DAREDEVIL #68 (September 1970)
“Phoenix and the Fighter!”
Writer: Roy Thomas
Artist: Gene Colan
Inker: Syd Shores
Letterer: Artie Simek
Colourist: not credited
Editor: Stan Lee

No, not that Phoenix.

After four issues in Hollywood, Daredevil is back in New York, but without Karen Page in tow. She’ll be back, but she’s out of the picture for the moment. In the meantime, Daredevil moves on to something else entirely.

Daredevil arrives at the DA’s office to find Foggy in a shouting match with three guys from an extremist group called Phoenix. The only one who gets a name is called Kragg. The Phoenix members wear brightly coloured tunics with logos on the chest – Kragg’s costume has a phoenix head, and the others have a sort of stylised flame thing. They generally look like they’ve wandered out of a Buck Rogers story and left their ray guns at home.

Kragg is trying to get Foggy to stop “hounding” his group. After Daredevil shoos the extremists away, we learn that Foggy is investigating them because they’ve mysteriously bought the contract of middleweight boxing contender Kid Gawaine. The Kid has an upcoming title match at Madison Square Garden, and his trainer, Pop Fenton, once trained Battlin’ Jack Murdock. For obvious reasons, a story of boxing corruption piques Daredevil’s interest, and he decides to look into Phoenix himself.

Rather than show up as Daredevil, Matt drops in at Kid Gawaine’s training camp in order to catch up with Pop Fenton. The Phoenix thugs spot Matt immediately, but if they just threw him out then there wouldn’t be a plot. So they just shrug their shoulders and decide that he looks harmless. Kid Gawaine himself turns out to be a well-meaning but naive moron, who thinks that Kragg and his cronies seem like perfectly nice guys. Pop is deeply suspicious about them, but the Kid thinks he’s just being paranoid.

Even so, Kragg is worried that Matt might shake the Kid’s faith in him. So Kragg decides on an excellent way to alleviate those concerns. He barges in, punches Pop in the face, and then starts beating up a blind man right in front of the Kid. Amazingly, even the Kid can see that this looks a bit dodgy, and he decides to take on the whole Phoenix group singlehandedly in order that Matt can escape. Then he announces that he’s going to quit after his next fight.

As it turns out, Kragg wants Kid Gawaine to take a dive, so that Phoenix can raise money for their cause by betting on the match. So far, so straightforward. We’re re-enacting the fate of Matt’s father, but this time Matt can make sure that the honest boxer who stands his ground comes out on top. In theory, that’s a perfectly good Daredevil story. In practice, this is where it all gets rather silly.

Matt learns that Kragg has found a secret way to fix the fight even without the Kid co-operating. And at the arena, Matt overhears two Phoenix members talking about a “neural-whatchamacallit gizmo”. So Matt settles on a characteristically insane plan: he sneaks into the Kid’s dressing room, knocks him out with a nerve pinch, and then uses make-up to take the Kid’s place. How does Matt know whether he’s dyed his hair the right colour? Don’t ask me! But Matt is convinced that he can pull this off, and because we’re still in the Silver Age, he’s right. Even the opponent, who is in on the scam, can’t tell the difference.

Up in the rafters, Kragg has a giant ray gun pointed at the ring – which they apparently got past security by claiming it was a TV camera. Wouldn’t you just know it, the plan is to zap Kid Gawaine with a ray that temporarily blinds him! Of course, Matt is completely unaffected and easily wins the fight. Gawaine and Daredevil beat up Kragg, and Pop works out that Daredevil was the man in the ring, but doesn’t figure out who he really is, thanks to Daredevil’s hitherto unmentioned disguise skills. Everyone agrees that Kid Gawaine is a lovely man. The end.

This is all too ridiculous for the story to work as a callback to Daredevil’s origin. Phoenix are just a bunch of guys in weird costumes who have a fairly conventional money-making scheme, which they pursue with no subtlety whatsoever, culminating in the inexplicably unveiling of a giant blinding ray, their one piece of high-tech equipment. It’s a botched melodrama. If anything, it’s not a Daredevil story, but a Human Target story – though that character didn’t get a series until 1972.

You might be wondering what sort of extremist beliefs Phoenix actually hold. Are they anarchists? Communists? Racists? Fascists? Libertarians? Religious fundamentalists? Well, the story is completely uninterested in going anywhere near that question. When Foggy’s arguing with them, he just says “I don’t care if you call yourselves the new left, the far right or the cherry centre!” Kragg has long hair, but none of the others do. Nothing about their appearance really fits with anything in particular, nor does their cause figure into the story. There’s nothing to suggest that their cause is just a pretext, but all the plot really cares about is that Kragg wants to raise some money for it. How much was he going to get by betting on the reigning champion, anyway? Maybe he would have been better off selling the blinding ray for parts.

In short, we are not to concern ourselves with what Phoenix actually stand for. They’re just extremists. Isn’t that enough? I’m all for a bit of woolly centrism, but you could knit a jumper with this story. It doesn’t work at all. And it’s no surprise that Phoenix never appeared again: you can hardly have a recurring group of villainous extremists without ever addressing what it is they believe in.

Given how evasive this story is about Phoenix’s agenda, the real surprise is that this turns out to be the first of three sstories in a row that involve political radicals of one sort or another. The other two stories will throw themselves into the politics with much more commitment, which makes this story’s timidity all the more baffling.