Daredevil Villains #1: The Fixer
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.
Charts – 1 September 2023
After the epic ten-week run of Dave & Central Cee’s “Sprinter”, we seem to be in a phase of the records it held off taking their turn at number one. Two weeks ago we had Billie Eilish. Last week it was Dua Lipa. And now, a record that wasn’t even number 1 in the midweeks…
1. Olivia Rodrigo – “Vampire”
This is the third number one for Olivia Rodrigo, following “Drivers Licence” and “Good 4 U” from her previous album. It’s not even the current single – that’s “Bad Idea Right”, which is a non-mover at 11 this week. “Vampire” is on its ninth week, and it spent the first four stuck at number 2 behind “Sprinter”. It’s never dropped before 5, but it’s still impressive for it to fight its way back to number 1.
The record at number 1 in the midweeks was “Paint the Town Red” by Doja Cat, which winds up at number 2. It must still be in with a shot next week. And if you’re wondering what happened to Dua Lipa, she gets hammered by the downweighting rule this week and drops straight to number 15.
The X-Axis – w/c 28 August 2023
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #102. By Steve Foxe, Stephanie Williams, Noemi Vettori, Pete Panazis & Travis Lanham. Continuing our series of short solo stories with the members of the abortive X-Men team, this is Jubilee’s issue. She takes some of the Krakoan kids to the Savage Land on a field trip. They stop some poachers. That’s pretty much it. I honestly don’t understand what this run of stories is meant to be achieving. It just feels like generic filler, I’m afraid.
WOLVERINE #36. (Annotations here.) Part 3 of the “Weapons of Vengeance” crossover with Ghost Rider, which has essentially nothing to do with “Fall of X”. I mean, there’s some passing mention of the idea that there are fewer mutants around, but the plot says otherwise, with the demon Stitcher having no apparent problem finding an endless supply of backwoods mutants to mutilate. This probably isn’t the best issue to raise the point, but: this is actually a problem. We’ve had years where the dominant narrative was that all of mutantkind were together on Krakoa – that was the point, after all – but “Fall of X” keeps trying to do stories about people pursuing the supposed handful of non-Krakoan mutants who, it turns out, were apparently teeming worldwide all along. If this was the direction, why march the rest of the world through the gates? Why not just do it with the population of Krakoa? Or, y’know, do “Fall of X” storylines that are consistent with the premise of there being virtually no more mutants around.
Wolverine #36 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
WOLVERINE vol 7 #36
“Weapons of Vengeance, part 3: Possessions”
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Geoff Shaw
Colour artist: Rain Beredo
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editors: Mark Basso & Darren Shaw
WEAPONS OF VENGEANCE. Despite the “Fall of X” branding on the cover, this arc has nothing whatsoever to do with the arc, unless you count some passing mentions of there not being many mutants around these days. This is a four-part crossover with Ghost Rider, also written by Benjamin Percy.
In Ghost Rider / Wolverine: Weapons of Vengeance Alpha #1 (and don’t get me started on “Alpha #1″) and Ghost Rider #17, extended flashbacks show us that “many years ago”, Ada Flores brought a little boy called Bram Straub to the X-Men Mansion to seek help from Professor X. Flores is the only social worker who has stuck with Bram after everyone else quit. But Bram is not a mutant; he’s demonically possessed. After establishing that fact, Professor X declines to take Bram on (though he does offer to try and put Flores in touch with someone more suitable). Wolverine takes an immediate dislike to the kid because he can sense the demon. Back at the orphanage, Bram (or his demon) kill all the kids in his dormitory and assembles their bodies into some kind of spire before returning to the X-Men Mansion on his own to fight Wolverine. Wolverine and Ghost Rider both go after the monster and get into the usual hero-versus-hero fight, during which the demon escapes.
Charts – 25 August 2023
As anticipated, Billie Eilish only manages a single week – which means she’s now had two 1-week number ones. We’re still in Barbie territory, though.
1. Dua Lipa – “Dance the Night (From Barbie the Album)”
Climbing to number 1 in its thirteenth week on chart. This has grown on me somewhat, but it still strikes me as something of a generic Dua Lipa track. It’s her fourth number 1, following “New Rules” (2017), “One Kiss” (2018) and “Cold Heart” (2021). The Billie Eilish track is at number 2, and we’ve also got “Barbie World” at 9, “Speed Drive” at 15, and “I’m Just Ken” at 22. Overall, the Barbie wave seems to have crested, and given how long it took Dua Lipa to get here in the first place, I suspect she won’t be here too long.
In an absurdly quiet week for new singles, there is just a single new entry on the top 40. There’s also a slightly baffling re-entry for “Dog Days are Over” by Florence & The Machine at number 27, which appears to have had its downweighting reset on the very tenuous basis that it’s in a film soundtrack on Disney+ – but it already reached number 21 earlier in the year.
But what about that new entry? Ah. Well.
The X-Axis – w/c 21 August 2023
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #101. By Steve Foxe, Stephanie Williams, Noemi Vettori, Pete Pantazis & Travis Lanham. Somewhat bizarrely billed as part of “the countdown to Fall of X“, which of course is well underway. The idea seems to be to do a spotlight story on each of the characters from the abortive X-Men team, and rely on the Gala issue to add some poignancy, but what it amounts to in practice is “Sam visits his home town and helps out with a flood because he’s nice.” It’s perfectly competent but I just don’t understand what the point is.
X-FORCE #43. (Annotations here.) Unlike most of the “Fall of X” books, we’re jumping back to the Gala itself here, as Colossus’ storyline finally comes to a head. Kind of. The basic idea is that Colossus was meant to be helping Mikhail Rasputin to mount his own completely unrelated attack on the Gala, only for Orchis to charge in first and make everything that Mikhail’s spent years working on utterly pointless. It’s hard to figure out whether this was always the plan or whether it’s an actual change of direction in response to the Gala, but it works surprisingly well – Mikhail’s plan going off the rails and leading to a bemused X-Force winding up on his doorstep is a more interesting direction than either having Mikhail sign up with Orchis, or having him duplicate their scheme. I’m less convinced about just plugging Kid Omega back into his old role, and Percy seems to have no real role for Omega Red – though he is Russian, and he does have a history with Mikhail, so maybe that’ll come to the fore in the next couple of issues. X-Force can be hit and miss but on the whole I’m quite liking this.
Realm of X #1 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
REALM OF X #1
“The White Witch”
Writer: Torunn Grønbekk
Artist: Diógenes Neves
Colour artist: Rain Beredo
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Lauren Amaro
REALM OF X is a 4-issue miniseries tying in to “Fall of X”… though possibly only in the sense that “Fall of X” provides the occasion for the story to happen in the first place.
COVER / PAGE 1: Mirage and Magik charge into action through a Krakoan gate. More of a misdirection cover for the solicits than anything much to do with the contents.
PAGES 2-10. The cast wake up in Vanaheim in the middle of a fight.
The name characters, and a bunch of random generics, evidently wound up here after being marched through the Krakoan gates by Professor X in X-Men: Hellfire Gala 2023. This is plainly not the alien landscape where we saw Forge in X-Men #25, or the featureless desert where Exodus and co wound up in Immortal X-Men #14 – despite Exodus claiming in that issue that the “whole population of Krakoa” was there. To be fair, they were a much larger group than the one we see here, so they may well be the vast majority of the Krakoan population; this issue’s recap page refers to “a handful of other mutants” accompanying the name characters, and Dani later mentions a “dozen” being wounded. We still don’t know why the mutants have been scattered in this way, although some sort of scheme involving Destiny and Manifold seems a realistic possibility.
Jean Grey #1 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
JEAN GREY vol 2 #1
“Mind Maze”
Writer: Louise Simonson
Artist: Bernard Chang
Colour artist: Marcelo Maiolo
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Design: Jay Bowen
Editor: Sarah Brunstad
JEAN GREY. I’d completely forgotten that there was a volume 1, to be honest. It was an ongoing series about the time-travelling Silver Age version of the character, which ran for 11 issues between 2017-2018. I dimly remember it being something to do with her touring the Marvel Universe to prepare herself to become Phoenix. Anyway, it’s nothing we need concern ourselves with.
COVER / PAGE 1. Symbolic image of the face of Jean Grey over the sea, I guess. Lovely image. Nice logo, too.
PAGE 2. John Romita tribute page.
PAGE 3. Jean wonders where she is.
Jean was killed while fighting Orchis in X-Men: Hellfire Gala 2023. She wasn’t wearing the costume shown here, which is her standard present-day costume from X-Men. The idea seems to be that Jean’s consciousness has somehow survived the death of her body, perhaps by decamping to the astral plane, and a disoriented Jean is experiencing visions as she tries to figure out how she got to this point. With the possible exception of this page, nothing in this issue takes place in the “real” world.
“I’m dying… Been there … so many times before.” The most obvious examples are X-Men #100-101 (1976), where she’s dying from cosmic radiation exposure until Phoenix comes along to save her; and New X-Men #150 (2004) where she’s killed by Xorn/Magneto. Jean also has the memories of the deaths of her duplicates Phoenix in X-Men #137 (1980) and Madelyne Pryor in X-Factor #38 (1989). And of course she’s been resurrected during the Krakoan era too.
X-Force #43 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-FORCE vol 6 #43
“Friend, Farmer, Soldier, Spy”
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Robert Gill
Colour artist: GURU-eFX
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER / PAGE 1. X-Force in action, with Colossus in the leadership role. For some reason the group includes Domino but not Sage.
PAGE 2. John Romita tribute.
PAGES 3-4. Colossus prepares for the Hellfire Gala.
We’re back on the night of X-Men: Hellfire Gala 2023, before all the unpleasantness happens. Unlike the other X-books, this one doesn’t jump forward ten weeks to catch up with Fall of X – it’s a belated Gala tie-in.
Again, there’s some ambiguity about whether the narrator here is meant to be Chronicler (or at least reflecting the inner voice that Chronicler is writing for Colossus). The particularly odd moment is on page 3 panel 4, when Colossus briefly lashes out in frustration – Immortal X-Men #12 spent a whole issue hammering the idea that Colossus is locked in, after all. Is Chronicler acting it out to be true to his understanding of the character? Or does Chronicler just let his guard down for a moment?
Charts – 18 August 2023
At long last, “Sprinter” by Dave & Central Cee is comfortably past its peak and gets hit by the downweighting rule – with the result that it drops straight to number 10 after a ten-week run at number 1. Thanks to that, our new number one is…
1. Billie Eilish – “What Was I Made For”
Not by a huge margin, admittedly. Dua Lipa is number 2, and the midweeks have her taking the slot next week. But it’s Billie Eilish’s second number one, and a very good record, too. The other one was “No Time To Die”, which had a single week at number one in 2020, so she’s in the odd position that her two biggest hits both come from film soundtracks. This one is more characteristic of her normal work, though. And hey, she’s had another 7 top ten hits to go with them both.
