basic joke of the Micah Synn arc is that the Americans – and especially the chattering classes like Foggy and his wife – persist in attributing the Kinjorge’s behavour to cultural differences, and in dealing with them as if they were wise, noble savages, when in fact they are unremittingly awful people. Not just Micah, all of them. The entire culture is organised on the principle of being entitled assholes. No matter how often we’re told that it’s a function of their environment, I think the point is meant to be simply that this is just the distilled essence of Englishness. Micah doesn’t march around seizing stuff with a sense of entitlement because he’s a savage. He does it because he’s a colonist.
That seems to be the idea, anyway. I don’t think it quite works. The problem with this reading is that the Kinjorge still come with a lot of off-the-shelf savage tribe tropes that can’t be unique to their culture, since we recognise them from other stories. As such, those tropes do play into the idea that Africans are Just Like That. But, with a degree of charity, I’m willing to accept that this is a muddled execution of what was basically conceived as an inverted Tarzan story.
The sexual politics of the story are much harder to defend. Micah is apparently very sexy, which is fine. But even his first appearance has two random female passers-by exchanging the following dialogue: “I don’t usually go for the brute type… but for him I’d make an exception.” “He can brutalise me any old time he wants.”
A major part of Micah Synn’s storyline involves Foggy’s wife Debbie Nelson trying to get shot of her boring husband and hook up with the sexy chief instead. This ultimately leads to her winding up as a domestic slave in Micah’s service and learning the error of her ways via ritual humiliation.
Denny O’Neil hates Debbie Nelson. I’ve never seen an incoming writer hate a supporting character the way Denny O’Neil hates Debbie Nelson. She wasn’t even being used heavily in the book before his run. He brought her back specifically to wreck her.
I can understand going for the henpecked husband angle with Foggy. At this point he was still regularly serving as comic relief, even if he increasingly got to complain that he was doing all the work to keep the business afloat while Matt kept letting him down. But O’Neil writes Debbie as an intolerable harridan, detested by every other character aside from Foggy himself. I genuinely had to check whether O’Neil was going through a bitter divorce at the time. Apparently not, but there’s real “she’s turned the weans against us” energy in this storyline.
The other strand to Micah Synn’s storyline is his steady adjustment to New York. The basic idea is that he starts off as a character who’s physically imposing and dangerous, but who can still be defeated by taking advantage of his lack of understanding of his new environment. Over the following chapters, he swiftly picks up that understanding, and learns how to manipulate the media, the courts and Matt’s own cultural values, making him increasingly dangerous. But, finding himself in a situation of unprecedented abundance, he also succumbs to temptation and starts to lose his physical edge. Eventually, he gets beaten up by some homeless people while trying to throw his weight around and winds up having to ask Daredevil to save him. And that’s the end of that – we never see him again.
In theory you could do more with Micah. The idea of an outsider who views New York as an outsider and exploits its cultural weak spots with psychopathic ruthlessness is really quite good. You could develop him in that way, and focus on him gaming the system because he sees it differently from everyone else. He might have been better suited as a dark-mirror villain for Ka-Zar.
But it’s understandable that nobody wanted to come back to Micah Synn after O’Neil’s story was finished. Not only does he get unceremoniously defanged in his final appearance, but he’s tied to a very awkward back story that would only get more awkward over time.
“Denny O’Neil hates Debbie Nelson. I’ve never seen an incoming writer hate a supporting character the way Denny O’Neil hates Debbie Nelson.”
Well, there’s Louise Simonson and Madelyne Pryor, but that’s a special case.
I also think it can be said that Dave and Bob hated Madame Masque when they took over Iron Man. They even blamed her for Tony’s drinking.
I think the reason that O’Neil disliked her was because she started out using Foggy on behalf of the Organizer- and she only turned against the Organizer not because she fell in love with Foggy but because Matt convinced her the Organizer was planning on having her killed.
I always assumed that we were supposed to take the Kingorge’s cruelty as a function of the environment of Africa, not of their Englishness. But that has Unfortunate Implications for other reasons.
What’s interesting is that the Kingpin objects to Micah Synn going after another man’s wife.
The O’Neil run is one of the worst runs on the book in the post-Miller pre-Marvel Knights era, and Micah Syn is a LARGE part of why.
And I would like to point out that arguably his best issue involved Matt losing his mind over Heather Glenn’s suicide and, given how irrelevant Matt’s disabled legal assistant is throughout the run except to be mocked by Syn and his wives…it wasn’t just Debbie Nelson he had a problem with.
And Neil has some…strong beliefs about the Irish Troubles (you’re about to meet the Gael, Crossbow and his proposed replacement for Heather Gleen, Glorianna O’Breen)…so maybe it wasn’t satire but plain ol’ parody or contempt that he was expressing with Syn.
Yeah, it’s hard to tell how much this is O’Neil hating on the English — though the upcoming Crossbow would seem to suggest something there — and how much is O’Neil bringing in elements of Heart of Darkness.
Much depends, I suppose, on how we read the Dickensian name O’Neil gives the character. A prophet of sin? An indicator of a kind of original sin or inherent wickedness? In the English, or in all people in the right or wrong circumstances? None of it avoids the suggestion of bas, though it might change our sense of the bias.
The whole “chattering classes” bit makes me think O’Neil may also have been a fan of Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers. (Roy Thomas sure liked it.)
Beyond that, Micah’s eventual downfall and defeat seem to me to be a significant element of the Tarzan parody. Not only is “fitness” ultimately not down to heredity, but that Romantic primitivist idea that civilization is decadence turns out to be true only if you’re an “entitled asshole,” as Paul puts it.
Micah’s downfall is that, for all his shrewdness, he does little ore than find ways to pursue his own endless appetites. (In a move even less subtle than Micah’s name and his apparent “animal magnetism” effect on women, O’Neil has the Kingorge worship an idol literally named “Mow,” as in a gaping and all-consuming “maw.”)
The problem underneath it all is that Micah doesn’t actually understand anything but very basic, self-centered desires, while Matt and the Kingpin, in different ways, understand both those desires and how and why they can be restrained (granted, that the Kingpin has a very different sense of what to do with that understanding). And the characters that don’t really understand those kinds of desires, however tempting they may be, wind up suffering the most. Those among the “civilized” who try to go with Micah — e.g., Debbie and Professor Piper — end up humiliated and destroyed.
That O’Neil seems to make his prime exemplars of this last point a woman and an educated person of color has plenty of its own problems, and very 1980s problems at that.
I was looking forward to this entry, and it did not disappoint.
“Moments later, one of the wives gets run over by a car, to the apparent indifference (or even amusement) of Micah and his remaining wife.”
Holy crap.
I agree that Micah could be brought back. Given the speed with which he acclimated to urban life, he would certainly have figured out how to build a secret evil empire during all his time away. And gotten his hot bod back in shape.
If anything, Micah Synn is more viable a character now than he was back in the day. It could be interesting to have him as a foil to Punisher, USAgent, Venom or Carnage. Or, for that matter, Wolverine.
I was disoriented by the character forty years ago and that will not change significantly right now. But I have repeatedly noted that the Denny O’Neill Daredevil run seems to be significantly interested in testing waters (at least initially), and I think that the introduction of Micah Synn fits that mold.
What we have here is a very hypocritical, very predatorial, and very adaptable character. While he is said to have blood relations to British nobility, he considers himself aristocracy for much more tangible reasons. He is really not very far distanced from a merging of the worst traits of Daredevil and Kingpin as of this point in time, down to knowing DD’s secret identity and deciding that exposing it does not serve his plans.
Above anything else, he is a social climber with no ethics. I keep forgetting that he is supposed to be African as opposed to South American.
That would just make Micah Sinn into another Kingpin or countless other crime lords from the history of Daredevil. There’s no reason to bring Sinn back if he’s become generic.
I wouldn’t really be fair to Edgar Rice Burroughs, considering that in another of his books, his protagonist character is speaking sympathetically about the Ku Klux Klan. Reading that racist intent into Tarzan would not be only subtext by Burroughs.
@Thom H.- The problem is that he tried to kill Vanessa. I can’t see the Kingpin listing him live after that.
@Chris V- Which book was that? I know that John Carter was a former Confederate soldier.
And which KKK? The Reconstruction Era KKK or the modern era KKK? Sadly, the mainstream view of Reconstruction between 1912 and 1950 was “Freed slaves bad, KKK good”.
I’m pretty sure it was either Pirates of Venus, published in 1934, or The Moon Maid, published in 1923.
Awesome entry, on the awesome topic of Micah Synn, Daredevil’s most awesome villain.
The only thing I’d add is that in DD 206, O’Neil retcons things and says that the “Kinjorge” tribe evolved from Englishmen who got lost in Africa not in the 1700s (as they said in DD 202), but in the 1500s.
I guess that gives them more time to go from nobles to savages, but if they were lost in the 1500s, why are they called the “Kinjorge”? Shouldn’t they be the “Kweenliz”?
P.S. In Daredevil 202, they cross out the editors’ names and replace them with the assistants because it’s Assistant Editor’s Month. So Jim Shooter’s name is crossed out and replaced with Ann Nocenti’s. That makes DD 202 the first-ever Daredevil comic to have Ann Nocenti’s name in the credits. Which is awesome.
@Chris V- According to Google, in Pirates of Venus, the protagonist smiles upon realizing that the freedom fighters’ initials are KKK. That does sound bad.
BTW, John Carter of Mars is weird. It was the inspiration for iconic characters like J’onn J’onzz. But every attempt to adapt it has been a failure. It’s not just that Carter was a Confederate soldier- that was much less of a dealbreaker in the 70s and 80s. TV Tropes has some theories- the costumes are TOO skimpy,. the monsters are poorly described. etc. It’s especially odd because Marvel tried to adapt it with Marv Wolfman and Chris Claremont writing. You’d think that Wolfman and Claremont would be the perfect writers to adapt it but the series flopped.
The John Carter movie sure did not deserve to flop.
Generally speaking, I suspect that the character was a bit too much of a trailblazer. The concept is not too different from what would now be described as the isekai genre.
But the movie still deserved better box office success.
Re: the failure of John Carter film, I wonder if it’s partly a case of the pre-superhero adventurer characters being hard to adapt for modern audiences.
Live-action movie versions of the Shadow, Allan Quatermain, Doc Savage, and even Burroughs’s more famous creation Tarzan have all failed in the last several decades. Nor have those characters managed to succeed in other media, such as comics, despite multiple attempts across the years.
The only really successful adaptation of that sort of character I can think of after the 1950s would be Disney’s Tarzan, an animated film rather than live-action, and one well within the “Disney animated feature” formula and genre.
I suspect that the broader appeal of the adventure novel character and the pulp hero has been taken over in popular culture by the superhero and, in their own niche, by the espionage and ex-military vigilante subgenres in movies and TV.
John Carter wasn’t a trailblazer though. Edwin L. Arnolds Lt. Gullivar Jones of Mars (which Marvel also decided to adapt in the ‘70s, probably because the rights to ERB’s more famous characters were held by DC at that time) predated John Carter. There’s little doubt that it was a massive influence on Burroughs.
Arnold’s Gullivar wasn’t all that well-written of a novel (although the comic was fun), but Arnold deserves some credit, as he’s been almost totally forgotten. His other novel, The Adventures of Phra the Phoenician was more deserving of being remembered, outside of Gullivar Jones deserving recognition from an historical perspective. Phra is dated by now, yes, but was also influential and worth reading.
Regardless, it certainly wasn’t the novelty of John Carter which precluded the popularity of the movie. By the time of he movie, the concept of “planetary romance” was a cliche which had been spoofed by later science fiction writers, by that point. A concept like Buck Rogers was increasingly popular in its time. If anything, I suspect that it’s as Omar writes, that fiction like Jones, Carter, Rogers was decidedly old-fashioned after the ‘50s, replaced by more appropriate/modern forms of the futuristic.
A very odd place where the Klan makes an appearance is in a Sherlock Holmes story, where you would be expecting it , reading in modern times.
I read (listened on audio) all the John Carter books in the last year. And the Lensman books. Which I don’t think I’d read since being a teenager. I thought they were all fine but not great.
Tangentially, since it came up on bluesky the other day, I’ve read a lot of Verne recent years and the protagonist of From the Earth to the Moon is what we’d now call an arms merchant, a 19th century Tony Stark.
Modern audiences don’t care about most pulp & early sci-fi heroes. The problematic aspects of the genre (e.g. the “mighty whitey” trope) are a factor, but most of it comes down to modern audiences having no connection to the characters.
We’ve all heard of Tarzan and probably seen at least one Tarzan movie or show, but John Carter, Doc Savage, and the Shadow don’t have the same pop culture footprint. I’d never heard of any of them until I started reading comics. I’ve never read any of Burroughs’s novels, the older comic strips featuring characters like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, or old pulp mags. I’m the target audience for this material, and I have zero enthusiasm for it. I can’t blame younger moviegoers from not caring about such musty IP. I don’t remember any such material being successful in other media in my lifetime, outside of Tarzan.
I’ve never read O’Neil’s DD comics. I only know them by their bad reputation. I assumed Micah Synn was an evil preacher or something, based solely on the last name. That premise could result in a good story, actually. This? I can’t picture a good version of the character described here, unless the whole idea was played for comedy.
JOHN CARTER was a commercially hopeless title for a movie. At least JOHN CARTER OF MARS would have told people that it was science-fictional. But then the film began by literally telling us that everything we’ve found out about Mars since 1913 is wrong.
I would have been about 10 when this run came out. I hadn’t been reading Daredevil for overly long, but I do know that this is where my interest in the series waned and I dropped out again for some reason or another, only to return again for “Born Again.” (And leave again during Ann Nocenti’s run! I was quite inconsistent!)
I do recall Micah Synn was a deeply uncomfortable character, and I wasn’t in a position to grasp any nuances this storyline had.
It’s probably all for the best that Synn remains lost and forgotten. Though he feels like the sort of character Priest might have had “fun” with in Black Panther.
I think we know who should be next episode’s OHOTOHOTMU should be now.
Synn wouldn’t have to be just a Kingpin knockoff if he came back. He could be a Kingpin/Kraven hybrid of some sort, maybe. And even better if Kingpin hates him.
Or maybe he went back to Africa and his crazy tribe started harassing Wakanda. Daredevil/Black Panther crossover, anyone?
Ohhh, or he stayed in New York but his goons stole some experimental Wakandan tech. That’s what makes him brave enough to resurface in NYC and try to take down Daredevil and Kingpin. Or whoever is in charge of the criminal underworld now. I can’t keep track.
There. I wrote it, Marvel style. Somebody want to draw it?
Different tastes and all that. Myself, I think Synn resembles Wolverine a lot more than he might somewhat-accidentally resemble Kingpin.
Yes, the generic name “John Carter” was not helpful at all.
Pulp-like heroes have certainly lost traction in the next few decades, since about some time in the 1980s by my estimation. How many people even noticed that DC published Doc Savage and Flash Gordon by that time? I just checked and found out that it also released a new wave (actually named “First Wave”) of traditional pulp heroes (and the Will Eisner Spirit) back in the 2010s. I think I knew of that and forgot entirely.
I think some of their fall from grace relates to the waxing and waning of various media forms which have become increasingly more individualized along time. Radio and open TV were a lot more suitable for wide appeal trend-making than subscription cable TV, let alone streaming channels. Movie theathers are now much less capable of moving mass tastes as well. Breakout franchises and characters are now much more varied and customized according to genre and niche, and that comes with many consequences for the better and for worse.
If there’s going to be a pulp hero movie, then the following should be taken into account:
1) If the film is a wild success, it probably tops out at making 80-100 million at the box office, so a budget of about 30 million is what should be aimed for.
2) If our hero is going to not wear too much, get a good-looking young actor. You don’t need an actor of Daniel Day-Lewis’s talent to play John Carter or another pulp hero. But if you put a nice looking actor in the skimpy outfit, then you might at least get some women and gay men to watch it, and it could unintentionally be a camp classic. I mean, there are all sorts of horror movies that get young actors with few credits for cheap.
@Luis- I think they were already losing traction in the 70s- as mentioned, Marvel’s attempts to adapt John Carter and Doc Savage in the 70s were disasters and the Flash Gordon film in 1980 bombed everywhere except the UK and Italy.
“JOHN CARTER was a commercially hopeless title for a movie.”
Jerry Maguire says hi.
JERRY MAGUIRE had Tom Cruise and a catchphrase. It’s also not such a bad title – Jerry Maguire sounds like a character, a chancer or a comedian.
How about Constantine, sticking with bad comic-based movie titles? I think a lot of people were wondering why the first “Christian Roman Emperor” was being played by the guy from Bill & Ted wearing an overcoat.
The 90s also gave us the criicially praised (more or less) and moderate successes of the Rocketeer (retro pulp hero) and The Phantom (Slam Evil).
Too bad more people didn’t read the book when Parker wrote that King Features heroes comics like 10 or so years ago.
@Joe Walker
So, the John Carter film would have sold more tickets had it called “Jerry Carter” instead? Because I highly doubt anyone went to see “Jerry Maguire” because it made them think of Jerry Lewis, or Jerry Stiller, or Jerry Seinfled.
They went for two reasons: 1) They heard good things, 2) Tom Cruise.
Also, the catchphrase had nothing to do with its success. The catchphrase became a catchphrase *because* of its success. You can’t just invent a catchphrase. You invent a phrase and either it catches or it doesn’t. If Jerry Maguire had sucked and bombed at the box office, “Show me the money!” would’ve been just another line of dialogue in a film that nobody saw.
The title “John Carter” didn’t tank the film. The idiocy of the people who made the film did. Casting a nobody like Taylor Kitsch as the lead in a 300 million dollar film and expecting to turn a profit is wildly optimistic no matter what the film is called. It’s not impossible, but you better have a damned good film on your hands. John Carter wasn’t that film.
Adding “of Mars” wouldn’t have helped either. Yes, that tells you it’s science fiction but so what? Even as a big fan of the genre, I’m not going to go see a sci-fi film just because it’s sci-fi. Sci-fi is exactly the same as any other genre in that some of what gets made is pretty good to great, while most of it is in the alright to crap range.
A film simply called “John Carter” could conceivably do well. Just as a film called “Jerry Maguire” did. But it would need to be a much better film than the one that actually got made, and ideally, feature somebody in the starring role that people have actually heard of.
I’m imagining John Carter, the Martian starring Matt Damon with Jessica Chastain as Dejah Thoris. That movie needed more Tharks.
Oh, and speaking of Constantine.
Keanu Reeves.
*That’s* who you cast as John Carter. It’s a no-brainer. If he could get people to go see a movie simply called “John Wick” then he can surely put asses in the seats for “John Carter.”
I think I remember a comic adaptation of the first book that decided to use the unfortunate composite title “John Carter: A Princess of Mars” which sounds rather like it’s casting aspersions on our hero’s manliness.
@Omar ummm Indiana Jones? Anyone? 3.5 successful movies and TV shows? I know it’s a knockoff and “7 cities of cibola” etc but I would argue still a very successful example of the pre-superhero adventurer archetype
I’d say that was a result of Lucas and Spielberg knowing how to update the source material. It’s very much centered in the pulps, but most people would probably associate Indiana Jones as an intrinsic part of ‘80s culture. Moviegoers probably also look at the historical fiction aspect and use of Nazis as villains as a way that softens Raiders of the Lost Ark from being too “pulpy”.
The same way that Star Wars is simply 1930s/1940s space opera, but Lucas managed to update the material for a modern audience. It doesn’t feel retro like Buck Rogers or John Carter, although it very much is a retro plot.
John Carter felt like a dated relic when the movie was released. Lucas somehow managed to find a way to make Star Wars feel timeless.
The fact that Lucas and Spielberg did have the freedom to craft their own versions of earlier pulp fiction is what helped Indiana Jones and Star Wars. They tried to make a straight adaptation of an Edgar Rice Burroughs John Carter novel into a movie, and it would take a lot of changes for a majority modern moviegoers to accept the idea of a 1920s “planetary romance”.
I always assumed the title of the books was “John Carter of Mars” for the very reason that it’s a common, everyday name juxtaposed onto an exotic setting. I think Disney messed up by not including the “of Mars” bit, but they wanted a franchise I suppose.
And it is possible to have a bombed movie that has a memorable catchphrase. “I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass …” springs to mind.
They Live wasn’t a bomb. Critically it was panned at the time, but I think even those critics have woken up to the fact that They Live is more than a typical B-movie.
As far as box office, it had such a small budget that the movie made money. It quickly became a cult favourite that is beloved to this day. Outside of some critics in the ‘80s who couldn’t see past the cheesiness and mistook it for another Hell Comes to Frogtown, it wasn’t a “bomb” by any criteria.
“…most people would probably associate Indiana Jones as an intrinsic part of ‘80s culture.”
@Chris V – Hmm. I’m not quite sure what you mean by that. Maybe some people view the film that way now from a retrospective standpoint, but that didn’t at all play into its success upon release. It was 1981. The decade had only just begun. We didn’t know what ’80s culture was yet.
@Ben: I’d agree that winking pastiches of the old-style adventure heroes can be successful. It’s the original characters that seem to struggle.
But I also agree with Chris V that old-style “planetary romance” is a hard sell. More generally, I think a lot of the successful pulp/adventure hero pastiches emphasize the hero’s vulnerability, not their might.
Indy gets beaten up across his films, has to improvise his way through chaos, and almost never beats the villain himself. The Rocketeer, in film, is a neophyte adventurer.
Well, if we want to see if planetary romance can be successful, there’s a new He-Man movie coming out. We’ll see how Nicholas Galitzine looks in the outfit. Though, uh, a 170-200 million budget does not make me think it will be a box office hit. But I suppose Amazon will measure its success by streaming hours.
Whew. This is *not* the site to go for conversation about Daredevil, is it.
There’s been over 60 almost weekly conversations about Daredevil, give the people a break 😀
As one of the main dudes who comments here who has been waiting for a take on Micah Synn almost from the start of this project, I want to say thanks to Paul for running with it long enough to get here and not disappointing.
Yes, Micah Synn is a very troubling villain, but so are many in comics. He is very much “Tarzan as a crime boss,” with a pinch of Conan thrown in. And while he is tough to take seriously, this is also a franchise which produced Stilt-Man, Leap-Frog, and Man-Bull, all of which have made frequent appearances. Heck, the original Leap-Frog was only killed off in a Murderworld one-shot a year or two ago.
I don’t see Synn’s return as impossible if some writer was inspired (and didn’t just want to borrow Kraven for a year). Kingpin didn’t have him die in prison because he was beneathe his notice after his defeat (or Fisk was distracted, which happens). He gets his physique back in prison and then basically becomes a low rent Bane. I mean, it isn’t as if Marvel isn’t willing to shamelessly rip off Batman. They could at least do it without relying on the same villains over and over. Heck, use Micah as an excuse to make a story bemoaning the evils of colonialism, and it could become Eisner bait.
(Besides, Kraven is being overused. He fought Deadpool a few years ago, for heaven’s sakes.)
Debbie Nelson’s origin with the Arranger didn’t cast her in the best light to begin with, but yes, O’Neill was hardly the first or last writer to come into a comic with a grudge against a female character. And yeah, his opinion of the IRA has aged like milk.
*Meant Organizer, not Arranger. Whoops!
I don’t know. The last time we got a Marvel story about colonialism, it was in John Ridley’s Black Panther, and that wasn’t exactly Eisner material.
Micah is distinct from Kraven, in that he’s not really interested in either honor or the hunt. He’s all about dominance, rapacity, and bullying the weak.
He’s also not like Bane, in that all of Micah’s intelligence is about finding ways to stay free and active so he can indulge his gross appetites.
He doesn’t play sinister mind games so much as he situationally plays tough or plays the wounded innocent victim t manipulate others into serving those appetites or giving him cover from consequences.
I could see him becoming a sort of manosphere icon, and that might give him new followers to manipulate and sufficient social and financial support to protect himself from consequences.
And it’d play into his “entitled asshole with an abused harem” bit. Imagine Micah recruiting embittered dudes into his new Cult of Mow, understood as a self-improvement program for incels. He could have a sleazy agent who handles the advertising and rhetoric.
@Chris V — then the poor man’s Bane angle is still viable.
I mean, if you really squint, you can see some of the ideas which were embellished upon with Bane in Micah Synn. He thrived in a real jungle, so he was even more dangerous in the “urban jungle” playing by the same rules and adapting to the environment. What did him in was being innocent of the vices, which was why Micah wound up such an out-of-shape slob that he was rolled by two hobos and needed Daredevil to save him.
The idea behind Bane was that he was born in a prison and that life was all he knew, so he saw Gotham City as a similar prison that he could rule by taking care of the cell boss, Batman. Now, unlike Micah, Bane’s origin at least has more meat on the bones since it also acts as a commentary to the oppressive prison industrial complex, though few writers seriously run with this. His origin, which takes place on a fictional Latin island, also removes white guilt from being associated with these practices (despite the U.S. imprisoning more of its populace, in percentage or total, than any other nation on Earth, of course). And despite dressing like a luchdador (a Mexican wrestler), Bane is tha palest Latino who ever lived (like how Ra’s Al Ghul is the palest Middle Eastern man who ever lived). So, yeah, tons of characters have problematic origins or designs in context.
Not that I envision DD knocking off Knightfall, but it wouldn’t take much to say that Micah had no choice but to bulk back up in prison to survive it, and now that he’s aware of the vices of the city could return and be formidable again. In retrospect, he could have been a fun sub-boss for any story where Matt found himself in prison. Instead, Brubaker used Black Tarantula for that role, which of course was totally not ripping off Bane.
Or, again, Micah could pop up again for a brief story instead of Kraven, since he’s right there. It’s like how you can do a story where the Flash meets Mr. Freeze, but why bother since Captain Cold is right there. Now I know, I know, Captain Cold is WAY better thanks to Geoff Johns and subsequent writers, but that almost proves the point. Even the lamest villain can thrive with a fresh outlook. I mean, nobody was sweating the Purple Man until Bendis recreated him.
@Omar — I like your ideas too, with Micah being like an incel guru like Andrew Tate with his cult of Mow.
See, for such a bizarre creation, there are lot of angles waiting for the right pitch. It certainly is more creative than the 10,000th rematch with Bullseye, or another rehash of Fall From Grace.
@Omar:
IMO, emphasizing the hero’s vulnerability is indeed the way to go for pulp-like heroes in movies these days. That may be what made “Pirates of the Caribean” a success. But it doesn’t always work – they tried the same approach with “Lone Ranger” and, well, it very much did not work.
Going back to Micah Synn, I think that there _are_ many possible, viable takes for the character, mainly because it wasn’t all that well developed, fully coherent a character on the first time around.
Curiously enough, that is yet another way in which he reminds me of Wolverine. Or shall I say, of what Wolverine was back in his heyday, which is 1979’s X-Men #127 far as I am concerned.
Maybe they should combine the two characters based on the change in Logan after Uncanny #127.
“Darlin’, I used to cry a lot. Then I got involved with Micah Synn’s Kinjorge Men’s Right Movement training camp. He showed me that real men don’t cry and civilization had sissified me. No longer do I have to creepily stalk Jean, making passive-aggressive offensive remarks, and deal with her turning me down for Alphas. Instead of me being an incel, now Scott is a cuck. All thanks to Micah. I’m the best there is at what I do, and what I do isn’t pretty, bub.”
Didn’t Lucas make Star Wars in part because he couldn’t get the rights to either Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon, so he made a film full of archetypes that borrowed from Kurosawa and Leni Riefenstahl.
“To complete your initiation into the Cult of Mow, go stand near that window.”
If Micah Synn had to turn back from a slob to a muscle-bound hunter type, he would be cribbing not from Bane, but from Catman.
But it worked for Catman.
The least worth it hill I’ll die on is that there’s a good 90-minute movie in ‘The Lone Ranger’. Unfortunately it has a runtime of 149 minutes.